Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide 9780367818982, 9781003010708, 9781032072968

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
Figures
Contributors
Introduction
Defining "genocide"
A brief history of genocide denial
Why denial must be combatted
Chapter sequence and themes
Notes
1. Is denial the final stage of genocide? Consolidation, the metaphysics of denial, and the supersession of stage theory
Rhetoric and reality
The rhetorical turn
Consolidation
Exit stage theory
Implications
Notes
Part I: Commemoration and memory cultures in contemporary societies
2. Holodomor and Holocaust memory in competition and cooperation
The history of trauma in twentieth century Ukraine
Conflicts over genocide memory in contemporary Ukraine
The conflict in context
Cooperation among survivor groups in Ukraine
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online sources
3. For an anthropological approach to denial: Social bonds, pathophobia, and the Duvalier regime in Haiti
"A brilliant man ... a loving man ... a man of integrity"
Denial as moral discourse
The price of belonging
Pathophobia
Animistic denials: Victimhood as an ontology
Anthropology and denial
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online sources
4. The Soviet denial of murdered Jews' identity during and after the Great Patriotic War
Molotov's first diplomatic note, establishment of the UN, and Soviet extraordinary commissions to investigate war crimes
Red Army "Special Flying" detachments
The Red Army liberates the extermination camps
Postwar denials of Jewish victimhood
Notes
Bibliography
Archival sources
Publications
5. Commemorating colonial violence from the Dutch golden age: New Netherland and Coen's conquest of the Banda Islands in Dutch memory cultures
New Netherland memory culture before 2009
New Netherland memory culture from 2009 to 2017
Dutch memory culture of Coen and the Banda Islands
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online sources
Part II: State-sanctioned and politicized forms of denial
6. Triumphalism: The final stage of the Bosnian genocide
Celebrating "ethnic cleansing"
Triumphalism unleashed
Triumphalism in popular music
Erasing history, celebrating genocide through memorials
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online sources
7. The Bosnian genocide and the "Continuum of Denial"
Phase I: Denial by dehumanization
Ideology of dehumanization in Bosnia
Development of individual accounts
Phase II: Emergent denial
Verbal denial strategies
Planning to deny genocide
Authorization
Physical acts of denial
Phase III: Bounded denial
Phase IV: Interpretive denial
Phase V: Embedded denial
Glorification
De-memorialization
Institutionalized denial
Phase VI: Forgetting as denial
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online sources
Documents from the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
8. Beyond erasure: Indigenous genocide denial and settler colonialism
Calling things by their correct names
Denial through discourse and education
Cultural appropriation
Tribal nation recognition
Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls
Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online Sources
9. Denying Rwanda, denying Congo
Denying Rwanda
The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF)
Denying Congo
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online Sources
Part III: New directions in analyzing and countering denial
10. Music as a means to combat genocide denial and assert Armenian identity
Identity and genocide denial
Music, memory, and denial
Music and the Armenian genocide
Genocide in Armenian folk music
Dle Yaman
Adanayi Voghby (The Mourning for Adana)
Qele Lao (Let's Go Son)
Hasnink Sasun (We Will Reach Sasun)
Genocide in modern Armenian music
International audiences and the music of the Armenian genocide
Notes
Bibliography
Online sources
11. The forgotten murders: Gendercide in the twenty-first century and the destruction of the transgender body
Terminology
Introduction
Reproduction and transphobic violence
Generative assaults on the transgender body
Conversion rituals
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online Sources
12. Collective historical trauma and retelling the past: Toward trauma-informed transitional justice praxis
What is collective historical trauma?
"Post-conflict," overcoming of fear, and grounding transitional justice in the lens of conflict transformation
Case one: Agitating caste transformation in India through trauma-informed transitional justice, storytelling, and public testimony
Case two: The response to mass violence and the state's attempts to scale local justice in Rwanda
Conclusions: Ways forward for trauma-informed transitional justice and genocide recognition
Notes
Bibliography
Publications
Online Sources
Index

Citation preview

Routledge Studies in Modern History

DENIAL: THE FINAL STAGE OF GENOCIDE Edited by John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow

Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide

Genocide denial not only abuses history and insults the victims but paves the way for future atrocities. Yet few, if any, books have offered a comparative overview and analysis of this problem. Denial: the Final Stage of Genocide is a resource for understanding and countering denial. Denial spans a broad geographic and thematic range in its explorations of varied forms of denial—which is embedded in each stage of genocide. Ranging far beyond the most well-known cases of denial, this book offers original, pathbreaking arguments and contributions regarding: •

competition over commemoration and public memory in Ukraine and elsewhere;

•

transitional justice in post-conflict societies;

•

global violence against transgender people, which genocide scholars have not adequately confronted;

• • •

music as a means to recapture history and combat denial; public education’s role in erasing Indigenous history and promoting settler-colonial ideology in the United States; “triumphalism” as a new variant of denial following the Bosnian Genocide;

•

denial vis-à-vis Rwanda and neighboring Congo (DRC).

With contributions from leading genocide experts as well as emerging scholars, this book will be of interest to scholars and students of history, genocide studies, anthropology, political science, international law, gender studies, and human rights. John Cox directs the Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. Cox’s latest book is To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (2017) and he has written and lectured widely on racism, fascism, genocide, and resistance. Amal Khoury is Senior Lecturer of Global Studies at The University of North Carolina at Charlotte, USA. Her research focuses on peacebuilding and post-conflict reconciliation and her recent publications include “Bridging Elite and Grassroots Initiatives: The Road to Sustainable Peace in Syria” in Post-Conflict Power-Sharing Agreements: Options For Syria (2018). Sarah Minslow is an Assistant Professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles, USA. She specializes in human-rights education, war and genocide in children’s literature, and refugee narratives. Her recent publications include “Coping with Killing? Child Soldier Narratives and Traces of Trauma” in Childhood Traumas: Narratives and Representations (2019).

Routledge Studies in Modern History

The Cold War, the Space Race, and the Law of Outer Space Space for Peace Albert K. Lai Experiences of War in Europe and the Americas, 1792–1815 Soldiers, Slaves, and Civilians Mark Lawrence The Greek Revolution in the Age of Revolutions (1776–1848) Reappraisals and Comparisons Edited by Paschalis M. Kitromilides Colonising New Zealand A Reappraisal Paul Moon Dictatorship in the Nineteenth Century Conceptualisations, Experiences, Transfers Edited by Moisés Prieto Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide Edited by John Cox, Amal Khoury and Sarah Minslow Koreans in Transnational Diasporas of the Russian Far East and Manchuria, 1895–1920 Arirang People Hye Ok Park Transatlantic Relations and the Great War Austria-Hungary and the United States Kurt Bednar For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/ history/series/MODHIST

Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide

Edited by John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow; individual chapters, the contributors The right of John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cox, John M., 1963- editor. | Khoury, Amal, editor. | Minslow, Sarah, 1982- editor. Title: Denial : the final stage of genocide? / edited by John Cox, Amal Khoury, and Sarah Minslow. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021012815 | ISBN 9780367818982 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003010708 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Genocide. | Denialism. | Collective memory. | Transitional justice. | Reconciliation. Classification: LCC HV6322.7 .D45 2022 | DDC 364.15/1--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021012815 ISBN: 978-0-367-81898-2 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-07296-8 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-01070-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708 Typeset in Times New Roman by MPS Limited, Dehradun

To Dr. Susan Cernyak-Spatz (1922–2019), brilliant scholar, artist, and educator who survived three years in Theresienstadt and Auschwitz. She was a pioneer of Holocaust Studies when it barely existed, laid the foundations for our Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies at UNC Charlotte, and combatted denial, racism, fascism, and bigotry to the end.

Contents

List of figures List of contributors

ix xi

Introduction

1

JO HN CO X

1 Is denial the final stage of genocide? Consolidation, the metaphysics of denial, and the supersession of stage theory

11

HENR Y C . THE R I AU L T

PART I Commemoration and memory cultures in contemporary societies 2 Holodomor and Holocaust memory in competition and cooperation

27

29

KIR STE N DY C K

3 For an anthropological approach to denial: Social bonds, pathophobia, and the Duvalier regime in Haiti

45

JEA N-PHILI PP E B ELL E AU

4 The Soviet denial of murdered Jews’ identity during and after the Great Patriotic War

62

THO MA S E A R L P OR TER

5 Commemorating colonial violence from the Dutch golden age: New Netherland and Coen’s conquest of the Banda Islands in Dutch memory cultures M AR K ME UW ES E

78

viii

Contents

PART II State-sanctioned and politicized forms of denial 6 Triumphalism: The final stage of the Bosnian genocide

97 99

HIKM ET KA RČ I Ć

7 The Bosnian genocide and the “Continuum of Denial”

113

SIM ON M A SS EY

8 Beyond erasure: Indigenous genocide denial and settler colonialism

131

M ICHEL LE A . S TA N LE Y

9 Denying Rwanda, denying Congo

148

A DAM JO NE S

PART III New directions in analyzing and countering denial

161

10 Music as a means to combat genocide denial and assert Armenian identity

163

M AR GAR IT A T AD E V O SY AN

11 The forgotten murders: Gendercide in the twenty-first century and the destruction of the transgender body

184

HA LEY M ARI E B R O WN

12 Collective historical trauma and retelling the past: Toward trauma-informed transitional justice praxis

196

JER EM Y A . R I N K ER

Index

215

Figures

2.1 Rohatyn’s 350-year-old Jewish cemetery, one of more than 600 headstone fragments recovered from the city and returned to the cemetery by Rohatyn Jewish Heritage since 2010 (Photo credit: Marla Raucher Osborn, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage, 2018) 2.2 Tsarist Eagle with nationalist and national flags, Poltava, Ukraine (Photo credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Global Photo Archive / Flickr, May 8, 2019, accessed May 14, 2019, https://sympathis.flickr.com/photos/adam_jones/ 42122503260/in/album-72157669805945017/) 3.1 Genealogical tree showing an improbable set of connections between victims and notorious enforcers of Duvalier, most notably Frank Romain (Credit: Jean-Philippe Belleau) 6.1 Warehouse in Kravica where approximately 1,300 Bosniak men and boys were killed on July 13, 1994. A quarter century later, there is no effort to hide the crime or to patch up bullet holes and other evidence of the crime. Like much of this region of the so-called Serbian Republic, Kravica once had a large Bosniak population but is now 90-95 percent Serbian (Photo credit: John Cox, June 2, 2019) 6.2 A few hundred meters from the site of the massacre in Kravica (Figure 6.1) stands this triumphalist memorial, which is also discussed in Chapter 7. Built in 2006, it features religious and nationalist iconography and vastly exaggerates the number of “Serb martyrs” by including victims of four different wars, dating back to 1912, in order to have a number that exceeds the well-known number of 8,372 killed at Srebrenica (Photo credit: John Cox, June 2, 2019)

34

36

51

106

107

x Figures 9.1 Map of the First Congo War (1996-1997), showing the RPF invasion of eastern Zaïre/DR Congo and subsequent lines of advance. Genocidal “hunts” of fleeing Hutus occurred throughout (Credit: Don-kun and Uwe Dedering/Wikimedia Commons)

153

Contributors

Jean-Philippe Belleau is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. He has published two monographs on the indigenous movement in Brazil and on “ethnophilia” and is writing a book on anti-élite massacres in Haiti under François Duvalier. Previously, he worked in human rights and development with the Organization of American States (OAS), the United Nations, and several NGOs. Belleau directed the Human Rights Education Fund in Haiti and was the political adviser to the OAS Chief of Mission in Haiti and has also worked for a Rohingya project in southern Bangladesh. He earned his PhD at the Institut des Hautes Etudes d’Amérique Latine at the Université Paris-III Sorbonne Nouvelle. Haley Marie Brown is an activist and transgender woman who in 2021 completed her Master’s in the Holocaust and Genocide Studies program at Stockton University in New Jersey. Hoping to make the study of gender in genocide more inclusive, Brown’s pathbreaking research primarily examines the way gender-based violence against transgender women both fits within and challenges current approaches to the study of gendered violence, mass atrocity, and genocide. Previously, Brown attended California State University San Marcos in San Marcos, California from 2012 to 2016, where she earned her Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science. Kirsten Dyck is a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer at Poltava V.G. Korolenko National Pedagogical University in Poltava, Ukraine. She is an affiliate adjunct professor at James Madison University, where she teaches for the Departments of History and of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication. She is the author of Reichsrock: The International Web of WhitePower and Neo-Nazi Hate Music (Rutgers University Press, 2017). Dyck has held fellowships with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Auschwitz Jewish Center, and the German-American Fulbright Commission. She earned her PhD in American Studies at Washington State University and her Master’s in Ethnomusicology from York University.

xii Contributors Adam Jones is a political scientist based at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, BC, Canada. He is the author of Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (3rd edition, 2017) and author or editor of numerous other works on genocide and crimes against humanity. He was senior book review editor of the Journal of Genocide Research from 2004 to 2013 and currently edits the “Studies in Genocide and Crimes against Humanity” book series for Routledge Publishers. Jones is executive director of Gendercide Watch and was chosen as one of “Fifty Key Thinkers on the Holocaust and Genocide”in 2010. Hikmet Karčić is a genocide scholar based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He is a Researcher at the Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks (IITB) in Sarajevo and a Senior Fellow with the Center for Global Policy (CGP) in Washington DC, and was the 2017 Auschwitz Institute for Peace and Reconciliation-Keene State College Global Fellow. Karčić holds a PhD in Political Science from the International University of Sarajevo. He worked for the Missing Persons Institute of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Center for Advanced Studies and was the project coordinator for “Mapping of Detention Camps in Bosnia and Herzegovina 1992-1995.” Dr. Karčić is the author of An Appeal for Truth (Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, 2013) and editor of Remembering the Bosnian Genocide: Justice, Memory and Denial (Institute for Islamic Tradition of Bosniaks, 2016). Simon Massey studied a first degree in Politics and International Studies at Southampton University in the UK. He studied Law at the University of the West of England, after which he worked in a legal aid practice. Massey later became a senior prosecutor in England, practicing for twenty-five years and specializing in complex crime, including suspicious deaths in children, hate crimes, human trafficking, and in obtaining evidence from foreign jurisdictions. Massey completed an MBA at Leicester University and then a Master’s degree in Criminology at the University of Gloucestershire, where he is now pursuing a PhD. Mark Meuwese is a Professor of History at the University of Winnipeg where he teaches courses on colonial genocides. He is the author of Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674 (Brill, 2012) as well as many book chapters and articles on Dutch-Indigenous relations in the Americas. In 2019 he published To the Shores of Chile: The Journal and History of the Brouwer Expedition to Valdivia in 1643 (Pennsylvania State University Press). He is currently working on a book manuscript on the early modern Dutch empire. Thomas Earl Porter is a Professor of Russian and Modern European History in the Department of History and Political Science at North Carolina A&T State University. His most recent works include a chapter on the Soviets at Nuremberg in Stalin’s Soviet: ‘Show’ Trials, War Crimes Trials and Nuremberg (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and an article, “In Defense of

Contributors xiii Peace: Aron Trainin’s Contributions to International Jurisprudence,” in Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal. Porter earned both his PhD in Russian History and his Master’s in International Studies from the University of Washington. Jeremy A. Rinker is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in the Department of Peace and Conflict Studies, where he is engaged in research that explores the intersections between marginalization, collective trauma, and systems of oppression. His most recent edited volume, entitled Realizing Nonviolent Resilience: Neoliberalism, Societal Trauma, and Marginalized Voice (New York: Peter Lang, 2020), explores the collective trauma of neoliberal marginalization. He is the editor of the Journal of Transdisciplinary Peace Praxis. Rinker earned his PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University and his Master’s in Asian Religion from the University of Hawai’i. Michelle A. Stanley is an enrolled member of the Coharie Indian Tribe. She recently earned her Master’s in Public Administration at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. She currently works as a Social Research Specialist in the Institutional Research office at UNC Charlotte. Her research interests include critical Indigenous studies and methodologies, Indigenous feminisms, and Indigenous students in higher education. Margarita Tadevosyan recently earned her PhD in Conflict Analysis and Resolution from George Mason University. She also received a Certificate in Peace Research from University of Oslo, Norway and an MA in Conflict Analysis and Resolution and a BA in Sociology from Yerevan State University. Her academic and professional interests are in practical engagement with conflict-affected societies, reconciliation processes, memory, history, and identity, especially in the South Caucasus. As a scholarpractitioner, Tadevosyan has extensive experience in peace and reconciliation work in the South Caucasus. Since 2012 she has been facilitating Georgian-South Ossetian reconciliation dialogues. Henry C. Theriault is President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) and Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs at Worcester State University, after nineteen years in its Philosophy Department and eight years directing the university’s Center for the Study of Human Rights. Theriault researches reparations, victim-perpetrator relations, denial, atrocity prevention, and mass violence against women and girls. He has lectured widely and published numerous journal articles and book chapters, as well as editing two books. Theriault chairs the Armenian Genocide Reparations Study Group and co-authored its 2015 report Resolution with Justice. He earned his PhD at the University of Massachusetts.

Introduction

“Any survivor of genocide will tell you that disbelieving or dismissing their experience is a continuation of genocide. A genocide denier is an apologist for the next genocide.”1 —Bosnian-American writer Aleksandar Hemon, October 2019, after genocide-denier Peter Handke won the Nobel Prize in Literature

Denial brings together the work of international scholars from across numerous disciplines to explore genocide denial in its various forms, including outright denial by individuals and governments, denial through evasion or erasure, denial through legal frameworks or education systems, and denial through creative expression. This book resulted from a conference held in Charlotte, North Carolina, in April 2019 that attracted more than 160 scholars and activists from sixteen countries. Hoping to expand the scholarship and debate in this area, our Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Right Studies decided upon this topic for our first international conference.2 We believe this book will contribute to a growing acknowledgement and sensitivity to the issues surrounding genocide denial—issues that are more urgent than ever. Just as we began organizing this book a prominent genocide-denier was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature; and as we concluded the book, the United States was awash in expressions of historical amnesia and denial. “This is not us” and “this is not the real America” went the refrains following the attempted right-wing coup of January 6, 2021. And three-quarters of a century after the Holocaust, which gave rise to the solemn invocation “Never again!,” genocidal violence not only persists, but is ignored or denied, from Brazil to Syria to China’s Xinjiang region to Myanmar.

Defining “genocide” In December 1948 the United Nations concluded the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” which after two DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-101

2 Introduction years of debate, political maneuvering, and revision ratified the most widely used and influential definition to date. Article II defines genocide as: Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical [sic], 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.3 This is the only definition that carries the force of international law but is seriously flawed. The exclusion of political, social, sexual, or economic groups—or other groups that can’t yet be foreseen—from the list of categories is one glaring weakness. “Intent” is crucial in distinguishing the uniquely sinister, permanent nature of genocide—a crime against all humanity, by seeking to diminish the richness and diversity of the human race by removing a thread from its tapestry. But “intent” is usually interpreted in unimaginative, legalistic ways. Even in the most extensively documented genocides, we find no explicit, written orders to physically exterminate an entire people. Yet the perpetrators’ genocidal intent, if we consider “intent” more creatively, can be uncovered by examining policies, actions, and outcomes. And policies that result in genocidal consequences, e.g., through disease or famine, often emerge from intentional social or political action; and as the genocidal effects become clear, the policy or project continues because of the unimportance (to the authorities) of the survival of the affected groups.4 In their Introduction to The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses wrote that genocide scholarship was for many years “schematic in its approach” as well as “too exclusive in its frame of reference.” They sought to place “the crime back in its context(s) that may often include mass non‐genocidal violence”: We do this because the focus on upper case Genocide often entails a focus on outcomes rather than causes and processes that may or may not produce the mass killing which many think is the substance of genocide. The focus on specific types of outcomes that qualify as genocide is analogous to studying the peaks of mountains from above a cloudline that only particularly tall mountains penetrate, when a glimpse beneath the cloudline would reveal that other mountains fell just short.5 For the purposes of this book, we define genocide as “the concerted, coordinated effort to destroy any human group or collectivity as it is defined

Introduction

3

by the perpetrator”—an attempt to “destroy the group’s ability to maintain its social and cultural cohesion and, thus, its existence as a group.”6 The “g-word,” so to speak, need not be applied to every atrocity. And we should never allow a linguistic debate to desensitize us to mass atrocities and mass suffering that might not qualify as “genocide” under standard definitions but that share many features and dynamics of crimes routinely designated as such. It is little consolation to the families of victims of a massacre in Gujarat or Brazil that they fell victim to a “crime against humanity” rather than a “genocide.” A common objection to the “genocide” designation—and a basis for much genocide-denial—are arguments such as, “well, that was very complicated” or “there were atrocities on all sides.” These sound reasonable, but the fact is that all genocides are complex and contain tremendous moral ambiguities. Invariably, they occur in times of war or revolution, with culprits and victims on all sides. One can point to killings of Hutu civilians by Tutsi-led forces, the suffering of many Turks during World War I, or the expulsions of hundreds of thousands of Serbs by Croatian forces in August 1995 and other atrocities against Serb civilians. Armed resistance by Jewish partisans, or collaboration by some Ghetto police, should certainly not prompt us to re-define the Holocaust. The occurrence of armed struggle and resistance does not change the fact that systematic genocides were carried out against Guatemalan Maya peoples, Tutsi, Armenians, Bosniaks, Iraqi Kurds, or others.

A brief history of genocide denial The truth is “indestructible,” wrote Pierre Vidal-Naquet in his classic Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust. What deniers wish to do is to destroy “a general awareness of the truth.”7 The title of our conference as well as book—though the book adds the question mark—is indebted to the “stages of genocide” as elaborated by Gregory Stanton. “Denial is the final stage,” though Stanton added that denial “lasts throughout” as well as following genocide. “It is among the surest indicators of further genocidal massacres. The perpetrators of genocide dig up the mass graves, burn the bodies, try to cover up the evidence and intimidate the witnesses. They deny that they committed any crimes, and often blame what happened on the victims.”8 Holocaust denial gained notoriety in the United States and Europe by the late 1970s, eventually bringing attention to other cases of denial. The first wave of Holocaust deniers helped to establish a template: adopt or employ pseudo-academic façade, if possible; when not denying outright a genocide, then confuse the issues through minimization of numbers, justification, victim-blaming, or pointing out that “bad things happened to many people” during a conflict and that there was no central plan.9 Over the last thirty years Turkey’s denial of the Armenian Genocide brought further scholarly

4 Introduction and public attention to denialism, a problem that has yet to be placed in a global and comparative context. The more effective deniers adhere to a common strategy, including minimization and victim blaming. For example, Turkish propagandists significantly lower the numbers of victims in the Armenian genocide to 300,000 Armenian victims, which is approximately one-sixth of the actual number. These same propogandists also will claim that the genocide did not flow through a centralized process organized by the state. “Some atrocities may have occurred, but they resulted from rogue units or commanders”—another dubious argument that is used by many others. Another time-worn tactic is to blame the victims. As Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report, explains: Some semi-official Turkish narratives now claim, in effect, that the Armenians actually carried out genocidal attacks on the Turks. NeoNazis and their scholarly enablers say that “the Jews” manufactured tall tales of the Holocaust in order to extort money and other concessions from postwar Germany. Neo-Confederates like Doug Wilson, a farright pastor in Moscow, Idaho, tell their listeners with a straight face that the Civil War was nothing less than a defense of righteous Christian civilization and that blacks really didn’t mind slavery. These lies all serve current agendas—to demonize and minimize the historical claims of Armenians, Jews, and African Americans. Similar assertions are employed against Bosnian Muslims, Rwanda Tutsi, Rohingya Muslims, the Uighurs of Central China, the Tamil people of Sri Lanka, Mayan Indians in Guatemala and many other groups that have been invariably labeled “insurgents, invaders” or “terrorists” by perpetrator regimes. Several contributors invoke Stanley Cohen’s influential 2001 book States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cohen, a sociologist who drew upon his long years in South Africa and Israel, analyzed collective, societal, and individual impetuses to reject or to re-contextualize disturbing facts. “Societies arrive at unwritten agreements about what can be publicly remembered and acknowledged” and must construct “vital lies” in order to uphold nationalist mythologies, Cohen argued.10 “People, organizations, governments” or entire societies are unable to acknowledge “information that is too disturbing, threatening” or that explicitly contradicts their national mythologies; “therefore this information must be repressed if not openly disavowed, pushed aside or misinterpreted.”11 Think, for example, of the U.S. war in Vietnam and its (non)place in American memory and culture. Between 1964 and 1973 the U.S. government and armed forces killed more than three million Vietnamese people—onetenth of the population. “The savagery often extended to the utmost depravity: gratuitous torture, killing for target practice, slaughter of children and babies, gang rape” reports Nick Turse in his 2013 book Kill Anything

Introduction

5

12

That Moves—titled after a routine command. On the rare occasions when the war is discussed, it is depicted as merely a mistake—“begun in good faith by decent people out of fateful misunderstandings,” opined Ken Burns and Lynn Novick in their celebrated 2017 documentary series “The Vietnam War.”13 If one looks too closely at this war it would become impossible to uphold the sacred notions of “American exceptionalism” and virtue and one might even detect a pattern in U.S. foreign policy.

Why denial must be combatted Post-truth is pre-fascism. … Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. … Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.14 —Timothy Snyder, 2021 Denial of genocide must be countered for many obvious reasons: justice, restitution, reconciliation, and elemental decency toward victims of mass atrocities, who are further traumatized and demoralized by attempts to erase their experiences and realities. I have observed this while speaking with survivors of the genocides in Nazi-occupied Europe, in Rwanda, and in Bosnia. On one occasion I found myself saying, not completely accurately, “please believe me, these Holocaust deniers have little influence.” “Any influence at all is too much; I watched half my family die” came the response. For survivors of lesser-known or understood genocides, the pain is often more acute. One can truly find oneself a stranger in a strange land. Most survivors—like veterans of war and other traumatic experiences—would rather not speak about their experiences. But when they do, it is unbearably frustrating and difficult, as I have been told by friends from Bosnia as well as Rwanda, to be met with indifference or even counter-arguments by people who have been influenced by denial or obfuscation. The criminologist Geneviève Parent discussed the devastating emotional consequences of genocide denial. Having interviewed dozens of survivors in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Parent reported that: “The survivors struggle on a daily basis in coping with inestimable hardships. Denial not only perpetuates their victimization but also devalues their existence before, during and after … the events,” and research has shown that Holocaust survivors, and therefore other survivors, are “at a high risk for suicidal thoughts and attempts.” Parent concluded that “denial even led some of the interviewees to wonder why they had survived.”15 There are many other reasons to struggle for historical truth and something resembling justice. As genocide scholar Israel Charny explained, “Denials of genocide make no sense unless one sees in them renewed opportunities for the same passions, meanings, and pleasures that were at work in the

6 Introduction genocide itself, now revived in symbolic processes of murdering the dignity of the survivors … even history itself.”16 [emphasis in the original] Thousands of stories could be told to provide further motivation to honor, rather than insult or expunge, the victims. This is one. Janusz Korczak was a renowned pediatrician, author, and pioneering educator. From 1911 onward, he ran a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw—in the section enclosed in the Ghetto after late 1940. During the “Great Deportation” (to the Treblinka death camp) of late July-early August 1942, the German police came to take his remaining children. In his haunting memoir Death of a City (re-published as The Pianist), Władysław Szpilman reports seeing the procession as it made its way to the deportation site: The children were to have been taken away alone. He had the chance to save himself, and it was only with difficulty that he persuaded the Germans to take him too. He had spent long years of his life with children and now, on this last journey, he could not leave them alone. He wanted to ease things for them. … I am sure that even in the gas chamber, as the Zyklon B gas was stifling childish throats and striking terror instead of hope into the orphans’ hearts, the Old Doctor must have whispered with one last effort, “it's all right, children, it will be all right.” So that at least he could spare his little charges the fear of passing from life to death.17 Alongside his 200 orphans, Korczak was murdered in a gas chamber at Treblinka on August 7, 1942. Three days earlier, in his final diary entry, he wrote, after recounting a series of degradations and horrors: “What I’m experiencing did happen. It happened.”18 Korczak was aware of the world’s indifference and knew the importance of reiterating the truth of these events due, in part, to their seemingly unfathomable cruelty.

Chapter sequence and themes In the first chapter, philosopher Henry Thierault, president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars, points to the larger, generalized phenomenon of denial—far beyond the realm of genocide. Denial of reality has in recent years “become the global political norm,” which is “manifested in all sorts of ways, from denial of climate change … to denial of the moon landings.” Thierault also makes a powerful argument that genocide’s final stage is consolidation—“to render genocide’s impacts permanent, and fully normalized.” The next four chapters confront issues of commemoration and “memory cultures.” An unfortunate victimhood-competition arises in many lands that have been ravaged by war and genocide. Based on her extensive research in Ukraine—where millions perished during the Holodomor, Stalin’s genocidefamine of the early 1930s, and where hundreds of thousands of Jews were murdered during the Holocaust—Kristen Dyck provides a sensitive and

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insightful treatment of the competing claims to victimhood. She finds positive examples of cooperative and multi-dimensional memory and commemoration, based on the recognition that “these two genocides were interrelated, and that the trauma of the Holodomor necessarily influenced Ukrainian responses to the Holocaust a mere eight years later.” Like many of our contributors, anthropologist Jean-Philippe Belleau writes from years of active engagement and sustained research. Chapter 3 uncovers certain cultural and political developments that followed the reign of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Haitian dictator from 1957 to 1971. Belleau concludes that denial in Haiti stems from something deeper than ideology; rather, it is often induced by a “set of social ethics” and “cultural repertoires,” some of which lead to the view that “the victim is wrong in essence. Victims are seen as responsible for generating the forces and conditions that led to their being victimized.” Making use of extensive archival research, Thomas Earl Porter’s chapter, “The Soviet Denial of Murdered Jews’ Identity During and After the Great Patriotic War,” demonstrates that the Soviet government went to great lengths to minimize official recognition of Jewish suffering during the war. Porter traces the evolution of certain state documents and reports of Nazi massacres, that turned “Jews” into “Soviet citizens” in the editing process. In a pattern that will be familiar to experts of post-war commemoration and state mythologies in East Germany and some other Communist-ruled states in the region, there was no room in post-war Stalinist mythology for the Holocaust or the roughly one million Soviet Jewish victims. In effect, the Soviets, in the name of “anti-fascism,” thereby contributed to Holocaust denial. In Chapter 5, “Commemorating Colonial Violence from the Dutch Golden Age,” Mark Meuwese examines how colonial violence against Indigenous peoples in two seventeenth-century Dutch colonies has been remembered and not remembered in contemporary Dutch society. By comparing how contemporary Dutch society has grappled with the legacies of colonial violence in two places, this chapter highlights how the romanticization of the colonial past—of the “Golden Age” of Rembrandt and Vermeer, at home—continues to prevent an honest appraisal of the colonial violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples. The next section of the book examines “State-Sanctioned and Politicized Forms of Denial.” Growing up in Sarajevo, Hikmet Karčić recalls the “celebrations of genocide” that he witnessed while travelling through Serbdominated villages in eastern Bosnia. Towns that had once been 90% Bosniak were festooned with posters of war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. Chapter 8 describes a stage of genocide that surpasses denial—triumphalism. Through his analysis of songs, memorialization, and media, Karčić provides insight into the explicit celebration of “ethnic cleansing” that permeates much of Serbian culture and politics. Simon Massey examines similar terrain, from a legal perspective. Drawing upon the work of Stanley Cohen and Israel Charny, and buttressed by his experience as a lawyer and senior prosecutor in England, Massey expands our vision by

8 Introduction arguing for a “continuum of denial.” He uses records from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in applying this framework to the 1995 genocide at Srebrenica and the larger genocide in Bosnia. In U.S. public education and culture, genocide of Indigenous peoples is largely denied, erased, “set in the past,” asserts Michelle Stanley, a member of the Coharie nation and an emerging young scholar, “or framed as inevitable.” Building upon the work of other Indigenous researchers, Stanley argues in Chapter 8 that by extending its control over history and knowledge, denial of Indigenous genocide allows for the continuation of settlercolonial processes. She concludes her chapter by persuasively integrating recent developments into these long-standing trends: the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) epidemic, tribal nation recognition processes, and tribal land and water access restrictions. In Chapter 9, Adam Jones employs the comparative and global framework that has served him well, in his numerous publications, to interrogate a deeply complicated set of issues of denial and counter-denial in the Great Lakes region of Africa. The Paul Kagame regime, which took power at the end of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, has been accused of committing its own atrocities, in Rwanda as well as Congo (DRC)—accusations with considerable merit, though they have been exaggerated. At the same time, a small number of left-wing “anti-imperialists,” including highly respected figures such as Noam Chomsky, have lent their authority to a bizarre campaign of denial of the Tutsi genocide of 1994, turning it on its head (into a genocide of Hutu). Jones notes that “denialist campaigns tend to fall into two categories: state-sponsored and freelance.” When lacking the support of a government (such as Turkey), “denial tends to be concentrated among private actors,” lurking in the margins or shadows—but in the case of the denial of the genocide of Tutsi, showing no signs of going away. The final chapters—“New Directions in Analyzing and Countering Denial”—chart a path toward new ways of understanding and countering genocide and denial. In Chapter 10, another young scholar who is making exciting contributions, Margarita Tadevosyan, explores the ways that younger generations in Armenia and the Diaspora employ music to frame their identity. As she notes, genocide has become a central component of Armenian national and ethnic identity. With compelling examples, Tadevosyan shows that “music is actively used to educate generations about the Armenian genocide, to reach the international community, and to forge a collective identity for all members of the Armenia diaspora.” In Chapter 11, Haley Marie Brown’s chapter elaborates, in a highly original manner, upon Elisa von Joeden-Forgey’s influential concept of “life force atrocities” while issuing a powerful challenge to the field of genocide studies.19 “Theories of gender and genocide have historically failed to take the experience of gender-variant people into consideration,” Brown argues, and much greater attention is needed to “help us understand perpetrator

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commitments to targeting gender-variant individuals.” Brown’s research analyzes techniques of destruction directed at transgender bodies, such as “rituals of humiliation, burning … and the removal of physical identifiers,” which represent “identity denialism,” which is closely correlated with genocide. Brown also persuasively argues that in their assaults on transgender women, perpetrators “have begun to form a concept of the victim group that has the same logic as those historical group categories identified by the Genocide Convention.” Jeremy Rinker, specialist in Peace and Conflict Studies and engaged scholar, examines the intersections of systems of marginalization and trauma. He posits that past collective trauma can be utilized in creating conditions for transitional justice theory and practice, but that “authentic sharing of collective historical traumas” is required. Rinker asks, and helps answer, “How can we really know the identity of the “Other” in conflict without understanding the collective trauma they carry with them?” Chapter 12 has significant implications for conflicts from Palestine-Israel to the Balkans and far beyond. *********************** All these topics, and many more, deserve much greater attention and we sincerely hope that this book will point the way to further research—and to further action. For it is not enough to analyze and attempt to understand the world: We must change it. John Cox Center for Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies Charlotte, NC March 2021

Notes 1 Aleksandar Hemon, “The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists,” The New York Times, October 16, 2019, A-27. Hemon is an award-winning Bosnian-American writer. 2 We wish to thank the other co-organizers of the conference, especially Emek Ergun and Ella Fratantuono. 3 Article II of UN Resolution 260, adopted December 9, 1948; the full text, in the original French and English, is available here, accessed May 3, 2020, http:// www.un.org/documents/ga/res/3/ares3.htm. 4 Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: A Critical Sociology of Genocide (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press), 224–225. 5 Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, “Editors' Introduction: Changing Themes in the Study of Genocide,” in Bloxham and Moses, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. 6 John Cox, To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).

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7 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), xxiii. 8 Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch, accessed December 11, 2020, http://genocidewatch.net/genocide-2/8-stages-of-genocide/. Stanton had developed his influential “8 Stages of Genocide” in 1996, and in 2012 added discrimination and persecution as the third and eighth stages. Thus, ten stages: classification, symbolization, discrimination, dehumanization, organization, polarization, preparation, persecution, extermination, and denial. 9 In 1980, U.S. Holocaust deniers created a journal called Journal of Historical Review, and they often brandished a 1976 book written by a professor at Northwestern University, whose training was very far from history; for deniers of the Armenian Genocide, a Turkish-funded professorship at Princeton University, awarded to Heath W. Lowry in 1993, was useful for shrouding their enterprise in academic garb. See William H. Honan, “Princeton Is Accused of Fronting For the Turkish Government,” The New York Times, May 12, 1996, accessed March 4, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/05/22/nyregion/princeton-is-accused-offronting-for-the-turkish-government.html. For a fuller treatment of the Lowry scandal and its context, see Eric Markusen, Roger W. Smith, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” PEN America, accessed March 4, 2021, https://pen.org/professional-ethics-and-thedenial-of-armenian-genocide/. 10 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2001), 11. 11 Ibid., 1. 12 Jonathan Schell, “The Real American War in Vietnam,” The Nation, January 16, 2013, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/real-american-war-vietnam/ 13 The Vietnam War, episode 1, “‘Dé jà Vu’ (1858-1961),” directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, aired September 17, 2017, PBS. 14 Timothy Snyder, “The American Abyss,” The New York Times, January 9, 2021, accessed January 11, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/magazine/trumpcoup.html. 15 Geneviève Parent, “Genocide Denial: Perpetuating Victimization and the Cycle of Violence in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 10: 2 (2016), 47. Also see Nathan P.E. Kellerman, Holocaust Trauma: Psychological Effects and Treatment (iUniverse, 2009). 16 Quoted in Markusen, Smith, and Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide.” 17 Władysław Szpilman, The Pianist (London: Orion Books, 2005), 95–96. 18 Janusz Korczak, Ghetto Diary (New York: Holocaust Library, 1978), 189. 19 Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (2010): 1–19.

1

Is denial the final stage of genocide? Consolidation, the metaphysics of denial, and the supersession of stage theory Henry C. Theriault

It has become a truism that denial is the last stage of genocide. This view is often attributed to Elie Wiesel and is highlighted by Greg Stanton in his “Eight Stages of Genocide” (now “Ten Stages”).1 The idea is echoed frequently by scholars and others struggling against genocide denial or calling attention to its impact. Yet, this characterization of genocide denial is incorrect and its proliferation has problematic consequences. On initial consideration, the reasons for this falsity appear simple. First, genocide denial occurs not only after the directly destructive phase of a genocide has been completed, but during and even before it occurs.2 The historical record is abundantly clear that denial occurs while a genocide is happening as much as after it occurs. In the Armenian, East Timorese, Guatemalan, Darfurian, and Rohingyan cases, as just some examples, the leaders of the perpetrator groups explicitly denied or have denied what was or has been occurring, falsely dismissing reports as exaggerations, falsely claiming that violence is perpetrated by rogue actors, or falsely characterizing the violence as civil war or even as aggression by the group actually targeted in the genocide. Similarly, deeply embedded euphemistic labeling of acts during the Holodomor—the Ukrainian genocide-famine of the early 1930s—and the Holocaust in conjunction with deft propaganda established a pervasive denial within their perpetrators’ societies and beyond. What is more, as Fatma Müge Göçek has demonstrated, denial can even be intertwined with the escalating violence and ideology driving a perpetrator group toward committing genocide.3 This approach can be extended to what I have termed “anticipatory denial,” whereby it is not the actuality of a genocide as past or currently occurring that is denied, but its intended future execution.4 Göçek importantly sees denial as a potential part of violent dynamics leading to genocide, while I recognize that the very international political and legal attention to genocide that has been meant as a deterrent and transformative ideal can actually entice perpetrators to attempt to create, ahead of a genocide, a rhetorical and perceptual framework in which their actions will not be recognized as genocidal—which they actually will be—as a means of removing these acts of genocide from the purview of anti-genocidal political and legal scrutiny and institutions. DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-1

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Second, denial is not essential to genocide, nor does it always accompany it, as a “stage” or otherwise. In ancient times and more recently, many perpetrators drew attention to their genocidal acts and possibly even exaggerated them for the intimidation effects. What is more, denial is not a necessary accompaniment of genocide in the contemporary era, either. Instead, it is best to understand denial as one possible tool to be used when the self-understanding of a perpetrator group, the practical political and legal restrictions on its genocidal acts, and/or the broader implications of being seen as a genocide perpetrator group make denial an efficacious strategy. When such conditions do not hold—for instance, when perpetrators or potential perpetrators view themselves as immune to international accountability and/or are so deeply immersed in their ideologies that they do not care about the consequences of their genocidal acts—such as Hutu in 1994 in Rwanda and Turkey’s and Azerbaijan’s populations relative to Armenians in 2020—perpetrators are more than willing to stridently espouse genocidalism. In such situations, denial is inverted into celebratory or invective declaration. Thus, not only is denial not necessarily related to genocide but instead its presence depends entirely on the circumstances in which a genocide is planned, executed, and consolidated; just as importantly, within a single perpetrator group denial often coexists with statements openly celebrating the genocide and/or threats to continue the genocidal treatment of victims in the future. Thus, Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s supporters can make explicit statements about completing the genocide of 19155 to eliminate all Armenians, referred to (along with other Christian victims of this genocide) by Erdoğan as “leftovers of the sword[s]” that were swung one hundred five years ago,6 while telling the leaders of other governments and the world community that he and his people bear Armenians no ill-will and are in fact the agents of “peace” against supposed Armenian “aggression.”7 Turkish leaders can be at once completely upfront about their genocidal intent and the 1915 genocide, and at the same time completely dishonest about it. As I will discuss below, there are cases in which, if the “stage” theory is retained, denial actually fades or is superseded during what is the actual final stage of genocide. Regardless of the specifics, what is clear from the foregoing is that the relationship between genocide and denial is very complex and variable. Genocide denial is a subspecies of denial more generally. To understand the relationship between genocide and denial in a comprehensive way, we must undertake a second line of inquiry into denial in general, in which genocide denial is one type among many.

Rhetoric and reality Those studying and/or responding to genocide denial in the past few decades probably did not anticipate the extent to which denial, as a broader

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phenomenon, would become the global political norm by the late 2010s. While scholars and activists confronting specific cases of genocide denial or working more broadly on the issue have certainly understood the importance of denial not only in the damage it does to victim groups and others, including those in the perpetrator group, but also because of how politically dangerous and debilitating the spread of denial is, even now it is rare for such scholars to recognize genocide denial as part of a broader issue of denial, which is manifested in all sorts of ways, from denial of climate change and the health impacts of cigarette smoking to denial of the moon landings. Genocide denial is often intertwined with genocidal desire, whether in expressing veiled approval of the denied genocide or for “true believers” whose denial is hidden in and a function of the deeper destructive ideological and epistemic commitments they hold (whereby they rationalize the destruction against targeted groups in a manner that allows them to maintain the delusion of their own moral decency), however much on the surface they may disingenuously espouse (meaninglessly) anti-violent and anti-oppressive views. From careerist scholars who join denial campaigns—usually to advance their positions in academia—to those attacking genocide commemorations through apparently innocuous words, institutional or juridical actions, hate speech, or even blatant violence, they all share a desire that genocide denial be normalized out of an approval of genocide and even a pleasure at demeaning the victims and as a way of reserving the potential of renewed genocide as threat or future activity. What appears to be or is presented as purely economic logic typically involves other motivations as well, and the economic logic can even be a patina that makes denial somehow more palatable: One cannot help but question whether careerism is as much an alibi or rationalization for joining a denial campaign, which underneath might be motivated psychologically by the pleasure of siding with a powerful—indeed, “all powerful” = genocidal—entity and the rush that comes with being able to denigrate a targeted group with impunity. There are many paths to career success; supporting denialism out of selfinterest still requires approving of genocide. Yet, even given such insights into the nefariousness of deniers, those who analyze denialism usually maintain some sense of an external space in which denial does not reflect the epistemic norm but instead can be seen as false against anchoring non-denialist standards of truth. The simpler and less sophisticated among them focus on refuting denialist falsifications and manipulations in order to show that denialist statements are wrong; perhaps without even realizing it, they hold fast to a notion that the world generally seeks truth and that the epistemic frameworks of cultures and social processes support establishment of the truth if people are taught well enough what it is and how to recognize it. Out of such naivete did John Stuart Mill hold that, if free debate that does not restrict blatant lying is allowed, the truth will be established, at least eventually.8 Those with a bit more sophistication understand that the effects of propaganda are not dissipated

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simply by revelation of its falsity, and therefore conjoin the exposure of falsehood to recognition that the tactics and organizations of those who peddle it must be included in the revelation, to undercut the apparent legitimacy of denial from what are (mis)represented as credible sources— especially prominent universities such as Princeton.9 Yet, this is still about exposure and assumes that the general frame of reference in which we operate is such that, when proper critical thinking tools are employed to counter propagandistic as well as subtler forms of manipulation, genocide denials can and will be recognized as incorrect or untenable. Unfortunately, not even that increased sophistication sufficiently integrates the true nature of genocide denial as a function of universal psychological, cultural, social, and political tendencies. Truly advanced scholars and practitioners do not confuse outrage at denial’s devasting consequences and the malicious motivations often behind it with surprise at its prevalence. They do not assume that the world is naturally tilted against denial and that this or that denial campaign merely needs to be opposed with enough intellectual or political force to restore the truth-oriented stasis. On the contrary, as Terrence Des Pres so perspicuously recognized, at least in the contemporary world the universal epistemic tilt is toward denial, not away from it. Deniers have figured out how to seize and control some of the most core critical thinking tools, including valuing “the other side of the story” and challenging ideas to the level of logical doubt, even when pushing to the level of logical doubt is in fact not a rational method of truth determination in the face of denial.10 Only what I will term “critical antidenialism” responds adequately to the depth of this assault on—not truth, but—humanity, for that is what its function and telos are. Only those adopting critical anti-denialism are not in denial about the true nature of this world, this real world, this deniers’ world. How did we get here? To answer that, we must begin with a very careful clarification. It is tempting to give in to the world of denial by presenting it as something other than what it is. Though even Hume, as most any modern philosopher, eschewed full skepticism and distinguished between philosophical exercises that push the boundaries of knowledge criteria and concrete, everyday rejection of the view that knowledge is impossible, the powerful nature of philosophical critique allowed a kind of intellectual relativism to gain some credence. While even the aforementioned Mill’s attachment to truth was more one of faith in a kind of “invisible hand” of reason that will guarantee that all debate will somehow automatically tend toward establishment of the truth eventually (so that, no matter how long denial dominates, faith in the ultimate prevailing of truth can be maintained, that is, Godot will eventually arrive), it was still there as a standard. Jean Baudrillard11 is perhaps the most prominent philosopher known for pushing this line of thought to its limit, in the notion of “hyperreality.” Hyperreality is the space in which everything is simulation or copy; there is no anchoring real or original. As Baudrillard famously claimed, a simulated

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bank robbery that a guard does not know is simulated will end up being a situation of actual violence (and the simulated bank robbers might even start to act in accord with the new reality), while in psychological terms simulating or faking symptoms of a mental illness might actually be indistinguishable from someone “really” having that (or a) mental illness. Setting aside the overly facile equivocations Baudrillard makes—an actual armed robbery intended by the assailants that is taken seriously by guards is simply a different phenomenon from a simulation that is transformed into a situation of real violence, and to say that it is impossible to distinguish between “real” and “simulated” symptoms of a mental illness is an epistemological, not ontological, issue; not being able to tell what is behind a door does not mean that there is no determined thing behind that door, and having the real symptoms of schizophrenia is to be a schizophrenic, while simulating them with sincerity is mental illness, but a different one, hypochondria—the key point Baudrillard is making is that, unlike epistemologists before him, he is not advocating a particular way of determining what is true of the world, but instead merely describing the epistemic state in which we exist. In this way, Baudrillard accurately describes the present state of epistemic affairs. It must be stressed that Baudrillard does not lapse into skepticism, such that there is no reality; on the contrary, Baudrillard posits “hyperreality” as a new way to understand what is actual, if no longer “real” in the received sense. Yet, Baudrillard’s characterization of our current epistemic reality carries with it three errors. First, Baudrillard provides an inaccurate history of how we have gotten to where are and what the context of his innovation is. Second, Baudrillard presents his description as if it is value- or perspectiveneutral. This leads to a third error: Baudrillard fails to test his model. As noted, he does not challenge his own logic in the examples he presents, but instead promotes an interpretation that is not the most obvious but that instead best supports his claims. And, he does not consider the consequences of the decision he has made about reality, though this is an inadvertent mistake stemming from the first two mistakes. Baudrillard presents a history of belief systems regarding “image” (or “representation”), and “reality.” For our purposes, the “image”/“representation” is historically related to the concept of “appearance” but, in order to convey the nuance I wish to later, I link it to the term “rhetoric.” For Baudrillard, the image/representation has gone from “reflect[ing] a profound reality” to “mask[ing]” and misrepresenting “a profound reality,” then to “mask[ing] the absence of a profound reality” (emphasis in the original), and finally to having “no relation to any reality whatsoever,” that is, the state of hyperreality. In other words, representation has gone from corresponding to reality to complete disconnection from it—to the point where it is no longer meaningful to discuss “reality” independent of images without referents.

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Setting aside the question of whether this succession of states is too reductive to capture the complexity of the dominant as well as heterodox views present in different cultures arranged by time (and place), the more pressing question is whether such a progression marks the revelation of the most advanced state of epistemic being, or rather is itself the product of a series of contingent if understandable cultural mutations. If Baudrillard is right to see each of these “phases of the image” as either the dominant view of the time or even the reality at that time, he fails to recognize the arbitrariness of each dominant view/reality. If these are or were the reality of the image/representation in a given period, that is because this reality itself was molded by the given view. If we live in an age—and remember that Baudrillard was writing forty years ago, before the internet, yet characterized in about 1980 the 2000s with what we must recognize as prescience—in which image is everything and one’s life is lived in virtual reality or cyberspace, not in some concrete world, that is so because we are choosing to value virtual reality ahead of other concepts of reality. We can certainly do this, but it is a valueladen choice, not an ineluctable condition (as so many prognosticators and profiteers in the digital age try to convince us). By watching “reality” shows that are of course complete constructs not in being scripted but in the very genesis of the situations and the activities of those who know they are being viewed, by celebrating “people” whose primary existence is on the internet, that is, by confirming the reality of their cyber-existences by watching what is presented by them on the internet, we are all too complicitly defining the relationship of image and reality in our age, not succumbing to it. Of course, many people resist these trends, and it is probably best to say that most people today have one foot in the virtual-video-propaganda world and one foot in reality. But this starts making my point: Whereas Baudrillard simply inverts the historical relationship of representation and reality, so that reality is real only in so far as it is the projected referent of a representation without any further reality—that is, reality is constructed by being the supposed actual thing being represented, even though representations no longer have a reality behind them at all—the relationship between reality and representation is much more complex. The obvious connection to The Wizard of Oz and the gold standard of U.S. currency—and, actually, the value of gold itself—is more relevant that we might think, given that L. Frank Baum was an ideologue and supporter of total genocide against Native Americans in the United States.12 Both reality and representation—or, in my terms, “rhetoric”—exist sideby-side in a fluid relationship, sometimes close together and sometimes far apart. The stages Baudrillard lists correspond to different historically typical distances between the two poles; there is no difference in kind between the stages, only differences in degree. And, the continuum of distances allows us a much more nuanced understanding of the complexity of the relationship between the poles. “Hyperreality” is simply a period in which the relationship between the two poles is particularly strained.

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There is also a valence—positive or negative, attractive or repulsive—in each moment of the relationship; reality and rhetoric are always tending to move toward or away from each other. When moving away, they tend to be viewed in the last two stages Baudrillard gives us, as well as many other relationships; when tending toward each other, they tend to be viewed in the first two stages and many others. There is a very different history, at least of the modern period of this relationship. The progression we have seen over the past two hundred and more years has been driven, counter-intuitively enough, by the establishment of human and political rights as entitlements of every person.

The rhetorical turn In Europe, prior to the modern age, there was little sense of human rights, even if some notion of rights by position existed. Reflective of Thrasymachus’ famous dictum, the power to harm was its own justification. If, as Plato’s critical response suggests, this was not universally accepted,13 the burden of proof throughout much of European history was on the side of those challenging the notion that “might makes right.” Without getting into the details, the rise of a notion of general human rights from about 1600 on, and the establishment of some level of rights first for dominant groups and then more and more for others from the mid-1700s to the 1900s, drove a growing expectation of rights throughout this period. It was this expectation that drove the positive expansion of the scope and demographic coverage of those rights. But with this expansion came a balancing challenge. The more human rights were asserted, the more that those benefiting from their denial—economic, political, racial, gendered, etc., elites and those who linked their own benefit to the elites, such as police forces, petit bourgeois functionaries, bureaucrats, and so on—resisted them. Yet, in a twisted nod perhaps to Nietzsche, as things progressed, that resistance could less and less be through a bald-faced denial of rights, as the raw force of the masses required the elites to appear to accept the “slave morality” of those challenging their subjugation. Explicit denial of rights—in which attitudes, law, and economic, social, and political reality aligned—gave way more and more to a rhetorical recognition of rights coupled with an actual undermining of those rights at the material level. Black men in the United States were give the right to vote and the nationstate proclaimed itself a “free country” (at least for some), but soon many policies and practices prevented the exercise of that right. The United States was proclaimed a meritocracy in which hard work and education could result in dramatic upward mobility for any who made the effort, while unfair labor practices, a tax code highly beneficial to the rich in which they received much more of a benefit than they paid for, effectively privatized public education that made wealth a condition of access to strong schools at the K-12 level as well as through increasing tuition costs of universities, and

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more ensured that the rhetoric of upward mobility was coupled with a reality of highly static class stratification. And so on. Social, cultural, economic, political, and military hierarchies were largely maintained even as powerful pressure against them drove change, because the change was actually a wedge between rhetoric and reality rather than a change in reality itself. While in the pre-rights order, those in power said exactly what they meant in their naked exercise of what Foucault refers to as the “right of death,”14 in the human rights era, the powerful exercise their power aided by an inversion of rhetoric. What Foucault mistakes as a change in the nature of the exercise of power, from destruction to control, we can now see quite differently as continuation of the same forms of power—both destruction and control—in a new relationship to rhetoric about the structure of societies. Life was, after all, always strictly regulated for its own promotion, as the Spartan system suggests, while the present age has seen no diminution in the frequency and extent of destruction of human populations—many argue, on the contrary, that it is precisely in the age of rights that the level of destruction has increased, with the twentieth (and now twenty-first) century considered the most destructive era of genocide and total war. It should be noted that, as the concept of human rights became more politically powerful, one solution would have been to actually improve respect for human rights around the globe. While it can be argued that in some ways this has been how the tension between brutal practice and liberal idealizations has been resolved, just as much if not quite more so it has been resolved by an attempt to cover over brutal practice with a denialist rhetorical patina that accords with those liberal idealizations and creates an illusion that material reality does as well. If one considers such forces as consumerism and its requisite advertising, nation-state formation (based on another kind of marketing), contemporary electronic image production, and so on as central to modern structures of domination, then the manner in which different aspects of the rhetoricreality relationship are intertwined yet individual nodes becomes clearer. In this way, genocide denial is at once a reflection of a much broader denialism that itself is one way the rhetoric-reality relationship manifests itself (at a point at which that relationship is becoming more distant) and at the same time one of the mechanisms that has driven the independence of rhetoric and reality from one another. The ability to commit genocide in the modern era has depended in more and more cases to a greater and greater extent on the ability to deny that genocide is being or will be committed, even as the ability to get away with genocide depends on denial that it was committed—as opposed to the pre-rights era, in which the ability to get away with genocide depended on the ability to commit genocide in a decisive and total manner and to project the resultant power convincingly.

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Consolidation Genocide is not about perception or rhetoric, but about actual material changes in the world. Yet, denial is a rhetorical strategy. It is meant to assist in the shaping of material reality, but is not a state of material reality itself. Thus, genocide cannot result in denial or end in denial. Denial is not only not the final stage of genocide, it is not a stage at all. Is there a terminus or telos of genocide? A genocide aims at the destruction of a target group or groups. But, in Hegelian terms, the negation of destruction is not only empty; there is also “determinate negation,” that is, destruction that yields something new. There are thus two aspects of destruction, the reduction or elimination of the target group(s) and the gains by the perpetrator group(s). This point is not lost on perpetrators who embrace a utopian genocidal ideology, such as the Nazis and Khmer Rouge did, or who adopt a more pragmatic ideology of narrow gain, as did the United States through Manifest Destiny and Argentina through the Conquest of the Desert. Genocide is a transformation of the demographic, political, social, cultural, and economic orders that destroys victims while benefiting perpetrators—or is perceived by them to be to their benefit. With this in mind, if we retain some kind of stage theory, then there is clearly a key stage missing from Stanton’s Ten Stages, a process and endpoint I term “consolidation.”15 A genocide is consolidated when the state of affairs that have resulted from the destructive phase becomes permanent and irrevocable. One caveat is important here: The state of affairs produced by the destructive phase does not follow as another step given in its entirety after a genocide. On the contrary, the destructive force of a genocide—even one that focuses more on cultural erasure than killing—is so overwhelming that it spills over the temporal boundaries of the actions themselves. Thus, the direct effects of a genocide that takes one hundred days or five years or one hundred years to perpetrate always extend far beyond the temporal endpoint of application of direct destructive force. Thus, the state of affairs resulting from a genocide can take years, decades, and even centuries to fully register in material reality. Of course, by this logic it is possible to argue that a genocide never ends, but we are concerned here with direct effects. The key point is not that the effects of genocide continue to be felt for generations and more, but that the direct effects of the violence of genocide continue to be. For instance, the killing of a substantial portion of a group means at once a traumatic psychological impact that affects members of that group for generations, at the same time that its demographic reduction means losses of political, security, economic, cultural, and other forms of stability, production, etc. The direct destructive effects of mass killing, then, take decades and more to reshape reality. Consolidation is the process by which the perpetrator group and/or others make this reshaping permanent and irrevocable.

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Even here appeal to the notion of a stage theory obscures reality. Consolidation as a process begins as soon as the first act of a genocide is performed, and by Göçek’s logic even before as a preparation for the effectiveness of the acts of genocide that will be committed. Thus, because a genocide always consists of a huge number of acts that can be viewed as discrete, the consolidative process is applied to each set of acts and even each act. That said, the consolidation is not primary until the actions of genocide are completed. What is more, when the survivor group—the “leftovers of the sword”—reassert themselves as a group against the long-term terminus of erasure, the perpetrator group, the world community, and/or segments of it focus on consolidation as the key to the success of a genocide. This is possible even in the face of trials, international condemnation, and other putative forms of rejection of the genocide. There are various characteristic features of the consolidation phase. One is integration of the historical territory of victims into the “territory” of the perpetrators. This proceeds by various means, ranging from resettlement to change the demographics of the land, through destruction of the architectural and archaeological heritage of the victims (destruction of churches and other buildings or “eliminative repurposing” of them that disconnects them from the heritage of the victims); renaming of places with the perpetrators’ geographical lexicon and language (“New Hampshire,” “Dover,” “Anatolia,” and so on); materialization of false histories through books, websites, and signs; and so on. Another is the “laundering” of wealth expropriated from the victims into the economy of the perpetrator group such that it cannot be readily identified or any identification can be contested. Yet another is a rendering of the victim population as perpetually insecure, such that their identity as well as physical extension into the future are continually in question and require endless focal effort that restricts actual recovery and development beyond survival. Renewed violence or the threat of it by perpetrators, genocide denial that prevents recognition of the bias of perpetrators, and so forth, all are means. The result of successful consolidation is either the final ending of the viability of the victim group, such that it effectively disappears as a substantive identity group, or the prevention of recovery that renders the victim group perpetually marginal. The latter in particular is typically measured relative to the power, security, and “impunity potential” (degree to which a perpetrator group can continue to harm or dominate the victim group without the victim group being protected or able to protect itself) of the perpetrator group. It is a typical result of genocide for surviving groups, which exacerbates the pre-genocide perpetrator group-victim group domination-subjugation relation that genocide actually maximizes. While it is impossible to erase or overcome the effects of a genocide, even one in which direct killing is a relatively small part of the destructive process, reparative processes can mitigate or balance those effects to a meaningful degree when they restore the long-term security and viability of the victim group. In

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this sense, repair (which is typically understood to include but go beyond recognition and apology) opposes denial, and the most significant function of denial in addition to anticipatory and contemporaneous denial that supports execution of the direct acts of genocide is prevention of repair and support of consolidation. But perpetual denial should not be understood as necessary to consolidation; on the contrary, consolidation succeeds precisely where indifference replaces denial, that is, there is no need to deny the facts of the past. The indifference and resignation with which Native American genocides, particularly earlier cases, is met today is a good example. The consolidative process is so advanced or complete that denial is unnecessary. Thus, in truly successful cases of genocide, denial itself is superseded or obviated.

Exit stage theory This chapter so far has granted that it can be appropriate to apply a stage model to genocidal processes. But beyond misrepresenting denial as a stage and missing what, if a stage model were appropriate, is clearly the final stage, the stage model is, ultimately, not a useful tool for generating serious insight into genocide for understanding or prevention. To understand why, this chapter examines the most prominent, developed, and established stage theory, Stanton’s “Ten Stages” model. First, the “Ten Stages” model is inaccurate beyond omitting the stage of consolidation and misrepresenting denial as a stage. For instance, “dehumanization” is considered very important in the model, as its fourth stage. This follows a dominant view in genocide studies, that dehumanization of victims is necessary to mobilizing the large number of “ordinary” people to participate in horrific violence against victims. As I have argued elsewhere, this view is deeply flawed.16 While it is true that dehumanization can be a causal condition of genocidal violence, in two ways it often is not. First, is dehumanization necessary for “average” people to participate in genocide? The historical record suggests otherwise. In many cases, it is clear that perpetrators engaged in the violence they did precisely because of their enjoyment at making human beings, whose registry of suffering is greater than a non-human being, suffer. It is not just that “ordinary” people often do not need to overcome resistance to genocide, but that many desire to do the violence of genocide. Indeed, that desire is prevalent in everyday, nongenocidal situations, as can be confirmed by even a cursory examination of the prevalence of, motivations for, and practices of sexualized violence, domestic violence, child abuse, torture, and other forms of direct violence that pervades “normal” society after “normal” society. Very often, it is because human beings suffer, not despite the fact that they suffer, that motivates perpetration of violence. Consider sadistic physical and psychological tortures (such as forcing a mother to choose which of multiple children will survive and which will die) so prevalent in genocide; these make no sense in a context of dehumanization. Second, even were dehumanization

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is present in a case of genocide—and it often is—it seems quite often to be the outcome, not a cause condition of violence. For instance, as has been pointed out in the literature, Nazi concentration and death camps functioned not after dehumanization had occurred but in fact to strip human beings of their humanity in a hyper-sadistic way. It is not enough for Stanton to allow for the persistence of dehumanization at different points in a genocidal process, while indicating that there is a “logic” to genocide; where prevention is concerned, there is a world of difference between dehumanization being a causal condition and a result of genocide. Similar critiques are possible of at least some of the other stages, but beyond what is needed in the present chapter. This suggests a second point: In some cases, the “stage” and its inversion are both present. For example, as Israel Charny has so famously shown, denial of a genocide can function as a celebration of the genocide by the perpetrators or those who identify with them.17 It is possible to push this notion further, by recognizing that celebration is not necessarily through denial, but that a strategy of denial might parallel a desire to celebrate a past genocide, as discussed above in reference to Erdoğan and his followers’ simultaneous explicit celebration and denial of the Armenian Genocide. And, quite often dehumanization and what I have termed “superhumanization”18 coexist, so that some perpetrators might dehumanize victims as part of their participation, while others might come to view themselves as “supermen” or otherwise possessing some special superiority or entitlement such that they are above mere human beings and can commit violence against them with moral license. That is not to suggest that the “Ten Stage” model does not fit any genocides. But that is part of the problem: it is at once based on a small sample of cases—perhaps just Cambodia and the Holocaust, with Rwanda added in later—and on a specific interpretation of those events. The less similar to such cases a genocidal process is, the less likely the “Ten Stage” model is to be of use in preventing the process from reaching full genocide or in correctly identifying a completed genocide as genocide. Regardless of the intention of its author, the “Ten Stages” depends on and reinforces a centerperiphery hierarchy among cases of genocide that can go so far as to exclude legitimate cases. In other words, the “Ten Stage” model itself can lapse into (unintentional) genocide denial. The foregoing in turn suggests a fourth problem. The stage model relies on an Aristotelian categorization of features of some set of genocides. It does not take account of negative cases at all. Just as much as dehumanization is not a causal condition of some genocides, at the same time when dehumanization is present it need not result in genocide. Great care must be taken in making any inferences based on the presence or absence of any of the “stages.” Operating with a framework in which a set of indicators are taken as the main red flags of genocide when they might not be and others might be means not only viewing some situations that will lead to genocide as non-genocidal, but what I will term “fabricationist” assertions that a

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genocidal process is under way when no such process is. A particularly disturbing example of false fabrication is manifested by the 2020 Genocide Watch country report on the Republic of Armenia, which asserted, in the middle of renewed military aggression by Azerbaijan against Armenians in the historically Armenian area of Artsakh that was the re-initiation of the attempted ethnic cleansing campaign begun by the Azeri-dominated republican government beginning in 1988 with massacres of Armenians in the Azeri cities of Sumgait and Baku, that Armenians were well-advanced in a process of genocide against Azeris.19 Even as the combined forces of the ninety-million-strong Turkey and Azerbaijan were raining state of the art drones from Israel and elsewhere and using NATO arms to attack civilians with the explicitly-stated genocidal intention of eliminating the mere 140,000 Armenian population of Artsakh who were defended by the outmoded military of fewer than three-million Armenian Republic citizens, and of ultimately eliminating all Armenians in the Caucasus, Genocide Watch stated that Armenia was at Stage 8, persecution, and Stage 10, denial, of genocide—that is, at the point at which direct extermination (Stage 9) was imminent. It does not matter that the “Ten Stages” model is not supposed to be taken as strictly linear or the stage progression inevitable; the damage of this evaluation that only Turkish and Azeri propagandists and those biased in their favor—no objective party looking comprehensively at the available data—could see as credible, is clear; this declaration and demonization of Armenians remarkably benefited Azeri propaganda efforts and undermined Armenian attempts to call attention to the one-sided nature of the violence and extensive human rights violations and war crimes by the forces of Azerbaijan and Turkey, including thousands of jihadi mercenaries from Syrian and Libya shipped in as cannon fodder.20 One can only speculate about the role of this evaluation in the decisions by Amnesty International’s and Human Rights Watch’s failure to take Armenian claims seriously and adoption of a facile and inaccurate balancing of the two sides of the conflict.21 The defense of the “Ten Stages” model includes acknowledgment that “[s] tages may occur simultaneously” and “[t]he process is not linear.” But, because it is asserted as a stage theory, the author must also admit that, “[l] ogically, later stages are preceded by earlier stages.” The question is obvious: which is it? Is there a temporal sequencing or not? That “all stages continue to operate throughout the process” does not address the problem, as earlier stages are supposed to create the conditions for later stages, even if the earlier stages persist throughout a genocide. This merely means that once the process of a stage has occurred, the features of that stage continue to be asserted in order to continue to support later stages; for example, if dehumanization were to end, then presumably what was occurring because of it would end as well. If the defense is asserting something more, that the “stages” are in fact merely features of (some) genocides without any temporal indexing, then the “Ten Stages” cannot be presented as a predictive

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model, except in the trivial sense of identifying social states or forces that indicate the potential for genocide. Ultimately, defending a stage approach to genocide entails attempts to having things both ways: The stage approach is at once non-linear/nontemporal and a predictive tool in which some stages “logically” precede and provide the conditions for other stages, at once a reliable list of stages (or features) of genocide and at the same time stages do not need to be present for the model to apply, and so forth. Even those sympathetic to a stage approach to genocide must at some point recognize the exception and qualification regime necessary to fit a stage approach to the data of actual genocides is Ptolemaic and unreasonable. To say that “[n]o model is ever perfect” and that all models “are merely ideal-typical representations of reality that are meant to help us think more clearly about social and cultural processes” might be true, but if the model in question actually obscures as much as it reveals, misleads as much as it accurately characterizes, then it is at best an intellectual mistake to employ it. One might even see it as negligent to apply a model that can result in inaccurate positive or negative identifications of genocidal processes that have actual life-and-death implications.

Implications There are three main implications of the foregoing. First, if they are to be anything more than a surface analysis that generates an ineffectual rejection, attempted refutations of genocide denial must not be considered in isolation from other forms of denial or apart from its historical development and epistemological foundations. Second, denial is not the final stage of genocide, and promoting the view that a state of denial is an ending phase of genocide that captures its long-lasting harm actually distracts well-intentioned people from recognizing that, far more than a merely rhetorical act, a comprehensive conceptual and material consolidation of the destruction of genocide is what must be recognized and opposed by much more than mere recognition that a genocide has occurred. There is, indeed, a serious danger in viewing the aftermath of genocide as primarily a discursive rather than material terrain. Finally, reliance on a stage model of genocide ultimately obscures the reality of at least some genocides and lends credibility to at least some fabrications of false genocides. Even if adopted with good intentions, great harm can result: The former can aid consolidation of genocides for which the active phase has ended and can undermine prevention of actual impending or ongoing genocides, while the latter can shift political and legal balances in favor of fabricators.

Notes 1 Gregory H. Stanton, “The Ten Stages of Genocide,” Genocide Watch, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.genocidewatch.com/tenstages. Subsequent references to the “Ten Stages” or stage theory in general are to this source.

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2 Henry C. Theriault, “Denial of Ongoing Atrocities as a Rationale for Not Attempting to Prevent or Intervene,” in Impediments to the Prevention and Intervention of Genocide, “Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Volume 9, ed. Samuel Totten (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2013), 47–75. 3 Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present, and Collective Violence against the Armenians, 1789-2009 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4 Henry C. Theriault, “Genocidal Mutation and the Challenge of Definition,” Metaphilosophy 41:4 (2010): 481–524. 5 “Report dated 19 November 2020 from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia on Armenophobic attitudes and policy of Azerbaijan and Turkey,” in “Note verbale dated 12 February 2021 from the Permanent Mission of Armenia to the United Nations Office at Geneva addressed to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,” United Nations Human Rights Council, Forty-sixth session, 22 February-19 March 2021, Agenda item 4, Human rights situations that require the Council’s attention, A/HRC/45/G/24 – OHCHR, accessed March 11, 2021, https://ap.ohchr.org/documents/dpage_ e.aspx?c=13&su=24. 6 Uzay Bulut, “Turkey: Erdogan’s ‘Leftovers of the Sword,” Gatestone Institute International Policy Council, May 13, 2020, accessed March 11, 2021, https:// www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16002/turkey-leftovers-of-the-sword. 7 See, for example, Nailia Bagirova and Tuvan Gumrukcu, “Turkey’s Erdogan, at Nagorno-Karabakh parade, says Armenia needs new leaders,” Reuters, World News, December 10, 2020, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/ article/armenia-azerbaijan-parade-idAFKBN28K1T1; “Erdogan: Turkey may open border if Armenia takes positive steps for peace,” TRTWORLD, December 10, 2020, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.trtworld.com/turkey/erdoganturkey-may-open-borders-if-armenia-takes-positive-steps-for-peace-42252; and “Message Sent by H.E. Mr. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, President of the Republic of Turkey, to Religious Ceremony Held in the Armenian Patriarchate of Istanbul on 24 April 2015,” Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accessed March 11, 2021, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/message-sent-by-h_e_-mr_-recep-tayyiperdogan_-president-of-the-republic-of-turkey_-to-the-religious-ceremony-heldin-the-arme.en.mfa. 8 See John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Elizabeth Rapaport (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), l5–52. 9 Princeton University was the long-time academic home of Armenian Genocide deniers Bernard Lewis, who was convicted in France in 1994 of denying the Armenian Genocide in a 1993 interview appearing in Le Monde (see Forum of Armenian Associations in France v. Bernard Lewis, Judgment rendered June 21, 1995, Paris Court of First Instance, First Chamber, First Section, RP L 860, RG 4/707/94, ASS/February 14, 1994, accessed March 11, 2021, https:// www.armenian-genocide.org/Affirmation.240/current_category.76/affirmation_ detail.html, and Heath Lowry. For Lowry, see Roger W. Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton, “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 9:1 (1995): 1-22 and William H. Honan, “Princeton Is Accused of Fronting for the Turkish Government,” The New York Times, May 22, 1996, accessed March 11, 2021, https:// www.nytimes.com/1996/05/22/nyregion/princeton-is-accused-of-fronting-for-theturkish-government.html. For Princeton’s protection of Lowry, see Amy Magaro Rubin, “Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 1995, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.chronicle.com/article/critics-accuse-turkish-government-of-

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16 17 18 19 20

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Henry C. Theriault manipulating-scholarship/, and the May 30, 1996, memorandum from then-Dean of the Faculty Amy Gutmann to the Princeton faculty. Terrence Des Pres, “On Governing Narratives: The Turkish-Armenian Case,” The Yale Review 75:4 (1986): 517–31. The following account is based on Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1–42. See Ward Churchill, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas 1492 to the Present (San Francisco: City Lights Publishers, 1998), 244–245. See Henry C. Theriault, “Rousseau, Plato, and Western Philosophy’s AntiGenocidal Strain,” in Metacide: In the Pursuit of Excellence, ed. James R. Watson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 193–210. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 133–159. For initial development of the concept of “consolidation,” see Henry Theriault, “The Final Stage of Genocide: Consolidation,” The Armenian Weekly, October 11, 2009, accessed March 11, 2021, https://armenianweekly.com/2009/10/11/ theriault-the-final-stage-of-genocide-consolidation/. and Theriault, “Denial of Ongoing Atrocities.” Henry C. Theriault, “Rethinking Dehumanization in Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide: Cultural and Ethical Legacies, ed. Richard Hovannisian (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2007), 27–40. Israel W. Charny, "A Contribution to the Psychology of Denial of Genocide," Journal of Armenian Studies 4:1-2 (1992), “Genocide & Human Rights: Lessons from the Armenian Experience”: 289–306. Theriault, “Rethinking Dehumanization in Genocide.” “Armenia,” Genocide Watch, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.genocidewatch. com/armenia. See, for example, Raja Abdulrahim, “Turkish-Backed Syrian Fighters Join ArmenianAzeri Conflict,” The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2020, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkish-backed-syrian-fighters-join-armenian-azeri-conflict-11602625885. See, for example, “Armenia/Azerbaijan: Decapitation and war crimes in gruesome videos must be urgently investigated,” Amnesty International, December 10, 2020, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/202 0/12/armenia-azerbaijan-decapitation-and-war-crimes-in-gruesome-videos-mustbe-urgently-investigated/ and the reports listed on the “Nagorno-Karabakh” page, Human Rights Watch, accessed March 11, 2021, https://www.hrw.org/tag/ nagorno-karabakh, respectively.

Part I

Commemoration and memory cultures in contemporary societies

2

Holodomor and Holocaust memory in competition and cooperation Kirsten Dyck

Ukraine today is a battlefield, as it was in the mid-twentieth century. The 2014 Euromaidan crisis and the ongoing conflict in Donbas have put poli­ tical and economic pressure on Ukrainian society both from Russia and from Ukraine’s Western allies, and Ukrainian nationalist groups are quick to point out—rightly—that Russia threatens Ukrainian cultural and poli­ tical independence, repeating a centuries-old pattern of colonial aggression. In this environment, public memory of the many genocides and atrocities that occurred in Ukraine during the twentieth century can sometimes help members of different political and ethnic groups to unify around a common cause of human rights. However, at other times, public memory of genocide, atrocity, and trauma can exacerbate tensions that simmer in this society’s diverse populace. This is particularly true for the memories of the Holodomor, the Ukrainian term referring to the Soviet-engineered mass famine of 1932–1933, and the Nazi Holocaust, which in Ukraine lasted from mid-1941 until late 1944. Holodomor memory, repressed and denied during the Soviet Era, has become increasingly mainstream since the fall of the Iron Curtain. Anger over the Holodomor as a national trauma undergirds new Ukrainian-language edu­ cation policies in public schools, military resistance to Russian territorial encroachment, memorials to Ukrainian nationalist heroes like Ivan Mazepa and Bohdan Khmelnytsky, and other initiatives for Ukrainian national au­ tonomy.1 Like members of most European and European-descended groups, Ukrainians have participated in neo-Nazi terrorism in small numbers. A group of young neo-Nazis, for example, murdered a Roma man in his bed near Lviv in 2018.2 The Azov Battalion and other combat units recycle Nazi visual symbols like the Wolfsangel—threatening images to many who re­ pudiate the Third Reich.3 In response, as this chapter demonstrates, Jewish and Israeli news outlets have sometimes published exaggerated reports of Ukrainian racism and anti-Semitic violence, portraying all Ukrainians as if they share the sentiments of the ultra-nationalist fringe. This practice can alienate Ukrainians who work in Jewish heritage preservation and Holocaust memory. In short, some commentators minimize the suffering of Ukrainians who aided Jews during the Holocaust, while others emphasize Ukrainian DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-2

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suffering and minimize ethnic Ukrainians’ complex role in Nazi violence. Yet some actors on both sides of the issue recognize that these two genocides were interrelated and that the trauma of the Holodomor necessarily influenced Ukrainian responses to the Holocaust a mere eight years later. Many ethnic Ukrainians now work to maintain Jewish cemeteries, synagogues, and other infrastructure by conducting heritage tours and publicly commemorating the Holocaust with monuments and events. Drawing upon both secondary research as well as my own experience as an American living and working in Ukraine, I analyze how contemporary Ukraine remembers the Holodomor and the Holocaust. This chapter begins with a brief history of the genocides and other traumas that occurred in Ukraine in the mid-twentieth century, then explores instances of con­ temporary genocide denial and minimization among both ethnic Ukrainian and ethnic Jewish communities. It also considers instances when Ukrainian and Jewish memory organizations and activists have gone out of their way to recognize each other’s historical traumas and to collaborate on com­ memoration and genocide prevention. Because the Russian government has exaggerated the threat of Ukrainian anti-Semitism in propaganda that at­ tempts to undermine the political relationships between Ukraine and its foreign allies, it is necessary to discuss how Russian meddling complicates the relationship between Holodomor and Holocaust memory today. Ultimately, I will suggest what the Ukrainian case can tell us about genocide commemoration and public memory in societies that have suffered multiple traumas.

The history of trauma in twentieth century Ukraine Ukraine’s current war with Russia certainly threatens the regional economy and political security. However, this instability pales in comparison with the traumas Ukrainians suffered in the mid-twentieth century. By official Soviet design, millions of Ukrainian civilians died of starvation in the 1932–1933 crisis now referred to as the Holodomor, or the “death by hunger.”4 Although some estimates of the death toll range as high as ten million,5 most reputable historians today, such as Timothy Snyder, favor a number be­ tween three and seven million.6 Soviet officials used deliberate food warfare to end Ukrainian peasants’ resistance to farm collectivization.7 They rea­ soned correctly that dying people could not organize nationalist uprisings. Not only did the Soviets export necessary food crops out of Ukraine for profit, they repeatedly raided private Ukrainian homes to strip hungry peasants of their remaining food. They placed armed guards in fields and at grain depots to chase away gleaners and scavengers. They sold food at ex­ orbitant prices in government shops. And they used a system of internal passports to bar peasants from leaving their home villages to search for food elsewhere.8 Reports of cannibalism were widespread.9 In many cases, the Soviet government simply replaced dead Ukrainians with loyal ethnic

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Russians from elsewhere in the USSR. Moreover, they exiled many of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities en masse to underdeveloped settlements barely better than the lethal Gulag camps in the Soviet far east.11 A few years after the Holodomor, in 1937 and 1938, the Soviet government shot to death at least 700,000 of its own citizens in the political purge dubbed “The Great Terror.” According to statistics from Ukraine’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, about 200,000 of those victims were Ukrainians.12 Then, in June 1941, came Hitler’s invasion. The violently racist Nazi occu­ pation government used Ukrainian civilians as slave labor.13 Angry about the decades of trauma they had suffered under the Soviets and believing propa­ ganda that depicted the Soviet government as a Jewish-Bolshevik plot, some ethnic Ukrainians lashed out at their Jewish neighbors in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi takeover. Some collaborated with the Germans in identifying and brutalizing Jews. This famously includes the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) under the leadership of the controversial Stepan Bandera, who tried and failed to ally his organizations with the Germans before simply fighting both the Soviet and the German armies for Ukrainian independence in the midst and aftermath of WWII.14 In their own right, Bandera’s forces massacred Jews, yet at the same time they protected many civilian populations in Western Ukraine from the ravages of front-line fighting and political repression. Some con­ temporary Ukrainian nationalist groups lionize Bandera for his organizations’ work during WWII, and even the Ukrainian government minimizes the memory of Bandera’s involvement with the Germans.15 Of course, many Ukrainians protected Jews from German persecution at the expense of their own safety during WWII as well—for example, Metropolitan Andrii Sheptytskyi of the Galician Greek Catholic Church worked to hide Jews and help them obtain false documents.16 Despite such efforts, the fact is that majority of Ukraine’s Jews perished in the violence between 1941 and 1944. Over and over, in cities and villages across Ukraine, German forces and death squads (Einsatzgruppen) collected Jews, Roma, and other purported enemies of the Reich into overcrowded ghettoes and shot them into mass graves. In the territory that is now Western Ukraine, German occupation forces also sometimes exploited Jews as slave labor and shipped them to Operation Reinhard death camps (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka). Horrific stories of torture and death litter the Yizkor Books, which memorialize Holocaust victims, from the region.17 Ethnic minorities bore the brunt of the Nazi “Final Solution” in Ukraine, but many ethnic Ukrainians also died of overwork, disease, and outright murder alongside their Jewish and Roma neighbors.18 Ethnic Ukrainians bore witness to Nazi crimes, as is clear from extensive lists of eyewitness testimonies collected by Holocaust memory organizations like Yahad-In Unum in recent years.19 After WWII and especially following Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet state’s persecutions and violence slowed in Ukraine, at least for ethnic Ukrainians, and life in Ukraine stabilized.20 Many WWII memorials

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appeared throughout Ukraine in the years between the end of the war and the fall of the Soviet Union. But public discussion of the Holodomor re­ mained sporadic until the late 1980s.21 The Soviet government pressured the international community not to recognize the Holodomor. It buried the documentation of its responsibility for the man-made famine, and it stifled and challenged historians who attempted to publish honest research about it.22 The fall of the Iron Curtain in the late 1980s and early 1990s brought greater international recognition and understanding of Ukraine’s twentieth century suffering. Since 1990, however, Ukraine has struggled economically more than its western neighbors. Corruption and lack of funds have left many Ukrainian cities and towns unable to pave their roads or repair their schools, much less pay for maintenance on mass graves or crumbling sy­ nagogues. Some towns and private citizens have paid to erect Holocaust and Holodomor memorials. In other places, sites of historical importance sit unmarked and dilapidated. There is a large Jewish cultural center and Holocaust museum in Dnipro, a brand-new Holodomor Memorial Museum in Kyiv, and a commemorative museum complex being planned near the site of the Babi Yar massacre on the outskirts of Kyiv. But commemoration is sparse at the site of the Nazis’ Janowska concentration camp in L’viv. The site of L’viv’s former Golden Rose Synagogue has a thoughtful con­ temporary memorial, but next door is a restaurant where customers who want an especially “Jewish” dining experience can choose to haggle over the amount of the bill with waitstaff who are trained to act miserly.

Conflicts over genocide memory in contemporary Ukraine For Western visitors to Ukraine, the “Jewish” restaurant haggling and the sight of spray-painted swastikas and other Nazi graffiti on the sides of buildings often seem shockingly anti-Semitic. But this reaction from out­ siders puzzles many Ukrainians, who have experienced international Holodomor denial for nearly nine decades and often view indifference to the Holodomor as no different from Holocaust denial. Several of my Ukrainian colleagues have explained to me that Holodomor denial makes them feel obliged to defend the memory of their families’ suffering at the expense of other genocide victims. The historian Vitalii Ogiienko from the governmentfunded Ukrainian Institute of National Memory wrote to me, for example, that “[The] Holodomor is simply much more important to Ukrainians than [the] Holocaust….[The] Holocaust is an artificial memory for Ukrainians. The motto that [the] Holocaust is our common memory sounds well but people do not perceive it so.” Ogiienko’s statement might at first seem callous, but consider the recent string of articles that have appeared in The Jerusalem Post and other prominent Israeli newspapers attacking the idea that the Holodomor deserves the same kind of commemoration as the Holocaust. For example, in January 2019, Efraim Zuroff, the head of the Jerusalem branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, stated publicly that:

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The largest number of [Holodomor] victims were Ukrainians, but it was not genocide … One of the biggest problems we are facing now is something called the “double genocide theory,” something prevalent throughout eastern Europe, where governments are trying to say that Communist crimes amounted to genocide … They were not. If they were, then that means that Jews committed genocide. There were Jews— not out of any loyalty to the Jewish people, and usually Jews who left the Jewish community—who worked in the KGB, in the Communist security apparatus, and did horrible things.23 Zuroff’s view, in other words, is that the presence of Jews amongst the ranks of the perpetrators should automatically bar any mass atrocity from being classified as a genocide, yet no legal definition of genocide supports Zuroff’s interpretation. In legal as well as moral terms, no religious or ethnic heritage gives an individual or a group carte blanche to abuse any other, although realpolitik sometimes creates a more complex situation in practice than in theory. Zuroff’s words provide a particularly stark example of genocide denial given his prominent position as a genocide scholar with one of the world’s leading Holocaust research organizations. The Jerusalem Post has published other articles questioning the legitimacy of the Holodomor as well. In February 2018, when the Israeli Knesset was debating a bill to recognize the Holodomor as a genocide and to declare a Holodomor Remembrance Day in Israel, the newspaper published a piece entitled “Bill to Remember ‘Ukrainian Genocide’ Under Stalin Treads Tricky Ground.”24 Author Lahav Harkov purports to discuss both the arguments for and against recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide, but the bulk of the article’s reporting focuses on arguments against recognition. “While there is no doubt that millions of Ukrainians were among the citizens of the Soviet Union who died of starvation in the 1930s, nearly every other detail of the Holodomor, which means ‘death by starvation,’ is disputed.” Harkov quotes several anti-recognition scholars, such as Irena Cantorovich from Tel Aviv University’s Moshe Kantor Database for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, who argues, “Ukrainians think [the Holodomor is] a kind of genocide” but that “I don’t think we need to compare it to our Holocaust…. It’s not the same, and Ukrainians weren’t specifically targeted the way Jews were murdered just because they’re Jews. It can’t be compared at all.” Cantorovich correctly states that Jews and other non-ethnicUkrainians died of starvation alongside ethnic Ukrainians in the Holodomor, but she fails to mention that ethnic Ukrainians and other non-Jews died alongside Jews in the Holocaust, or that diligent and reputable scholars have established a long paper trail demonstrating the Soviet government’s stated desire to destroy the relational and physical integrity of the Ukrainian people.25 Harkov’s article, in short, cherry-picks evidence and arguments against recognizing the Holodomor as a genocide, while ignoring the bulk of international scholarly research in favor of a genocide classification.

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Worse than Harkov’s article, though, is a sensationalistic September 2018 piece from Haaretz called “Grave Robbers, Nazi Collaborators and Official Apathy: How Ukraine Is Erasing the Holocaust.”26 Author Shmuel Herzfeld, rabbi of the National Synagogue in Washington, DC, emblazons his article with a photograph (see Figure 2.1) from an August 2018 Jewish cemetery clean-up event I myself attended in Rohatyn, Ivano-Frankivs’ka Oblast, where I watched young Ukrainian activists take time off from their jobs, drive across the country at their own expense, and work through injuries to assist with Jewish cemetery maintenance simply out of personal interest. The Rohatyn cemetery photograph Herzfeld borrows was originally taken by my colleague Marla Raucher Osborn, co-founder and head of the Rohatyn Jewish Heritage organization. Osborn specifically designs her organization’s events to bring together ethnic Ukrainians and Jewish community members. She was horrified to see Herzfeld use her photo as an example of Ukrainian anti-Semitism. In fact, that photo depicts tombstones which had been smashed for use as paving stones and building materials by the Nazis in the 1940s and then subsequently returned to the cemetery in a collaborative effort by Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and local Ukrainians who wanted to pay respect to their dead neighbors. Herzfeld, however, portrays all Ukrainians here as unconcerned with Jewish heritage and unwilling to reckon with their country’s violent past: “At Janowska, the Auschwitz of Ukraine, I saw skulls, hypodermic needles and tons of trash. Looters desecrate mass graves of Jews, searching for gold; the site’s histories are ‘revised’, overwritten by Christian and nationalist symbolism.”

Figure 2.1 Rohatyn’s 350-year-old Jewish cemetery, some of the more than 600 headstone fragments recovered from the city and returned to the ceme­ tery by Rohatyn Jewish Heritage since 2010. (Photo credit: Marla Raucher Osborn, Rohatyn Jewish Heritage, 2018.)

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At best, Herzfeld’s rhetoric is an insult to the Ukrainians who volunteer at sites like the Rohatyn cemetery. It does nothing to convince Herzfeld’s readership that Israel or the United States should expend effort helping Ukraine further commemorate the Holodomor. It glosses over decades of thankless work by ethnic Ukrainians who have had nothing to gain from maintaining Jewish infrastructure but choose to do so anyway. It does not discuss how the current war affects many Ukrainian nationalist groups’ unwillingness to acknowledge their forebears’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII. It does not reckon with the grinding poverty that drives some Ukrainians to search mass graves for valuables—the grave-robbing details in Herzfeld’s article are a real phenomenon. It does not acknowledge how Soviet Holodomor denial in Ukraine shaped contemporary Ukraine’s dis­ course around genocide in general. With articles like this one appearing in widely read, reputable news outlets as Haaretz, and with Russian troops entrenched on the border between Ukraine and Russia, it is not difficult to understand why Ukrainian historians and activists might choose to avoid discussing the Holocaust and focus instead on gaining more international recognition for Ukrainian suffering during the Holodomor.

The conflict in context Shmuel Herzfeld is correct in his assertion that anti-Semitism exists in Ukraine. As Vitalii Ogiienko himself stated in an October 2018 email to me: Ukrainians en masse are very antisemitic but. … [i]t hasn’t to do [as much] with hatred [as] with some prejudice of a kind when two neighbors have been living together for a long time [and] don’t like one another but … do business together. … I know that all problems start from these kind[s] of prejudice but [that] is not [happening] in this case. This, to me, is the paradox of contemporary Ukraine. Low-level Jewish ste­ reotyping and neo-Nazi graffiti are common. Every few weeks, I have a dis­ cussion with someone who tries to use the admittedly disproportionate number of Jewish politicians in high Ukrainian government office as evidence to sup­ port Jewish world conspiracy theories. Several of Ukraine’s current military and paramilitary units use Nazi and neo-Nazi symbols as insignia—the Azov Battalion, for example, uses the neo-Nazi Wolfsangel, and kolovrat and Totenkopf paramilitary insignia badges routinely appear for sale from souvenir vendors near the national WWII and Holodomor Memorial Museums in Kyiv. The far-right paramilitary group Pravyy Sektor, or Right-Wing Sector, has adopted Stepan Bandera’s red-and-black flag.27 But while these symbols are common sights in Western Ukraine, the display of the Pravyy Sektor/Bandera flag at the top of the Monument of Glory in my east-central city of Poltava (see Figure 2.2) generates grumbling

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Figure 2.2 Tsarist eagle with nationalist and national flags, Poltava, Ukraine. (Photo credit: Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Global Photo Archive / Flickr, May 8, 2019, accessed May 14, 2019, https://sympathis.flickr.com/photos/ adam_jones/42122503260/in/album-72157669805945017/.)

from my friends and colleagues. “Bandera was a Nazi, you know,” one of my students said to me last year. While my student’s assessment is oversimplistic—Bandera was also imprisoned by the Nazis—it is not entirely incorrect either. Supporters of Pravyy Sektor, the Azov Battalion, and other far-right paramilitary organizations often claim their neo-Nazi symbols have nothing to do with anti-Semitism anymore. This is almost believable, be­ cause in ultra-nationalist areas of Western Ukraine, neo-Nazi and Banderist symbols do evoke anti-Russian sentiment in today’s super-charged political climate. Of course, the argument falters when groups like the Azov Battalion appear in public saying they do not much care that their symbols evoke painful, violent repression for Holocaust survivors and their descendants.28

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Unlike in America, though, as Vitalii Ogiienko hinted, belief in Jewish conspiracy theory and use of Nazi symbolism do not necessarily translate into violent animus (at least not right now). Reports of anti-Semitic violence are lower in post-Maidan Revolution Ukraine than in the US. As even the editors of Haaretz acknowledge, Ukrainian voters elected a part-Jewish comedian to be the next President of Ukraine in April 2019, defeating in­ cumbent President Petro Poroshenko with 73% of the popular vote.29 It may be less taboo to voice anti-Semitic opinions and to express open support for neo-Nazi ideologies in contemporary Ukraine than in North America or Western Europe, but this does not necessarily mean violent animus or even low-level prejudice are more widespread. Further research would be neces­ sary to determine whether the stigma against expressing overt racism actu­ ally reduces racist sentiment, or whether it simply keeps racist discourse out of mainstream discussions. The resurgence of right-wing populist move­ ments in North America and Western Europe over the past five years sug­ gests that levels of racist belief and even violently racist activism may not be as different in Ukraine and in the West as many foreign commentators would like to believe. Further, Russian meddling may present an exaggerated picture of Ukrainian anti-Semitism to the international community. The Russian government has worked to destabilize the Ukrainian political system over the past decade. This includes paying so-called titushky, or hired thugs, to paint anti-Semitic graffiti and instigate street violence at political rallies so the Russians can point to this purported Ukrainian anti-Semitism in news coverage aimed at international audiences.30 Government-sponsored Russian news outlets in recent years have reported stories of anti-Jewish incidents in Ukraine that observers argue were actually perpetrated by paid agents of the Russian government.31 Seemingly, the Kremlin’s goal is to diminish support for Ukrainian sovereignty among Ukraine’s allies, such as the U.S. and Israeli governments. Even Jewish community leaders like Ukraine’s Chief Rabbi Yaakov Dov Bleich have spoken out against this information warfare from Russia.32 Ordinary Ukrainians have grown up in a media climate where, as one of my university students told me, “The only news and history you can trust is from your family. Everyone else has reasons to lie.” It is often difficult in this environment to tell whether an antiSemitic incident represents the real sentiment of a local community member or yet another Russian attack on Ukrainian national sovereignty. Some Ukrainians acknowledge that both Russian propaganda and actual antiSemitic stereotyping are serious problems in contemporary Ukraine, while other Ukrainians choose to dismiss all reports of Ukrainian anti-Semitism as Russian spin, including any attempts to reckon with the history of Ukrainian pogroms and Nazi collaboration during WWII. But to focus only on willful ignorance and not on the steps many Ukrainians have made in commemorating both genocides misrepresents the situation.

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Cooperation among survivor groups in Ukraine What I have seen since 2017 while living in Ukraine has given me hope. Ukraine’s 70,000-strong Jewish community is enmeshed in Ukrainian so­ ciety and gets involved in projects that commemorate ethnic Ukrainian history as well as Jewish history. Ethnic Ukrainians come to Holocaust conferences and Jewish cemetery clean-up events in many Ukrainian towns and villages, such as the one I attended in Rohatyn. Young Ukrainian vo­ lunteers draw on a long tradition of activists who have worked to preserve some of Ukraine’s Jewish history and infrastructure, taking over the re­ sponsibility of caring for Ukraine’s Jewish heritage sites from those who have performed maintenance since 1945. Groups like Rohatyn Jewish Heritage and the L’viv Volunteer Center fundraise and mobilize large groups of volunteers. Ethnic Ukrainian scholars such as Yehor Vradiy at the Tkuma Institute in Dnipro work on Jewish heritage research, and the efforts of Holodomor scholars in the genocide studies community have won in­ creasing international recognition for the Holodomor and the mass de­ portations of Ukraine’s ethnic minorities as real genocides. There are many reasons for mistrust from both ethnic Ukrainians and the international Jewish community regarding genocide memory, but the seeds of real cooperation are there too if the international community can foster them. One way to do this is to discourage the angry accusations of in­ sensitivity and genocide denial we often see in the news, such as the biased Jerusalem Post and Haaretz articles I highlighted above. While it is under­ standable that trauma survivors and their descendants may become fru­ strated with what they view as a lack of progress either in Holocaust memorial infrastructure in Ukraine or toward Israeli national recognition of the Holodomor as genocide, angry recriminations between survivor groups and descendants will almost always be counterproductive in trauma-riddled societies. In places like Ukraine, accusations of genocide denial can descend into spirals of finger-pointing, in which several groups can legitimately ac­ cuse each other of indifference. Hostile political posturing is the opposite of the best practices developed by clinical psychologists for interacting with trauma victims—practices such as creating safe environments for survivors to discuss past traumas, demonstrating consistently transparent and trust­ worthy behavior, strengthening survivors’ social support networks, and re­ cognizing denial and anger as common dissociative coping mechanisms that allow survivors to distance themselves from painful memories.33 In fact, cycles of back-and-forth hostility among opposing ethnic groups often seem to stem from real or perceived wounds on both sides, and if left unchecked, can morph into centuries-long histories of warfare, not to mention explosive mass violence, such as the ethnic tensions in the African Great Lakes Region and the complex hatreds in the Balkan Peninsula. Traumatized people need to see how they can benefit from sympathizing with those they believe have hurt them in the past. They need reassurance

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that they will not experience more abuse and accusations if they acknowl­ edge others’ pain. They need to hear they will not be held responsible for the crimes of their forefathers. If people are forced to choose between feeling guilty for things that happened before they were born and adopting ultranationalist ideologies in search of self-respect, many people will choose re­ fusal, denial, ultra-nationalism, retrenchment, and hostility. A third option is necessary. People need a way to maintain dignity while they reckon with agonizing historical truths. This is not to say neo-Nazism and genocide denial should be excused. It never should. However, we might sometimes need to give traumatized groups extra patience and compassion to make them feel safe enough to acknowledge violence committed by their friends, their relatives, their neighbors—their protectors. After experiencing oppression and denial themselves, people may simply no longer believe they have anything to gain through reconciliation or truth. The key is to build slow but meaningful connections among individuals from different ethnic groups, and to encourage small commemorative pro­ jects that can grow into large-scale efforts over time. Genocide memory is not a zero-sum game. Compassion should not come with strings attached. We can care for ethnic Jews and Ukrainians and Roma and Slovakians and Romanians and Hutsuls and Poles and Russians all in the same country. We can memorialize both the Holocaust and the Holodomor. If outsiders memorialize all Ukraine’s twentieth century traumas as respectfully as possible, this may lessen denial in Ukraine among the different groups who suffered. Proper memorialization may show survivors and their descendants that the commemoration of their own pain does not depend on the re­ pression of others’. This is also true for other war-torn and conflict riddled areas of the globe where several opposing groups have all sustained deep collective wounds, like Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia, and Palestine. The international community can acknowledge in public and legally-binding ways that everyone’s suffering matters. The international community can engage in respectful discourse with members of multiple ethnic, political, and religious groups. We can do it—and so, I think, can Ukraine.

Notes 1 Natalya Shevchenko, “The History of Bilingualism in Ukraine and Its Role in Today’s Political Crisis,” Cahiers Sens Public 1, no. 17-18 (2015), https:// www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CSP_017_0203--the-history-of-bilingualism-in-uk­ raine.htm; “Ukraine Marks Holodomor Anniversary, U.S. Blasts Russia’s ‘Ongoing Aggression,’” Radio Free Europe, November 24, 2018, accessed September 29, 2019, https://www.rferl.org/a/state-department-issues-statementmarking-holodomor-anniversary/29618259.html; Alexander J. Motyl, “Deleting the Holodomor: Ukraine Unmakes Itself,” World Affairs Journal (September/ October 2010), 4, http://history.org.ua/LiberUA/DelHolodUkr_2010/ DelHolodUkr_2010.pdf. 2 Alex Sturrock and Hannah Summers, “‘They Wanted to Kill Us’: Masked NeoFascists Strike Fear into Ukraine's Roma,” Radio Free Europe, August 27, 2018,

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4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

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Kirsten Dyck accessed September 29, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2 018/aug/27/they-wanted-to-kill-us-masked-neo-fascists-strike-fear-into-uk­ raines-roma. Illia Ponomarenko, “After More than 3 Years in Bases, Azov Regiment Returns to Front,” Kyiv Post, February 1, 2019, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/after-more-than-three-years-in-bases-azovregiment-returns-to-front.html. Anne Applebaum, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine (New York: Doubleday, 2017), loc. 4182-4183, Kindle. Valeriy Kuchinsky, “Joint statement by the delegations of Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Egypt, Georgia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Nauru, Pakistan, Qatar, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America on the seventieth anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor),” United Nations General Assembly, November 7, 2003, accessed September 29, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20170313040724/http:// repository.un.org/bitstream/handle/11176/246001/A_C.3_58_9-EN.pdf. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), 53. Applebaum, Red Famine, loc. 6103. “The History of the Holodomor,” Holodomor Victims Memorial, accessed September 29, 2019, http://memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/history/. Applebaum, Red Famine, loc. 5553. Ibid., loc. 6209-6254. J. Otto Pohl, “Stalin’s Genocide Against the ‘Repressed Peoples,’” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000). “80th Anniversary of the Great Terror,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, November 15, 2017, accessed September 29, 2019, https://mfa.gov.ua/en/presscenter/news/61104-80-ti-rokovini-velikogo-teroru. Applebaum, Red Famine, loc. 6904. Alexander J. Motyl, “Ukraine, Europe, and Bandera,” Cicero Foundation Great Debate Paper 10, no. 05 (March 2010), accessed September 29, 2019, http:// www.cicerofoundation.org/lectures/Alexander_J_Motyl_UKRAINE_ EUROPE_AND_BANDERA.pdf, 6. Motyl, “Ukraine, Europe, and Bandera,” 9; Delphine Bechtel, “The 1941 Pogroms as Represented in Western Ukrainian Historiography and Memorial Culture,” in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), 6, https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20130500holocaust-in-ukraine.pdf; Anatoly Podolsky, “Collaboration in Ukraine During the Holocaust: Aspects of Historiography and Research,” in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), 188, https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20130500-holocaust-in-ukraine.pdf; Edward Doks, “Ukraine’s New Heroes: Anti-Semites and Murderers of Jews,” YNet News, January 25, 2018, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5076191,00.html. Crispin Brooks, “Visual History Archive Interviews on the Holocaust in Ukraine,” in The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2013), 122-123, https://www.ushmm.org/m/pdfs/20130500holocaust-in-ukraine.pdf.

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17 See, for example, Samuel Druck, Swastika over Jaworow: The Tragic Chronicle of the Jaworow Jewish Community, trans. Samuel Kreiter (New York: First Jaworower Independent Association, 1950), 19 and 22, https:// www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Yavoriv1/Yavoriv1.html#TOC. 18 Ulrich Herbert, “The Army of Millions of the Modern Slave State: Deported, Used, Forgotten: Who Were the Forced Workers of the Third Reich, and What Fate Awaited Them?” in Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), https://web.archive.org/web/20110629004525/http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/ slave_labour13.htm. 19 Patrick Desbois, The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), Kindle. 20 Applebaum, Red Famine, loc. 7136. 21 Ibid., loc. 7136 and 7283. 22 Ibid., loc. 7104. 23 Herb Keinon, “Zuroff: Israel Should Not Recognize Holodomor as Genocide,” The Jerusalem Post, January 22, 2019, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Zuroff-Israel-should-not-recognize-Holodomor-as-gen­ ocide-578308; 24 Lahav Harkov, “Bill to Remember ‘Ukrainian Genocide’ Under Stalin Treads Tricky Ground,” The Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2018, accessed September 29, 2019, https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Bill-to-remember-Ukrainian-Genocideunder-Stalin-treads-tricky-ground-540847. 25 For example, Applebaum, Red Famine; Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Yaroslav Bilinsky, “Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 a Genocide?,” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 2 (1999), 147-56. 26 Shmuel Herzfeld, “Grave Robbers, Nazi Collaborators and Official Apathy: How Ukraine is Erasing the Holocaust, Haaretz, September 16, 2018, accessed September 29, 2019, https://wwwsympathis.haaretz.com/world-news/.premiumgrave-robbers-nazi-collaborators-and-official-apathy-how-ukraine-is-erasingthe-holocaust-1.6472625. 27 Luke Harding, “Kiev’s Protesters: Ukraine Uprising Was No Neo-Nazi PowerGrab,” The Guardian, March 13, 2014, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/13/ukraine-uprising-fascist-coup-grass­ roots-movement. 28 See comments from Azov Battalion members about neo-Nazi tattoos, for ex­ ample, in “Ukraine’s Far-Right Children’s Camp: ‘I Want to Bring Up a Warrior’,” The Guardian, September 5, 2017, accessed September 29, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBXmbkwiSw. 29 Maxim Edwards, “Ukraine Just Elected Its First Jewish President. Here’s Why It’s Not an Issue,” Haaretz, April 21, 2019, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-ukraine-may-elect-a-jewish-pre­ sident-here-s-why-it-s-not-an-issue-1.7142407. 30 Ukrainian Jewish Encounter, “Antisemitism in Ukraine: Russian Antisemitism and On-the-Ground Reality,” video recording of YES Annual Meeting, Kyiv, Ukraine, September 22, 2018, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGDY1HQe0Ps. 31 “Kremlin Exploiting Ukrainian Jews: Russian Media Accused of Faking AntiSemitism Stories,” Ukraine News One, May 13, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=M0Bh_h6sWCc. For an example of Russian news coverage of

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Ukrainian anti-Semitism, see “Ukraine Glorifies Jewish Massacres,” RT, July 3, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4iCSGnY-s. 32 “Ukraine Chief Rabbi Accuses Russia of Anti-Semitic ‘Provocations’,” The Times of Israel, March 4, 2014, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-chief-rabbi-accuses-russia-of-anti-semitic-provo­ cations/. 33 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, “SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach” (Rockville, MD: Trauma and Justice Strategic Initiative, July 2014), 9-11, accessed September 29, 2019, https:// www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/SAMHSA_Concept_of_Trauma_and_ Guidance.pdf; Heather Phillips, Eleanor Lyon, Mary Fabri, and Carole Warshaw, “Promising Practices and Model Programs: Trauma-Informed Approaches to Working with Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Violence and Other Trauma” (National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma & Mental Health, September 2015), 3-5, http://www.nationalcenterdvtraumamh.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/01/NCDVTMH_PromisingPracticesReport_2015.pdf.

Bibliography Publications Applebaum, Anne. Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine. New York: Doubleday, 2017. Kindle. Bechtel, Delphine. “The 1941 Pogroms as Represented in Western Ukrainian Historiography and Memorial Culture.” In The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 1–16. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 2013. Bilinsky, Yaroslav. “Was the Ukrainian Famine of 1932-1933 a Genocide?” Journal of Genocide Research 1, no. 2 (1999): 147–156. Brooks, Crispin. “Visual History Archive Interviews on the Holocaust in Ukraine.” The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 17–62. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 2013. Conquest, Robert. Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Desbois, Patrick. The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest’s Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Kindle. Druck, Samuel. Swastika over Jaworow: The Tragic Chronicle of the Jaworow Jewish Community. Translated by Samuel Kreiter. New York: First Jaworower Independent Association, 1950. Herbert, Ulrich. Hitler’s Foreign Workers: Enforced Foreign Labor in Germany Under the Third Reich. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Motyl, Alexander J. “Deleting the Holodomor: Ukraine unmakes itself.” World Affairs 173, no. 3 (2010; Gale Academic OneFile). Motyl, Alexander J. “Ukraine, Europe, and Bandera.” Cicero Foundation Great Debate Paper 10, no. 5 (March 2010): 1–14. Phillips, Heather, Eleanor Lyon, Mary Fabri, and Carole Warshaw. “Promising Practices and Model Programs: Trauma-Informed Approaches to Working with

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Survivors of Domestic and Sexual Violence and Other Trauma.” National Center on Domestic Violence, Trauma & Mental Health, September 2015. http:// www.nationalcenterdvtraumamh.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/NCDVTMH_ PromisingPracticesReport_2015.pdf. Podolsky, Anatoly. “Collaboration in Ukraine During the Holocaust: Aspects of Historiography and Research.” In The Holocaust in Ukraine: New Sources and Perspectives, 187–198. Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, April 2013. Pohl, J. Otto. “Stalin’s Genocide Against the ‘Repressed Peoples.’” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 267–293. Snyder, Timothy. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin. New York: Basic Books, 2010.

Online sources Doks, Edward. “Ukraine’s New Heroes: Anti-Semites and Murderers of Jews.” YNet News, January 25, 2018. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5076191,00.html. Edwards, Maxim. “Ukraine Just Elected Its First Jewish President. Here’s Why It’s Not an Issue.” Haaretz, April 21, 2019. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.haaretz.com/world-news/europe/.premium-ukraine-may-elect-a-jewish-presi­ dent-here-s-why-it-s-not-an-issue-1.7142407. The Guardian. “Ukraine’s Far-Right Children’s Camp: ‘I Want to Bring Up a Warrior’.” September 5, 2017. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiBXmbkwiSw. Harding, Luke. “Kiev’s Protesters: Ukraine Uprising Was No Neo-Nazi PowerGrab.” The Guardian, March 13, 2014. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/13/ukraine-uprising-fascist-coup-grass­ roots-movement. Harkov, Lahav. “Bill to Remember ‘Ukrainian Genocide’ Under Stalin Treads Tricky Ground.” The Jerusalem Post, February 6, 2018. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Bill-to-remember-Ukrainian-Genocideunder-Stalin-treads-tricky-ground-540847. Herzfeld, Shmuel. “Grave Robbers, Nazi Collaborators and Official Apathy: How Ukraine is Erasing the Holocaust.” Haaretz, September 16, 2018. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.haaretz.com/world-news/.premium-grave-robbers-nazicollaborators-and-official-apathy-how-ukraine-is-erasing-the-holocaust-1.6472625. Holodomor Victims Memorial. “The History of the Holodomor.” Accessed September 29, 2019. http://memorialholodomor.org.ua/eng/holodomor/history/. JTA. “Ukraine Chief Rabbi Accuses Russia of Anti-Semitic ‘Provocations’.” The Times of Israel, March 4, 2014. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.timesofisrael.com/ukraine-chief-rabbi-accuses-russia-of-anti-semitic-provo­ cations/. Kuchinsky, Valeriy. “Joint statement by the delegations of Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Benin, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Egypt, Georgia, Guatemala, Jamaica, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Nauru, Pakistan, Qatar, the Republic of Moldova, the Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates and the

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United States of America on the seventieth anniversary of the Great Famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine (Holodomor).” United Nations General Assembly, November 7, 2003. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://web.archive.org/web/201 70313040724/http://repository.un.org/bitstream/handle/11176/246001/A_C.3_58_ 9-EN.pdf. Keinon, Herb. “Zuroff: Israel Should Not Recognize Holodomor as Genocide.” The Jerusalem Post, January 22, 2019. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Zuroff-Israel-should-not-recognize-Holodomor-asgenocide-578308. Ponomarenko, Illia. “After More than 3 Years in Bases, Azov Regiment Returns to Front.” Kyiv Post, February 1, 2019. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.kyivpost.com/ukraine-politics/after-more-than-three-years-in-bases-azov-re­ giment-returns-to-front.html. Radio Free Europe. “Ukraine Marks Holodomor Anniversary, U.S. Blasts Russia’s ‘Ongoing Aggression.’” November 24, 2018. Accessed September 29, 2019. https:// www.rferl.org/a/state-department-issues-statement-marking-holodomor-anniver­ sary/29618259.html. RT. “Ukraine Glorifies Jewish Massacres.” July 3, 2009. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N4iCSGnY-s. Shevchenko, Natalya. “The History of Bilingualism in Ukraine and Its Role in Today’s Political Crisis.” Cahiers Sens Public 1, no. 17–18 (2015). Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.cairn-int.info/article-E_CSP_017_0203--thehistory-of-bilingualism-in-ukraine.htm. Sturrock, Alex, and Hannah Summers. “‘They Wanted to Kill Us’: Masked NeoFascists Strike Fear into Ukraine’s Roma.” Radio Free Europe, August 27, 2018. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2 018/aug/27/they-wanted-to-kill-us-masked-neo-fascists-strike-fear-into-uk­ raines-roma. Ukraine News One. “Kremlin Exploiting Ukrainian Jews: Russian Media Accused of Faking Anti-Semitism Stories.” Ukraine News One, May 13, 2014. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0Bh_h6sWCc. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. “SAMHSA’s Concept of Trauma and Guidance for a Trauma-Informed Approach.” Rockville, MD: Trauma and Justice Strategic Initiative, July 2014. Accessed September 29, 2019. Accessed September29, 2019. https://www.nasmhpd.org/sites/default/files/SAMHSA_Concept_of_Trauma_ and_Guidance.pdf. Ukrainian Jewish Encounter. “Antisemitism in Ukraine: Russian Antisemitism and On-the-Ground Reality.” YES Annual Meeting, Kyiv, Ukraine, September 22, 2018. Accessed September 29, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGDY1 HQe0Ps.

3

For an anthropological approach to denial: Social bonds, pathophobia, and the Duvalier regime in Haiti Jean-Philippe Belleau

This chapter explores three anthropological dimensions of the denial of crimes committed during the François Duvalier regime in Haiti (1957 and 1971): the manner in which social obligations created by kinship and social bonds induce conformism, self-censorship, and eventually denial; the dis­ association from the victim’s suffering, a social phenomenon I call patho­ phobia; and the animistic dimension of denial, which considers that the victim is wrong in their very essence and thus deserving of their fate.1 The regime of François Duvalier is generally considered to be the most brutal in Haitian history, responsible for massive human-rights violations and the widespread use of torture, buttressed by an extreme cult of personality.2 The killing of up to 30,000 people in fourteen years in a country of about four million (its population in 1960) makes it one of the most murderous regimes in the twentieth century outside fascist and “totalitarian” regimes, such as those under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot. Fort-Dimanche, the regime’s main political prison, saw the execution or slow death in horrendous conditions of thousands of individuals, while a militia known as Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (aka Tontons Macoutes) enforced this regime of terror and acquired a reputation for wanton violence. By 1971, when Duvalier’s son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier succeeded him, the regime’s terror had somewhat subsided but executions, forced imprisonment, and nepotism continued. The brutal acts committed by the regime should suffice to keep this regime ingrained in public consciousness. Yet, reality is more complicated. After its overthrow in 1986, the popular consensus regarding the brutal nature of the regime waned and nostalgia for the Duvalier regime set in, fed by the re­ lativization and sometimes denial of its crimes.3 The paucity of research on this period, possibly correlated to the scarcity of primary sources, may also contribute to this climate of nostalgia and selective forgetting. Most im­ portantly, denial tends to be based only partially on politically motivated subjectivity or ideological sympathy with the defunct regime—that is, from ex-Duvalierists or contemporary supporters of Duvalier’s ideologies. Rather, denial in Haiti tends to be induced by a set of social ethics. The ethnographic data used in this chapter were collected during the re­ search for a book project on violence during the Duvalier regime—primary DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-3

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sources from private collections and extensive interviews with perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. By “bystander” I refer to individuals who, related neither to victims nor to former perpetrators, are confronted with narratives of victimization and with a choice: to recognize the wrongs or to deny them. The category of bystander in a situation of post-violence can also be an ideal-type. I am interested here primarily in the denial of bystanders. Their discourse of denial does not raise universal questions of courage or personal identity, but anthropological question that evokes what Bourdieu calls “misrecognition,” a type of false consciousness related to something other than class. My reflections are also informed by over four years of residence and observation in Haiti between 1994 and 2005 and numerous trips there since then. The first part of this chapter provides examples of denial. The second focuses on the relation between kinship morality and forms of social pressure that lead to denial and self-censorship. The third explores the practice of dissociating from suffering, for which I coin the term “patho­ phobia,” while the fourth examines “animistic denial,” which considers the victim as ontologically wrong.

“A brilliant man … a loving man … a man of integrity” There are many individuals who have called out the Duvalier regime for its violence and cruelty. For instance, many novelists have focused on the brutality of this regime; yet, these novels’ plots also explicitly articulate how contentious memory is in Haiti.4 In the immediate post-1986 era, the media—at that time, essentially Port-au-Prince’s radio channels—constantly brought Duvalier’s crimes to the forefront, inviting former prisoners and relatives of victims to talk about their experiences. However, the post-1986 governments and state institutions, notably the judiciary and the educa­ tional system, have failed to engage in what anthropologist Veena Das calls the judicial and bureaucratic appropriation of suffering.5 There has been no justice for the victims of the Duvalier regime.6 No member of the regime was ever imprisoned or condemned. The Komité Pa Bliyé (Never Forget Committee), the first organization of victims and relatives of victims to be established after the fall of the regime, was never able to engage the judiciary or civil society in a way that echoes its counterparts in Latin America. After it morphed into the NGO Memory’s Duty (Devoir de Mémoire, henceforth DDM),7 also dedicated solely to uncovering the massive human rights crimes committed during the Duvalier regime, no prosecutor has been willing to take their cases.8 This situation stands in stark contrast to the examples of Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, and El Salvador, where state and civil society organizations eventually, even if reluctantly and often ambiguously, created justice, truth, and/or reconciliation commissions to investigate crimes committed during Cold War-era military regimes. Legal organizations sometimes joined these movements; most importantly, in these countries the narratives that dominate today tend to be those of the

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 47 victims, at least to some degree. Further, in Haiti, the current and former presidents have refused to receive DDM and have not answered their in­ quiries. No Haitian president has ever advanced an agenda for the re­ cognition of victims of Duvalierism nor demonstrated a genuine political interest in addressing the atrocities committed by the regime.9 In addition, the Haitian Ministry of Education, which determines the curriculum for public and private schools in Haiti, evades the study of the regime in schools. History textbooks carefully stop the study of the coun­ try’s history at 1957, the year François Duvalier was elected. This evasion contributes to the public’s ignorance of the crimes and stands in contrast with, for instance, post-genocide Cambodia, where the history of the gen­ ocide in Cambodia is transmitted through formal education, museums, and private homes, albeit it within state-mandated constraints.10 The lack of social stigma or public shame for perpetrators and regime officials stands in stark contrast to the treatment of similar histories in many Latin American countries. Some of the last actors of the Haitian regime’s repression, now in their 80s, today enjoy a second public life as writers who are invited to speak on radios channels and to present their books in book fairs.11 Rosalie Bousquet (1925-1986), known as “Madame Adolphe,” who was the warden of Fort-Dimanche and one of the most feared members of Duvalier’s militia,12 has a public library named after her in her hometown of Mirebalais.13 Franck Romain, one of Duvalier’s most notorious and brutal executioners,14 was lavishly praised in a eulogy signed by his daughter in the leading daily Le Nouvelliste. She described him as “a brilliant man … a loving man … a man of integrity … [whose] intelligence allowed him to shine.” The paen to the murderous police chief concluded, “a leader, a vi­ sionary, a patriot… Franck Romain continues to live through us all and through his dreams which one day, I hope, all united, will become reality.”15 In terms of collective memory, the evasion of perpetration for some of the key actors in Duvalier’s regime contributes to a mythologized history and contributes to ongoing denial. In the public, nostalgia for the Duvalier re­ gime is recurring.16 The public interest in the Duvalier era, which may be related to the persistence since 1986 of political instability and poverty, obscures and even erased the brutal realities of that regime and contributes to ongoing denial.

Denial as moral discourse In recent years, I noticed a public discourse of denial both among my in­ formants as well as in random conversations. The key themes and beliefs that emerge from my interviews, demonstrating the types of denial that infuse public conversations, include: there were few killings under Duvalier; these killings were justifiable reactions to insurgencies; Duvalier did not order most killings (overzealous militiamen were responsible for the humanrights violations that may have occurred); it is undignified to harass old

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people who worked for the Duvalier regime. Crucially, this discourse is not expressed solely by ex-Duvalierists or supporters of Duvalier’s ideologies. Many of the individuals who shared their views with me on the subject tend to be progressive folks who disagree in private with the repression carried out under Duvalier. Yet they are very uncomfortable when DDM’s mem­ bers publicly denounce figures who had taken part in the repression carried out by the Duvalier regime. In the past few years, this aspect of public opinion has targeted the activities and members of DDM, the NGO that publicly names perpetrators and regime officials and explicitly calls for justice. Denial in these cases appears motivated less by ideological support for the regime than by the reproduction of social and private ethics in the political field. DDM broke, it seems, a social rather than a political taboo. In good company, one does not accuse people who are today grandfathers of having perpetrated or enabled horrific crimes. Denial is therefore a moral discourse. It often comes from educated, middle class individuals. Individuals from the peasantry and the urban poor seem usually indifferent to the Duvaliers, although most of its victims came from those social classes.17 My attempts to extract opinions from individuals from these sectors failed, even from informants I have known for decades. The class divide about memory echoes others and runs throughout Haitian history.18 Bystanders are not the only ones in disagreement with DDM. Many re­ latives of victims have been reticent to criticize perpetrators and feel em­ barrassed by DDM’s activism. They may criticize the regime in general, almost in an abstract fashion, but do not want to openly name perpetrators and strongly disapprove of those who do: “We are not sure they did something;” “They are old”; “they did nothing”; “Why bringing all this up?”; “I personally know some of them.” One of DDM’s rare male mem­ bers, S. G., who lost two members of his father’s family to the repression, stated to me: “I resigned [from DDM] because they are going too far. It is one thing to dislike Duvalier, but I do not want anyone to go to prison because of me.” This attitude lead to self-censorship. Many victims or re­ latives of victims do not seek justice—not because they fear retaliation, but because they are afraid of how their milieu will judge them. We are therefore clearly dealing with social ethics. This is also true about their views of the organization DDM. I first assumed that trauma, fear, or perception of fear were responsible for this behavior. However, over the years, as I became familiar with several of them and was able to observe them, I ruled out trauma or fear in favor of a more social set of reasons. I realized that the handful of older ladies who head DDM and want to bring perpetrators to justice and denounce them publicly were the cultural exception, and that I needed to study the pattern instead. Here is an empirical example of this, from an experience of mine one Sunday morning in January 2016 in a leafy garden north of Port-au-Prince. It was a breakfast gathering of eight people, all from the middle class and all originally from the northern town of Gonaives—two older couples in their

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 49 early seventies, another couple in its sixties, and an older gentleman.19 They all knew each other from childhood. They were either adolescent or in their twenties in the 1960s, during the “Papa Doc” Duvalier regime, although none of them had been involved with the government. The conversation, dis­ tinguished by warmth and trust and easy-going humor, inadvertently turned to history when one of the two hosts asked me: “Why are you here [in Portau-Prince] this time?” To which I replied, “to interview William Régala.” Gal. Régala had been a pillar of the Jean-Claude Duvalier regime and, after Duvalier’s overthrow in early 1986, a major actor of the military governments of the next few years. As soon as I mentioned his name, my hosts and their guests laid their outrage bare, speaking heatedly for the next half hour. A few days earlier, the head of DDM had made yet another declaration over a radio channel asking for Régala’s indictment for crimes against humanity. This provoked my hosts’ heartfelt indignation. They invoked Régala’s old age, the fact that he had grandchildren whom he loved and were being shamed, and that he had friends and family with whom they were acquainted. This was hardly the first time, nor the last, I heard and observed decent people express outrage at calls for justice. But while their tirades had no political substance, they underlined social ethics. Whether Régala was guilty or not mattered little. For them, decency seems defined as having friends and family. Either social bonds were evidence that Régala could not have per­ petrated violence, or that DDM was out of bound. Then the conversation switched to a discussion of networks of friends and to genealogy. A complex and rapid-fire evocation of names of activists and marriages ensued: They were assessing if Régala and DDM activists shared some overlapping social networks. For them, only interpersonal relationships could stop DDM’s actions and save Régala’s good name.

The price of belonging Much of the anthropological literature on Haiti emphasizes the relational character of society, the importance of interpersonal relations, of bonds, intimacy, the durability of the social fabric, and the centrality of family in most aspects of social and public life.20 Social relations beyond the family often reproduce relations to kin. In this relational universe, social bonds are conceived as capital, while efforts are made to turn transactional encounters into social bonds. This literature also shows that social ethics accompany the social fabric: Kinship morality is not restricted to the family but overflows in various forms into larger society—I would even hypothesize that social ethics in Haiti are a case of reproduction of kinship morality. Bonds with non-kin can be as strong as with affines and consanguines. In both the rural and the urban worlds, social webs of kin, friends, neighbors, former class­ mates, colleagues, and acquaintances being vast and penetrating deeply into society, people are cognizant of the fact that they can encounter people they do not know but to whom they can nonetheless be related or connected.

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This recognition informs behavior and therefore the influences social ethics.21 I have encountered dozens of cases during the Duvalier regime of one person interceding for the liberation or the sparing of a friend or of a relative before an official by proving or suggesting to that unaware official that he was related to the person in prison. Victims, perpetrators, officials, accomplices, witnesses, opponents can stand within the same social web and sometimes the same genealogical tree. Being cognizant of overlapping social or family networks is also central to denial, inhibitions, and social re­ probation about accusing others. More precisely, many Haitians are wary of accusing others because of the strong sense that one should not accuse someone of vile crimes if they know them or are socially related to them. The genealogical tree in Figure 3.1 shows a rather improbable set of connections between victims and notorious enforcers of Duvalier, particu­ larly Frank Romain. Marguerite Bouchereau is one of the founders of DDM. Her father, a doctor in the military with the rank of major, was kidnapped on April 26, 1963 by militiamen in Port-au-Prince during a vast spree of killings.22 His body was never recovered. The Sansaricq family is also represented in that tree. A family of shopkeepers in Jérémie, the Sansaricq were executed for no known political reason in 1964; fourteen people who had no connection to any insurgency were killed, including six children.23 This tree shows that two families of victims, the Sansaricq and the Bouchereau, are connected to one another through three military officers and other members of Duvalier’s repression apparatus. One of them is Franck Romain. The formal and informal networks represented in the chart below occurred in the 1970s, years after the killings represented in it. Yet, these relations were precisely in place to create the genealogical continuum and conundrum that today produce the inhibitions and post-crime denials this chapter analyzes. As sociologist Michèle Oriol put it: “You are going to accuse the cousin of the grand-uncle of your grandchild of having murdered your own brother? Nobody will talk to you, nobody in your family and nobody in your circles [of friends].”24 A social organization that is, in other times, conducive to nepotism creates a wide web not merely of social rela­ tions but of bonds, bridging several deep societal cleavages (class-based, social, political, ideological). The presence in this tree of a member of DDM who does not shy away from accusing the perpetrators, shows that individual agency can always sneak through social structures. The connections explain, on the other hand, the social pressures from within their own milieu and from the society at large. This type of tree exemplifies a social pattern and explains some of the ethical inhibitions of relatives of victims today. If self-censorship is the price of belonging, then we should consider Durkheimian notions of ingroup solidarity, including social control, in situations of post-violence. There is evidently a contradiction with such an argument, whose nuance and complexity resist any short answers. If the social fabric is so “thick” and omnipresent, and social inhibitions so pervasive, then people should be in­ hibited from killing as well. Obviously, it did not inhibit Duvalier and his

Figure 3.1 Genealogical tree showing an improbable set of connections between victims and notorious enforcers of Duvalier, most notably Frank Romain (Credit: Jean-Philippe Belleau).

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 51

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executioners. Two brief answers can begin to give an explanation. First, social moral obligations are not the only norms in a competitive field. Culture indeed resembles what anthropologist Victor Turner famously called a “forest of symbols,” which can disorient even its own protago­ nists.25 Second, social inhibitions may indeed have played a role in the scale of violence in Haiti’s postcolonial history, which never approached genocide-level, not to mention the relatively low degree of demonization of “enemy figures”—no group ever “died socially” in Haiti, even if some were constructed negatively. This is obviously an hypothesis that would deserve a larger theorization and more substantiation, for to study an absence (why genocide did not happen) is methodologically and epistemologically pro­ blematic, which helps explain why scholars usually refrain from going in that direction. With these precautions in mind, it is highly intriguing that, in the two hundred years of Haiti’s postcolonial history, episodes of political violence never degenerated into full-scale mass violence, even under Duvalier. That social ethics informed by kinship morality were never de­ stroyed by government actions and continued to function in society are one reason for this absence. In Europe and in Asia, mass violence always relied on large numbers of participants.26 Duvalier’s killers at most numbered a few dozen. If Haiti’s interpersonal universe and social moral obligations are indeed strongly resilient, then they played a role not only in stimulating forms of denials but also in inhibiting large-scale political violence.27

Pathophobia I will now focus on what I believe are two other intertwined phenomena that contribute to denial. The first one is a disassociation with the victim’s suf­ fering; the second is the assumption that the victim is wrong in essence rather than because of her actions. I will start with an anecdote from the Haitian filmmaker and intellectual Raoul Peck. Known in the United States pri­ marily for his widely acclaimed film based on the writings of James Baldwin, I Am Not Your Negro (2016), Peck’s first feature film was about the Duvalier regime, The Man by the Shore (1993). It tells the story of an eight-year old child, Sarah, and the destruction of her family by Duvalier’s reign of terror. Peck watched the film’s premiere in Brooklyn from the back of the theatre. During a graphic scene depicting the torture of a man by Macoutes, “a couple of men seated in the middle of the theatre started to laugh loudly and nervously.”28 For Peck, who observed that these two men were young Haitians migrants who, after all, had the curiosity to see the film, the laughter was reactive. They did not laugh because they found torture funny, because the victim was ridiculous, or because they had no sense of decency. The two men wanted to dissociate themselves at all cost from the victim, from pain—from being wrong. Laughter as dissociation has been the subject of many works going back to Darwin, Freud, and Baudelaire.29 Analyzing Walter Benjamin’s writing

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 53 on shock and Baudelaire’s essay on laughter, literary critic Kevin Newmark argues that laughter is a response to a shocking experience and is a shock itself.30 Laughter as a defense mechanism during the Holocaust, the ability to cope with the unthinkable, or “the politeness of despair” as Boris Vian called it, is also well-documented.31 The anecdote described above is indeed a form of dissociation. However, it was also a form of misrecognition—that is, of false consciousness—in a way that laughter by Holocaust victims certainly was not. And the Holocaust victims disassociated with their own suffering, not with that of others. This dissociation is a form of denial. Yet, it is not the crime that is denied, it is the suffering. From this perspective, the victim is wrong for being victimized. This tautology suggests a cognitive process that, instead of attempting to identify causalities, is actually in charge of making sure that the subject, whether he was a bystander, a perpetrator, or a victim, does not get incriminated. The risk of being socially shamed or embarrassed resides in coinciding with the victim. The scorn manifested for DDM activists, and the refusal to demonstrate empathy with characters being tortured on a screen are me­ chanisms of mise-en-distance, not an approval of the crime. Innocence is not defined by not being a culprit, by not participating in a crime; innocence is defined by not being a victim—or even by identification with the strong. To empathize with the victim is to side with guilt. That is, it is not the truth that is denied; it is victimization. I name this phenomenon patho­ phobia, from the Greek roots πᾰ́ θος (pathos), misfortune, and φόβος (phobos), fear or aversion.32 People disassociate themselves from victimization not out of fear, obedience, or loyalty to a regime or to an ethnic group, but because they are socially compelled to do so by a social habit of disassociation from the suffering of others. The earlier anecdote by Raoul Peck about a reactive laughter exemplifies the disassociation with the victim’s suffering which I call pathophobia. When confronted with descriptions of atrocities and the in­ volvement of entire sectors of society, the post-conflict bystander can be under shock—indeed in a way reminiscent of Benjamin’s description of the modern condition. The shock created by the horror is social, cognitive, psychological. The bystander’s consciousness is assaulted with narratives of horrors but also with social injunctions to obligations. One is confronted with a choice: re­ cognizing or denying evil. Pathophobia, then, is when the mind “shuts off.” Pathophobia is a choice made by this bystander to escape being exposed to pain as well as to social re-involvement.

Animistic denials: Victimhood as an ontology A second phenomenon, animism, also presents the victim as wrong. From very different approaches, anthropologists Philippe Descola and Bruno Latour, rejecting impermeable societal categories derived from iron-clad ideal-types (modern, traditional, and so on), argue that elements from tra­ ditional societies survive unchanged in modern societies.33 Descola posits that

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animism as behavior and epistemology continue to inspire all societies, in­ cluding modern ones.34 Philosopher Peter Sloterdijk contends that an ani­ mistic relation to causality is integral to abnormally violent regimes.35 Criminal events are caused not by culprits—states—but by outside forces generated by the victims themselves. Indeed, animist thinking represents an alternative mode of the relation between causality and misfortune, victim and perpetrator, culpability and victimhood.36 Causality and responsibility are produced by a relation between two entities. What causes the victim to be hurt is their failure to act properly, to follow a set protocol with a third entity who, therefore, bares no responsibility—whether it is a neighbor, a tiger, or any entity endowed with a soul and therefore able to strike the victim with mis­ fortune. The strike, then, is considered a form of counter-violence.37 Relations are thus central to animistic attributions of misfortune.38 According to the Marilyn Strathern, humans learn to construct relations (between different phenomenon or different concepts, for instance) by first learning how they are personally related to their kin.39 That is, the ability to conduct relational analysis between non-human entities is a reproduction, a sublimation, and a change in scale of the awareness of kin relations. Being unable, or unwilling, to move to non-being relational analysis and transcend cores of relations between persons is foundational to an animistic denial. Although this would require more theoretical development, it seems likely that animistic denials result from unscaling and anthropomorphize relations between non-being phenomenon, including causalities. They “stick” to hu­ mans. Animistic denials focus on persons rather than on actions. However, if this source of denial is built on a relation between two beings, there is no social relation between perpetration and misfortune: they reside in the same person. The study of the displacement of causality from the perpetrator to the victim is of course not restricted to animistic thinking, as the vast an­ thropological literature on witchcraft and on anti-witchcraft violence has shown.40 In such cases, the victims themselves often think they are re­ sponsible for their own misfortune. Yet causality here is not located in a deed but in an essence, that of the victim. The action that went wrong is a marker of the victim’s essence. Victimhood, then, is an attributed ontology (“attributed,” that is, because no victim has any essence, of course; any “essence” lies entirely in the denier’s eye.) That is why an animistic denial sees the victim as ontologically wrong; that is, the responsibility for a specific misfortune may be determined by an action (by the victim), yet the victim is also wrong in essence—and to be avoided, as if tainted. Many narratives of massacres under Duvalier imply that the victims were responsible in one way or another for their killings. Every massacre, every execution of opponent seems to have its animistic shadow. Here is one in­ stance that exemplifies this. Jean-Robert T. was a witness to a massacre that occurred in the summer of 1964 in the town of Jérémie. I interviewed him about a dozen times. The son of a physician and a physician himself, he became intellectually interested in this event and its causes, and developed a

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 55 full-blown, internally consistent understanding of it. We therefore worked on the same subject. During this massacre, twenty-seven men, women, and children, all civilians and all from the local elite, were executed by the military under a specific order from Duvalier. The youngest victim was two, the oldest in her seventies. None had any history of political activism, none was known to have spoken publicly against the regime. About a fourth of them were relatives of opponents; the others had no link whatsoever to any oppositionist. The main reason for this massacre was that Duvalier aimed at creating fear and obedience among the light-skin elite. With no trace of evidence, Jean-Robert first elaborated a theory that victims were killed by a mob. When I eventually found and showed him evidence that Duvalier had ordered the executions and the military had carried them out, I assumed he would recognize where responsibility lay. But he did not, and never has. Over the ten years I have known Jean-Robert, I heard his explanation of the massacre change several times: Once, the victims had conspired against the regime; in another version, they despised the population that sought revenge against them by killing them; another, the victims hid weapons for a future rebellion; another, they were communists with links to Cuba; and so forth. What all these narratives had in common was the victims’ guilt. In particular, he could not figure out why one of the victims, a woman and shopkeeper in her fifties, had been detained in a round-up and put on the truck with the other victims. He concluded his speculations in extraordinary but revealing fashion: “I still cannot understand why she was executed, but I will find out what she had done and who she was.”41 Animistic denials are different from victim blaming. In animistic denials, which, as all denials, are post-facto explanations or justifications, the victim is considered the cause of her own misfortune. How different is this, then, from the notion of “blaming the victim,” to use the notion first popularized by Adorno to identify situations where the victim is blamed for a specific deed through a conscious cognitive process that rationalizes and reverses responsibility?42 An animistic denial in a modern context takes place within an attributed ontology. That is, the victim is wrong; and this victimhood is considered ontological. Victim-blaming is a concept that can even be in­ terpreted as based on a rather utilitarian approach while an animistic denial has no objective—political, ideological, ethnic, material, or otherwise. Rather, it is brought about by a misrecognition steeped in social habits with dimensions that are barely conscious. Further, it is void of sadism and is mediated by outside forces, with a denier who does not have a personal relation to the past event and its actors.

Anthropology and denial This chapter issues a double plea: For far greater use of anthropology in the study of denial, while avoiding a culturalist approach. The study of mass violence, including the study of denial, has overwhelmingly fallen within the

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realms of history and political science. In its approach to these topics, an­ thropology seems to suffer from impostor syndrome. It should: violence has always been at the periphery of the discipline; to link perpetrators with specific ethnic groups deeply troubles and inhibits anthropologists.43 The risk would be to use the discipline’s master category, culture, to study denial, which inevitably runs a culturalist risk—the discipline’s capital sin—not to mention the risk that a society could be portrayed as culturally violent. Yet, anthropology has much to offer that other disciplines may not, drawing upon its corpus of knowledge on sociality, interpersonal relations, kinship, and so on. Its signature focus on empirical observation and ethnography allows it to dive into and sort out vernacular socialities and examine realities made of complicated social ties that resist broad generalizations about brutality. Finally, following anthropology’s creed “to see things from the native’s point of view,” denial—a notion based on Western epistemological assumptions—victimhood, responsibility, and perpetration may not be ne­ cessarily constitute universal epistemologies of post-facto violence, and therefore study how they vary across times and spaces.44

Notes 1 I thank Michèle Oriol, Rodrigo Bulamah, and Sarah Minslow for their biblio­ graphic and intellectual suggestions. 2 On the toll of the regime, see Bernard Diederich and Al Burt, Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today (New York: McGraw-Hill Company, 1969); Bernard Diederich, Papa Doc et les Tonton Macoutes (Port-au-Prince: H. Deschamps, 1971); Bernard Diederich, Le Prix du Sang (Port-au-Prince: Antillia, 2005); Frantz-Antoine Leconte., ed. En Grandissant Sous Duvalier: L’agonie d’un EtatNation (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000); Elizabeth Abbott, Haiti: A Shattered Nation (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2011). 3 On the post-1986 period, see Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996) and Robert Fatton, Haiti’s Predatory Republic. The Unending Transition to Democracy (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002). I do not treat here the question of dechoukaj, violent acts of popular justice that immediately followed the de­ parture of Jean-Claude Duvalier; however, they can certainly be construed as powerful evidence of the widespread rejection of the Duvalier regime. 4 See Évelyne Trouillot, Memory at Bay (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015) and Edwidge Danticat, The Drew Breaker (New York: Knopf, 2004). 5 Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995). 6 See Sarah A. Decosse and Kenneth Ross, Thirst for Justice: A Decade of Impunity in Haiti (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 1996). 7 DDM is composed of about three dozen individuals. Most of its members are women who lost a father, husband, or brother. The Benoît couple, whose new­ born was kidnapped in 1963 by military officer, were also members until they passed away in 2019. Though much smaller, DDM can be compared to the Argentinian organization Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Many of DDM’s members are from the middle class and live in Port-au-Prince, but some also come from other social classes and/or from rural communities. See Henry Chip

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 57

8 9

10 11

12

13 14 15 16

17 18

19

20

Carey, “The Slow Rise of Social Movement Organizations for Memorialization in Haiti: Lutte Contre Impunite, Devoire de Memoire-Haiti and Digitizing the Record on Atrocities,” in Eve Zucker and David Simon, eds., Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2020; Kindle). Tellingly, efforts to create an exhaustive and convincing list of victims have also repeatedly failed. This is also true of René Préval (president from 1996-2001 and 2005-2010). The case of Jean-Bertrand Aristide (president from1990-1996 and 2001-2004) is complicated. A Liberation Theology priest and opponent of the military juntas that ruled between the fall of “Baby Doc” in 1986 and Aristide’s election in December 1990, his criticism of the Duvalier regime tended to focus on socioeconomic inequalities. While in the opposition, he led a march that turned into a mob that eventually leveled Fort-Dimanche, thereby destroying evidence and a potential place of memory. On Aristide, see Alex Dupuy, The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006); and Fatton, Predatory Republic. Burcu Münyas, “Genocide in the minds of Cambodian youth: transmitting (hi) stories of genocide to second and third generations in Cambodia,” Journal of Genocide Research, 10, no. 3 (2010), 413–39. The Haitian economist and former World Bank official, Leslie Péan, whose uncle was executed by the regime, told of an awkward moment at a book signing event in Port-au-Prince, when he was placed alongside an apologist of the regime, Dr. Gilot. Bousquet led hundreds of executions and is said to have tortured prisoners herself. See Bernard Diederich, Fort-Dimanche: la monstrueuse machine à tuer de la dictature des Duvalier (Montréal: CIDIHCA, 2016), 18–19; and Abbott, Haiti, 142. Formal protests by DDM to Mirebalais’s authorities have not received a reply. Diederich, Prix du sang, 167–168, 202. Marie-Rose Romain, “Hommage à mon père,” Le Nouvelliste, September 13, 2017. Duvalier’s grandson, Nicolas, 37 at the time of this book’s publication, has de­ clared he will run for president and has generated some interest, although his potential popular support is difficult to measure. His lack of accomplishments—he did not graduate from high school and does not currently hold a job—proves that he is running only on his last name. Claude Rosier, a farmer’s son who was imprisoned from 1966 to 1977, contends that the vast majority of prisoners at Fort-Dimanche were poor. Claude Rosier, Le Triangle de la Mort (Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 2003). This chapter does not focus on class divisions, but they are clearly reflected in this issue. To some extent, denialism as well as calls for recognition of Duvalierist crimes represent inter-middle class phenomena. This had been noted by Jean Price-Mars, Haiti’s foremost early twentieth-century public intellectual, in his account of a civil war in the late 1800s that ultimately mobilized one sector of the middle class against another: “Where was, where has been the Haitian people in attempts such as this one?” Jean Price-Mars, Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais et le Drame de Miragoâne (Port-au-Prince: Impr. De L’Etat, 1948), 126. With the exception of one couple, I knew all of them for about a decade and the aging bachelor for longer—therefore they felt comfortable in speaking openly. In addition, the food itself on this occasion testified to social intimacy—giromon soup, djondjon rice, fried eggs, all of types not served in restaurants. See Ira Lowenthal, Marriage is 20, Children are 21: The Cultural Construction of Conjugality and the Family in Rural Haiti (PhD dissertation, John Hokpins

58

21

22

23 24 25 26 27

28

29 30 31 32

Jean-Philippe Belleau University, 1987); Sidney Mintz, Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Flavia Dalmaso, Kijan Moun Yo Ye? As Pessoas, as Casas e as Dinâmicas da Familiaridade em Jacmel, Haiti (PhD dissertation, Museu Nacional, 2004); Rodrigo Bulamah, Ruínas circulares: vida e história no norte do Haiti (PhD dissertation, University of Campinas, São Paulo, 2018); Karen Richman, Migration and Vodou (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2005). Memorialists also strikingly focus on fa­ mily, friends and neighbors rather than events and places: for example, Eddy Cavé, De Mémoire de Jérémien: Ma vie, ma Ville, mon Village (Pétion-ville, Haiti Les Editions Pleine Plage, 2011). These reflections are also informed by over two decades of research and work in Haiti. Formal and informal bonds may both contradict and reinforce society’s hierarchy, tying individuals but also families and social webs from across the many divides. Diederich, Prix du sang, 163–173. This event has not yet been thoroughly studied, although it constitutes the first large-scale massacre under Duvalier. It was part of a purge of the military, with mulatto officers and retired mulatto officers being systematically targeted, sometimes with their families. Passersby without links to the military were also killed. In total, several hundred people were killed, mainly by militiamen but also by armed members of the regime. Many were shot in the streets, others in their homes, and a few were executed in Fort-Dimanche. Abbott, Haiti: A Shattered Nation, 135–137; Jean-Philippe Belleau, “Les Vêpres Jérémiennes,” in Ralph Allen, Tombés au Champ d’Honneur. Les 13 de Jeune Haiti (Port-au-Prince: eEditions Zémès), 35–39. Perosnal communication with Michèle Oriol, January 2015. Victor Turner, A Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967). Christopher Browning, The Path to Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 125–184. My larger point here is indeed that sociality is the foundation of ethics—rather than the other way around, as many psychological and evolutionary anthro­ pologists argue. It is also distinct from Helen Fein’s argument about the im­ portance of bonds and the need to identify with the victims in times of genocide. Fein was actually not writing about social bonds, social fabric, or interpersonal relationships that preceded violence; rather, she believed that human decency, societal ethics, and morals can prevent genocide. See Helen Fein, Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1979). Peck first reported this anecdote in a book he later wrote. Raoul Peck, Monsieur le Ministre … Jusqu’au Bout de la Patience (Port-au-Prince: Editions Velvet, 1998). I was so puzzled by this story that years later I asked him if he could elaborate on it. Personal communication with Peck, November 2013, Port-auPrince. The quotations are from my exchange with him. See John Carty and Yasmine Musharbash, “You’ve Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humour and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology,” Anthropological Forum 18, no. 3 (November 2008): 209–17. Kevin Newmark, “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995), 236–255. See Chaya Ostrower, It Kept Us Alive: Humor in the Holocaust (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014). To take a more famous example, I believe Primo Levi’s anecdote about his sister refusing to hear his account of Auschwitz, then suddenly leaving the dining table,

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 59

33 34

35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42 43

44

is a clear exemple of pathophobia. See Primo Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 53. Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013). I do not essentialize animist thinking, which takes many forms. Also, to be clear, animistic attributions are not just about anthropomorphizing beings, the en­ vironment, or cosmology. I am talking here about an animistic prism for the attribution of causality, victimhood, and perpetration. Peter Sloterdijk, Die schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit: Über das anti-genealogische Experiment der Moderne (Berlin: Verlag Suhrkamp, 2014). See E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010; first published in 1871). A nineteenth-century anthropologist, Tylor coined the term “animism.” I would add that hatred is also conceived by such ideologies as a counter-hatred, through the same epistemological route of reversing causality: Hatred is attrib­ uted to the enemy and therefore animosity toward this enemy is justified. Relations seem somewhat overlooked in the literature on animistic representa­ tions, except by Bird-David, for whom animism represents a “relation episte­ mology.” See Nurit Bird-David, “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology,” Current Anthropology 40, no. S1 (1999), 77–8. Marilyn Strathern, The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale (Chicago: Prickly Press, 1995). E.E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 18–32. The Haitian sociologist Michèle Oriol was herself the witness of a lynching of an old woman accused of being a werewolf. Oriol links witch-burning to animist thinking: The witch is to be killed because of who she is. Outside the context of political violence, the lynching of individuals suspected of witchcraft also falls within animistic attributions of “wrong.” The italic is mine. Personal communications with Jean-Robert T. (not his real name) between 2015 to today. Interestingly, this notion was originally conceived for the study of mass violence. Danielle de Lame, “Anthropology and Genocide,” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence, November 4, 2007, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.sciencespo.fr/ mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/anthropology-and-genoci­ de.html. Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 28, no. 1 (1974), 26–45.

Bibliography Publications Abbott, Elizabeth. Haiti: A Shattered Nation. New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2011. Bird-David, Nurit. “Animism Revisited: Personhood, Environment, and Relational Epistemology.” Current Anthropology 40, no. 1 (February 1999): 67–91. Browning, Christopher. The Path to Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Bulamah, Rodrigo. “O cultivo dos comuns. Parentesco e Práticas Sociais em Milot Haiti.” Master Thesis, University of Campinas, 2013.

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Bulamah, Rodrigo. “Ruínas circulares: vida e história no norte do Haiti.” PhD diss. University of Campinas, São Paulo, 2018. Carey, Henry C. “The Slow Rise of Social Movement Organizations for Memorialization in Haiti: Lutte Contre Impunite, Devoire de Memoire- Haiti and Digitizing the Record of Atrocities.” In Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age, edited by Eve Zucker and David Simon, 175–196. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Carty, John, and Yasmine Musharbash. “You’ve Got to be Joking: Asserting the Analytical Value of Humour and Laughter in Contemporary Anthropology.” Anthropological Forum 18, no. 3 (November 2008): 209–217. Cavé, Eddy. De Mémoire de Jérémien. Ma Vie, Ma Ville, Mon Village. Petion-Ville, Haiti: Les Editions Pleine Plage, 2011. Dalmaso, Flavia, “Kijan Moun Yo Ye? As Pessoas, as Casas e as Dinâmicas da Familiaridade em Jacmel, Haiti.” PhD diss. Museu Nacional, 2004. Danticat, Edwidge. The Drew Breaker. New York: Knopf, 2004. Das, Veena. Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995. Decosse, Sarah, and Kenneth Ross. Thirst for Justice: A Decade of Impunity in Haiti. Washington, D.C.: Human Rights Watch, 1996. Descola, Philippe. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013. Diederich, Bernard, and Al Burt. Papa Doc: The Truth about Haiti Today. New York: McGraw-Hill Company, 1969. Diederich, Bernard. Papa Doc et les Tonton Macoutes. Port-au-Prince: H. Deschamps, 1986. Diederich, Bernard. Le Prix du Sang. Port-au-Prince: Antillia, 2005. Diederich, Bernard. Fort-Dimanche: la monstrueuse machine à tuer de la dictature des Duvalier. Montréal: CIDIHCA, 2016. Dupuy, Alex. Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996. Dupuy, Alex. The Prophet and Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the International Community, and Haiti. Landam, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2006. Evans-Pritchard, E.E. Witchcraft, Oracles, and Magic Among the Azande. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1937. Fatton, Robert. Haiti’s Predatory Republic. The Unending Transition to Democracy. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2002. Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide. New York: Free Press, 1979. Geertz, Clifford. “From the Native’s Point of View: on the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28, no. 1 (1974): 26–45. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Leconte, Frantz-Antoine, ed. En grandissant Sous Duvalier: L’Agonie d’un EtatNation. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000. Levi, Primo. Se questo è un uomo. Turin: Einaudi, 2005. Lowenthal, Ira. “Marriage is 20, Children are 21: the Cultural Construction of Conjugality and the Family in Rural Haiti.” PhD diss. John Hokpins University, 1987.

Social bonds, pathophobia, Duvalier’s Haiti 61 Mintz, Sidney. Three Ancient Colonies: Caribbean Themes and Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Münyas, Burcu. “Genocide in the Minds of Cambodian Youth: Transmitting (Hi) stories of Genocide to Second and Third Generations in Cambodia.” Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 3 (2010): 413–439. Newmark, Kevin. “Traumatic Poetry: Charles Baudelaire and the Shock of Laughter.” In Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited by Cathy Caruth, 236–255. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995. Ostrower, Chaya. It Kept Us Alive: Humor in the Holocaust. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2014. Peck, Raoul. Monsieur le Ministre….Jusqu’au Bout de la Patience. Port-au-Prince: Editions Velvet, 1998. Price-Mars, Jean. Jean-Pierre Boyer-Bazelais et le Drame de Miragoâne. Port-auPrince: Imprimerie de L’Etat, 1948. Richman, Karen. Migration and Vodou. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005. Rosier, Claude, Le Triangle de la Mort. Port-au-Prince: Henri Deschamps, 2003. Sloterdijk, Peter. Die Schrecklichen Kinder der Neuzeit: über Das Anti-Genealogische Experiment der Moderne. Berlin: Verlag Suhrkamp, 2014. Strathern, Marilyn. The Relation: Issues in Complexity and Scale. Chicago: Prickly Press, 1995. Trouillot, Évelyne. Memory at Bay. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015. Turner, Victor. A Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967. Tylor, Edward B. Primitive Culture. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Voltaire, Frantz. Mourir pour Haïti: la résistance a là dictature en 1964. Montréal: Les Éditions du CIDIHCA, 2014.

Online sources de Lame, Danielle. “Anthropology and Genocide.” Online Encyclopedia of Mass Violence. November 4, 2007. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.sciencespo.fr/ mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/anthropology-and-genoci­ de.html, ISSN 1961-9898 Primera, Maye, “La Desesperación lleva a Los Haitianos a Añorar la Era Del Dictador Duvalier.” El Pais, January 18, 2011. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// elpais.com/internacional/2011/01/17/actualidad/1295218801_850215.html Romain, Marie-Rose. “Hommage à Mon Père Frank Romain.” Le Nouvelliste, September 13, 2017. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://lenouvelliste.com/article/1 76236/hommage-a-mon-pere-franck-romain

4

The Soviet denial of murdered Jews’ identity during and after the Great Patriotic War Thomas Earl Porter

Emblazoned onto virtually every one of the war memorials in the former Soviet Union is the slogan “nikto ne zabyt, nichto ne zabyto” (no one will be forgotten, nothing will be forgotten). A veritable cult of the Great Patriotic War would serve to buttress the Soviet regime’s legitimacy and still today, nearly three decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, the military victory over Nazi Germany is undoubtedly the most important of Russian patriotic holidays. The enormous death toll—the USSR lost more than twenty-five million people—included many millions of non-Russians as well as ethnic Russians, but today their sacrifice has been subsumed into the legitimizing narrative begun by Stalin’s famous “toast to the Russian people” at the conclusion of hostilities.1 This deliberate obfuscation of the victims’ identities began during the war with the minimizing of Nazi crimes against Soviet Jewry, who ultimately constituted more than one-quarter of Hitler’s victims. The Soviet regime denied a full measure of acknowledgement of their own citizens’ suffering while it was ongoing. This callous act of denial illustrates the deep antipathy Stalin and his henchmen harbored toward Soviet Jews and the denial of their victimhood served a political purpose: to advance a calculated campaign that might have led to another ethnic cleansing but for Stalin’s death in 1953. The conduct of German forces after the invasion of the Soviet Union was criminal from the very start. On October 27, 1941, both U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill condemned Nazi atrocities, with the latter opining that “the punishment of these crimes must now be included among the major aims of the war.”2 The Nazis’ callous indifference to the peoples of the Soviet Union pointed up the difference between Hitler’s war in the West and the brutal racial struggle (Rassenkampf ) in the East. The racist nature of this conflict can be seen in the plans for the war of annihilation outlined in the “General Plan for the East” drawn up by Heinrich Himmler. It called for the “removal” of eighty million people from Russia to allow for its colonization by Germans. This document, which was to have been presented to Hitler upon the occasion of the final defeat of the Soviet Union, was to be the blueprint to transform all of Russia into a colony to furnish raw materials and slave labor DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-4

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 63 for Germany. It would mark the successful seizure of the Lebensraum Hitler had been dreaming of since he dictated Mein Kampf to Rudolf Hess in Landsberg Prison in 1924. Stalin, in an address to his generals underground in Moscow on November 6, 1941, asserted this link between the plans of the Nazi leadership and the actions of German forces in the field when he stated that “the German invaders want a war of extermination with the peoples of the USSR,” and “if the Germans want a war of extermination they will get it.”3 Throughout the war the Soviet Union continually pointed out not only the glaring violations by the Nazis of international treaties regarding the conduct of war and treatment of both civilians and prisoners of war but also this direct link to and criminal responsibility of the civilian and military leadership of Nazi Germany for any actions committed by their subordinates in the field.

Molotov’s first diplomatic note, establishment of the UN, and Soviet extraordinary commissions to investigate war crimes In April 1942 Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov sent a diplomatic note to “all embassies and ambassadors with which the USSR has diplomatic relations.” It was entitled “Concerning the Monstrous Crimes, Atrocities, and Acts of Violence of the German State in the Occupied Soviet Regions and the Responsibility of the German State for these Crimes.” In this extremely detailed explication of the atrocities committed by German forces, Molotov noted that these transgressions were not random but instead were calculated and “not manifested as the episodic excesses of undisciplined military units.”4 The Soviet Government collected countless battle reports, orders and other documents that clearly proved that the Nazis’ “bloody crimes and atrocities had been undertaken in accordance with the carefully compiled and elaborate plans of the German government and German High Command.” The note broke down the Nazis’ heinous transgressions in Russia into a half dozen categories, including the methodical plunder of the country’s population, the complete destruction of cities and villages, the enslavement of its people and deportation of several million more to Germany for forced labor, the veritable extermination of the Soviet population and prisoners of war and the liquidation of Russian national culture and the cultures of other peoples of the USSR. Molotov took pains to point out that the evidence presented “not only supports the assertions of the Soviet government of the planned nature of these evildoings” but also “shows that the Hitlerite government and its accomplices have reached the limits of cruelty and moral depravity in its bloody criminal attack on the freedom, welfare, culture, and very life of the Soviet peoples.”5 The document went into explicit details of the myriad atrocities and crimes of German forces in Russia and connected the perpetration of those crimes with captured military documents, including several from Hitler and Goering. The grisly specifics of some of the many

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massacres of men, women, and children were presented, as well as detailed retellings of the numerous summary executions of citizens and the horrific treatment of Soviet prisoners. The wanton burning and looting of villages and destruction of equipment, buildings, and entire cities was chronicled and the looting of property was carefully catalogued. The idea that these acts were not only criminal but committed as part of a plan determined by the highest civil and military authorities would become a key part of the Nuremberg trial. Molotov promised in conclusion that “Hitler’s government and its accomplices will not escape severe responsibility and deserved punishment for all their unparalleled crimes perpetrated against the peoples of the USSR and against all freedom loving peoples.”6 In October 1942, Roosevelt and Sir John Simon (the British Lord Chancellor) both proposed that a “United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes” be established to collect evidence and identify suspects. Two months later a joint declaration by the United States, Britain, and the European governments in exile publicly accused the Nazis of a “bestial policy of extermination of the Jewish people in Europe,” but the United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) did not meet until over a year had passed and the Soviet Union never became a member of the commission. But they seized upon the declaration by the United Nations to call again for the establishment of a war crimes tribunal for both civil and military leaders as well as the actual perpetrators. U.S. Secretary of War Henry Stimson also believed that an international judicial proceeding was required.7 His department devised the outlines of the criminal indictment that ultimately would be utilized at Nuremberg. The plan charged the Nazi regime with a criminal conspiracy to wage aggressive war and commit crimes against humanity: The whole movement had been a deliberate, concerted effort to arm for war, forcibly seize the lands of other nations, steal their wealth, enslave and exploit their populations, and exterminate the Jews of Europe.8 The Western Allies therefore were fully aware of the genocidal plans of the Nazis. A war crimes trial to bring to account the perpetrators was being contemplated but the Soviet Union had already begun preparations for just such a trial. In July 1942, a draft proposal by Georgy Aleksandrov, head of the Propaganda and Agitation section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, was circulated that called for the establishment of an “Extraordinary State Commission for the investigation of atrocities, violence and other crimes committed by the German army on the regions of Soviet territory temporarily occupied and an account of the damage inflicted by the German-Fascist forces on the population of the USSR and to the Soviet state.”9 Aleksandrov asserted that the “violence, mass murders, destruction of priceless material and cultural treasures of the Soviet people, and

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 65 establishment of the forced labor regime” were the result of “a systematic plan which had earlier been devised and authorized by the German government and the German High Command.”10 Therefore, “the Soviet people demand retribution for the crimes of the German Fascist forces” and to that end it “was necessary to conduct an exact inventory of all the evil crimes of the Hitlerite army on the territory of the USSR, the violation of the norms of international law, of the rules and customs of the conduct of war.”11 On October 28, Aleksandrov forwarded to Foreign Minister Molotov a draft decree from the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet concerning the establishment of an “Extraordinary State Committee [sic] for the inventory of the German-Fascist invaders’ evildoings.”12 Molotov made extensive corrections on the proposal (including the name of the commission) and added that its principal purpose would be to oversee “the unification and conformity of the inventory already being conducted by Soviet state organs of the crimes and damage inflicted by the invaders.”13 In addition to a full accounting of the damages inflicted upon the USSR, the commission would also be charged with “establishing, in all cases where circumstances permitted, the identity of the German-Fascist criminals, the guilty in organizations which have committed evildoings on occupied Soviet territory, with the goal of bringing these criminals to justice and to their most severe punishment.”14 Thus, on the basis of the October 1942 declaration the Soviets in November set up an “Extraordinary State Commission for ascertaining and investigating crimes perpetrated by the German-Fascist invaders and their accomplices, and the damage inflicted by them on citizens, collective farms, social organizations, State enterprises and institutions of the USSR.” Announced in Pravda as a decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and as a resolution from the Council of People’s Commissars, this body was charged with compiling the evidentiary materials for a future war crimes trial. The commission’s charter was formally approved in March 1943.15 The Soviets began to lay the foundation for such a tribunal with the trial of three German prisoners of war in the city of Kharkov in December 1943. The Kharkov trial featured three accused war criminals who confessed to atrocious crimes but more important was the statement made by one of them that the principal war criminals were Hitler, Himmler, and Rosenberg. In delivering the verdict, the judge said that these proceedings were “only a prototype of the coming of the not far distant court of peoples, which will mete out punishment to the band of leaders of fascism for all their loathsome crimes.”16 But these early Soviet criminal trials (especially in Krasnodar and Kharkov, for example) did not always identify Jews as the Germans’ principal victims.17 Most, though not all, press accounts did not even acknowledge that Jews had been singled out for wholesale slaughter and instead used the deliberately misleading term “peaceful Soviet citizens.” The regime was, in fact, ambivalent in its characterization of its Jewish citizens’ victimization throughout the war years and only acknowledged these atrocities when it served a political end.

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For example, in 1942 a state sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) was established. Its purpose, like the four others established at the same time (for women, young people, scientists, and Slavs) was to lobby similar foreign constituencies in the West for support of the Soviet regime.18 Its chairman was the well-known Jewish actor and head of the State Jewish Theater Solomon Mikhoels—who would be murdered on Stalin’s orders in 1947 as part of the prelude to a vicious anti-Semitic campaign that nearly culminated in genocide—travelled in the West and raised millions of dollars for the Red Army from American Jews. The regime also allowed the wellknown Jewish writers Vasilii Grossman and Il’ia Ehrenburg, who were also members of the JAC, to document the suffering of Soviet Jews with an eye both toward using these materials in future criminal trials and for fund raising in the West. Mikhoels had already warned in a 1941 radio broadcast that the Nazis planned “the total annihilation of the Jewish people.” The JAC kept a running count of the Jewish victims of Nazi criminality and made sure these details were widely disseminated in the West. In fact, it was the American Committee of Jewish Writers, Artists, and Scientists (whose honorary head was Albert Einstein) that first suggested that a compilation of these documents be published in what would become known as The Black Book.19 The Soviets forged ahead in their planning for the future international war crimes tribunal. On April 3, 1943, a staff of one hundred sixteen people with a budget of 2,669,000 rubles was approved.20 The secretariat included departments charged with recording the evidence of atrocities against Soviet citizens, damage to state and collective farms, damage to industry, transportation and communications, damage to cooperatives, trade unions and other civic organizations, damage to cultural, scientific and medical institutions, churches, etc., and finally a department to collect the evidence of harm to Soviet citizens. Much like the party and state apparatus, sub commissions were established at the republic and regional levels. Members always included the first secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party at each level (Nikita Khrushchev was head of the Ukrainian SSR’s commission), as well as the chair or deputy chair of the Council of People’s commissars and representatives from the local political police.21 The participation of a representative cross section of Soviet officials and citizens in the commission’s work was sought and more than seven million people supposedly took part in the process.22 Instructions were adopted by the Commission on May 31, 1943, which required the staff of the Commission to travel around the recently liberated areas of the Soviet Union and empower local committees to investigate Nazi crimes and atrocities. The statute required that these investigations be completed within one month of the area’s liberation. Dossiers were meticulously compiled listing the details of Nazi crimes, the units and persons that had committed them, accomplices, etc. along with forensic reports, statements by local citizens and captured German documents. The Commission ultimately collected more than a quarter million statements and estimated the damage to the

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 67 regions surveyed at almost seven hundred billion rubles. Members of the commission reopened graves, exhumed bodies, and interrogated German prisoners of war.

Red Army “Special Flying” detachments In those areas that had seen enormous devastation, and where the local organs of government had not yet been reconstituted, special Red Army military intelligence units composed of officers and medical doctors investigated the crimes and drew up the protocols (akty), or findings of fact, which were then forwarded to the Main Political Administration of the Workers and Peasants Red Army (GLAVPURKKA) and from there sent on to the Extraordinary Commission.23 These particular documents have not yet been studied and offer interesting contrasts with the records filed by the civilian local and regional commissions. Research into these documents indicates that the military committees faithfully recorded the eyewitness testimony of the locals and were extremely diligent in revealing the human cost of the war (as compared with the protocols of the Extraordinary Commission, which were seemingly more attentive to material damage, perhaps with an eye toward future reparations). Of special interest is the fact that many of these Red Army officers were Jewish, especially the medical staff. Both the civil and military commissions took down the testimonies of the eyewitnesses at the scene of the crimes and atrocities. In those reports where the victims were Jews, the term was at first written down as these eyewitnesses clearly indicated that Jews had been the principal victims. Yitzhak Arad has shown that these testimonies were subsequently often changed and the word “Jews” replaced with “Soviet citizens.” At the next level in many of the civilian akty the word “Jew” was found less frequently, and finally in the reports from the republic committee’s the word was almost never to be found. The fact that some reports were indeed edited can be seen through a simple comparison of the initial reports by Red Army committees with those ultimately forwarded to Moscow by the union republic committees. For example, one of the earliest protocols documenting Nazi atrocities was submitted by a “flying” military committee to GLAVPURKKA in January of 1942 by senior political instructor (politruk, or politicheskii rukovoditel’) Kriuchkin, political instructor Fadeikin, and medical officer Gurvich which recorded the eyewitness testimony of several persons from the village of Alfer’evo, Volokolamsk district, Moscow region. In it the villagers recounted how “upon arrival in November 1941, the German soldiers and officers rounded up without exception all the Jews … they held them for hours in the cold after having taken from them all their warm clothing. Most of these people were women, old men and children. They shot these unfortunates and out of 100 persons 80 were killed and 20 were wounded. The Germans forbade the rendering of any kind of medical assistance to the

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wounded and the other 20 froze to death.”24 Other atrocities were also recounted in detail including the rape and “cruel treatment of our women and girls.” The corresponding report forwarded by the regional committee to Moscow in 1944 repeated this information verbatim but read simply that “100 peaceful Soviet citizens” had been murdered.25 In other words, a deliberate decision was made as to which victims would be commemorated. Arad asserted that this concealment of the fate of the USSR’s Jewish citizens was a policy set by Stalin from the very beginning of the war. To be sure, in public pronouncements the massacred Jews would, with very rare exceptions, usually be referred to only as “Soviet citizens” as Stalin used nationalism to rally support for the war effort26—of course, one could argue that “Soviet” was not necessarily the same as “Russian.” Yet the “fifth row” (piataia grafa) of the Soviet internal passport contained one’s “national” identification and there is no doubt that most Russians saw themselves as the leading people of the USSR; Stalin’s famous wartime toast “to the Russian people” at the conclusion of hostilities well illustrates this hierarchy of identities. Foreign Minister Molotov mentioned the Nazi effort to annihilate the Jews in just one of his four wartime diplomatic notes, and even then, he minimized and obscured it. Molotov’s January 6, 1942 note discusses the infamous September 1941 massacres at Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev, in which more than 33,000 people were killed by German SS and special forces. Molotov included “Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews” among the tens of thousands murdered, despite the fact that virtually all of the victims were Jewish and were identified as such in their internal passports (and not as Ukrainians or Russians) and that two months after the massacre Izvestiia had noted that “information has been obtained from the reliable sources that in Kyiv [usually transliterated as Kiev in English] the Germans executed 52 thousand Jews—men, women, children.”27 While the evidence for Arad’s assertion might seem prima facie to be compelling this may not have been a formal policy and more likely was just the practice of Soviet chinovniki anticipating Stalin’s wishes in a somewhat similar fashion to Nazi officials “working toward the Fuhrer.”28 In Molotov’s working papers one can indeed often find specific, explicit discussion of the Nazi efforts at extermination of the Jews. To be sure these references were usually deleted or toned down prior to publication but it is doubtful that Molotov (whose own wife was, as is well known, Jewish) would have discussed this so forthrightly and openly in documents that were marked for distribution to Stalin if in fact it might have served to displease his master (and, as is also well known, he eventually divorced his Jewish wife at Stalin’s behest and stood by silently when she was arrested and sent to Siberia after the war). For example, in the first draft of the October 1942 “Declaration of the Soviet Government Concerning the Implementation of the Plan of the Hitlerite Criminals for the General Extermination of Jews on Europe’s Occupied Territory and the Responsibility of the German Government and

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 69 all its Accomplices for this Bloody Evildoing” he specifically noted that the victims at Babi Yar, “more than 30,000 people,” were Jews.29 And Pravda did publish the text of the December 18, 1942, joint declaration of twelve nations “On the Hitlerite Regime’s Extermination of Europe’s Jewish Population.” This document noted that German forces have “brought to life Hitler’s oft-expressed desire to eliminate the Jewish people in Europe.” The declaration had concluded with the statement that the signatories “again emphasize their firm resolve to guarantee jointly with all of the United Nations, that the individuals responsible for these crimes will not escape their deserved retribution and they (the signatories) will accelerate their implementation of the necessary practical measures for the achievement of this stated goal.” Two days later, however, in their own declaration the Soviets again highlighted the sufferings of the Russians, Ukrainians, and Byelorussians and opined that the Slavic peoples had also been marked for extermination.30 The Ministry of Foreign Affairs draft indignantly cast aspersions on the foreign perception that “allegedly, the requisitions, robbery and executions were directed ‘only’ against Jews.” This sentence was crossed out by Molotov himself and not included in the final version. In yet still another draft version of the declaration—again with marginalia in Molotov’s own hand—he waxed grandiloquent about the tolerance and lack of racism in the Soviet Union and the complete absence of such thoughts in Marxism-Leninism and asserted that “the younger generation of Jews [in the Soviet Union] had had absolutely no experience with antiSemitism and racial chauvinism was unknown.” He quoted Lenin as saying that “the use of the vile prejudices of the most uncivilized strata of the population against Jews so as to encourage … the monstrous slaughters of peaceful Jews, their wives and children … evokes such disgust from the entire civilized world.” Molotov’s exegesis also included, and deliberately so, not just one but two quotes from Stalin on the subject of anti-Semitism. In the first instance Molotov noted that as the result of Hitler’s racial theories Stalin had correctly pointed out that “the German people were the first, and would also be the final, victims of Hitlerism and that their anti-Semitism was the highest form of racial chauvinism, which will turn out to be the most dangerous form of cannibalism for them.” In his conclusion, Molotov then quoted from one of Stalin’s frequent notes to the Red Army which reminded its soldiers that they were “fighting in its great liberation struggle free from feelings of racial hatred … and free from such degrading sentiments because it [the Red Army] has been raised in the spirit of racial equality and respect for the rights of all people.”31 In the final analysis then, the Soviets were of course very much aware of the Nazis’ ongoing effort to exterminate the Jews. Molotov’s working papers contain numerous documents detailing the extent and scope of the Holocaust in both the Soviet Union and the West. The highly specific information in these reports undoubtedly made it clear to the Soviet regime

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that the Jews were marked for total annihilation, despite the occasional snide aside about how “it was not only the Jews … but the entire [Soviet] population” that was targeted for such a fate. Molotov’s papers included the observation that it was Hitler’s “plan to concentrate 4 million Jews in Eastern Europe by the end of 1942 with the aim of their physical annihilation” and that “ultimately the plan contemplates the complete destruction of the multi-million Jewish population.”32 But the regime’s official declarations also made statements such as the following: The crimes and atrocities committed by the Hitlerite robbers, rapists, and hangmen against peace-loving Soviet citizens have already been revealed to the entire world. The large majority of the victims of these bloody riots are farmers, laborers, clerks and members of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian intelligentsia. Many are the victims among the Lithuanians, the Latvians, and the Estonians, among the Moldavians and people of the Karelo-Finnish Republic. The Jewish minority in the Soviet population, which is not very large in number, has suffered particularly at the hands of the blood-thirsty Hitlerite animals.33 (Emphasis added) And Pravda continued to print articles that talked of Hitler’s “plans to annihilate the Slavs … to expel and exterminate Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Yugoslavs, Ukrainians, Byelorussians.”34 When, at the end of the war, the noted Soviet (and Jewish) writers Il’ia Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman tried unsuccessfully to publish The Black Book, their accounting of the magnitude of Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, Georgy Aleksandrov, the head of the agitprop department and the individual who had been entrusted with setting up the Extraordinary Commission, wrote of the effort that were trying to imply that the destruction of the Jews was the Nazis’ primary intent, nothing that “the Germans established some kind of hierarchy in their destruction of the peoples of the Soviet Union. … The documents of the Extraordinary State Committee convincingly demonstrate that the Hitlerites destroyed, at one and the same time Russians, Jews, Byelorussians, Ukrainians, Latvians, Lithuanians, and other peoples of the Soviet Union.”35 He concluded that this officially sponsored effort was fatally flawed because it created the impression that the “Germans fought against the USSR for the sole purpose of destroying the Jews.”36

The Red Army liberates the extermination camps As the Red Army liberated the extermination camps of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek, it continued to collect documentation of the Nazis’ concerted efforts to eliminate the Jews. The photographs and films of the concentration camps in Germany itself were as close as most Americans or Britons came to the industrial murder carried

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 71 out by the Nazis and, of course, they had not witnessed the wholesale slaughter of millions of human beings in the East. Much of the documentation and evidence needed to convict the Nazi criminals would necessarily have to come from the Soviet investigations. The GPU “flying” military intelligence committees continued their work as the Red Army crossed into Poland. The first Vernichtungslager liberated by the Soviets was Majdanek, on the night of July 22–23, 1944. One of the first Belorussian Front military committees present at the camp’s liberation submitted a preliminary report the very same day that stated that this camp “was not an ordinary camp … rather, it was a camp designed for the extermination of people.”37 The report detailed the discovery “of gas chambers, and two ovens for the cremation of corpses.” The victims “included Russian prisoners of war, Poles that had been captured in 1939, political prisoners from various countries, and a significant number of Jews.”38 The members requested that “representatives of the Extraordinary Commission be sent immediately for the investigation of the Nazis’ atrocities in this camp.” The committee further requested that “moviemakers and photographers be sent as well in order adequately to document the unprecedented barbarism of the German Fascists as mere words simply cannot convey the horrors that have taken place here.”39 Many of the voluminous eyewitness protocols that were compiled by the Extraordinary Commission would be admitted as evidence without further corroboration both at the IMT and at other war crimes trials. The countless official military documents, reports and orders, as well as the interrogation records of captured German POW’s and the official court records of war crimes trials held in the USSR prior to the Nuremberg trials were also accepted as evidence.40 Ultimately, the Soviets would get their international war crimes trial for the major planners and organizers of the myriad atrocities committed by the Nazi regime in the East and the actual perpetrators would indeed be tried at the scene of their crimes. The Four Powers met in London in June of 1945 to hammer out the framework for this process. The representatives agreed that the Nazi political and military leadership were to be charged not only with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and the violation of the rules of warfare, but also for launching a war of aggression. Many general histories credit the United States with being in the forefront of the campaign to bring Nazi war criminals before the bar of justice, and as Francine Hirsch noted “conventional wisdom about the trials give little attention to the substantive role that the Soviets had in all aspects of the IMT.”41 In fact it was the Soviet Union that immediately recognized the uniquely criminal aspects of the German war of annihilation and insistently called for such a tribunal. The nature of Nazi warfare on the Eastern front had, of course, been criminal from the outset. The Soviets had been subjected to inhuman and barbaric acts which the regime went to great lengths to chronicle. The murder of millions of prisoners of war in violation of international law, the wholesale slaughter of Jews and the deaths of millions

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of other civilians from famine and deprivation during the occupation, the plundering of Soviet resources as well as the still untold story of the suffering of millions more Soviet citizens abducted for forced labor in Germany were all monstrous crimes. These atrocities were all meticulously documented by the Soviets in an enormous effort, in marked contrast to the efforts undertaken by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. According to Telford Taylor, the Chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, the commission “had no investigatory staff or, for that matter, adequate staff for any substantial undertaking.”42 Looking through the voluminous files and reports of the Extraordinary Commission one is first appalled by the sheer scale of the destruction, but then begins to see that Stalin hoped to recoup these losses through war reparations. An exact accounting would be necessary in order to press for reparations. More important, the cult of the Great Patriotic War would be used to confer legitimacy upon Stalin’s regime, whose mistakes and crimes were not completely unknown by this time. But there is also no doubt that the evidentiary material compiled by the Extraordinary Committee and the military committees proved of enormous importance for the prosecution of the Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. The Soviets’ insistence on such an international trial and their contributions to jurisprudence, regardless of the political cynicism sometimes displayed, should be applauded. But the deliberate downplaying of the Jewish identities of many of Hitler’s victims both during the war and since is unconscionable. This political manipulation of the identity of the dead was, and still is, bone-chilling.

Postwar denials of Jewish victimhood That the Soviet Union suffered grievously is beyond doubt, but Putin’s annual calls for the remembrance of the tens of millions war dead (with the clear implication that these were all “Russian”) of course includes many millions who were not ethnic Russians and millions more were “Soviet” only as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet regime deliberately chose which victims to commemorate. Of the twenty five million war dead only ten million were combat soldiers, of whom 3.3 million died in captivity—the Soviet POWs who died such miserable deaths in Nazi captivity, primarily during the winter of 1941-1942. Jewish prisoners were shot out of hand, and as the Soviet Union was an empire that comprised dozens of nationalities, so in all likelihood half of these ten million military dead were not ethnically Russian. The majority of the civilians that died were also Jews, Ukrainians and Byelorussians. Thus, it is highly unlikely that a majority of the casualties were ethnic Russians. After decades of official silence Evgenii Evtushenko’s 1961 poem Babi Yar, published in the government-controlled Literaturnaia gazeta, finally commemorated the Jews murdered by the Nazis outside of Kiev. It was met with consternation by Soviet officials, and when Dmitrii Shostakovich

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 73 subsequently wrote a symphony based on this poem which premiered in Moscow in December 1962, Khrushchev castigated him for “raising the unnecessary for anyone ‘Jewish question’ even though the fascists killed not only Jews.”43 A granite marker grudgingly placed to honor the victims of Babi Yar noted only that “peaceful Soviet citizens” had been slaughtered there. In 1976 a statue was unveiled with very little publicity which was again categorized as a memorial for the Soviet people, specifically Kievan citizens and POWs, who had been shot there in September 1941. Finally, in September 1991, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy—during the last days of Gorbachev’s celebrated era of glasnost’ and just before the collapse of the Soviet Union—Ukrainian authorities publicly admitted for the first time that Jews were the principal victims at Babi Yar. Leonid Kravchuk, the head of the Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Parliament) of Ukraine, and soon to become the first President of an independent Ukraine, acknowledged that the Soviet regime “concealed from the people the historical truth about the Babi Yar tragedy, about the fact that the majority of the victims of the mass shootings were Jews.”44 At this time additional monuments were erected. One, a Menorah commemorating the Jewish victims has been vandalized with increasing frequency of late. Supposedly more truthful plaques were installed with inscriptions in Hebrew, Russian, and Ukrainian. The latter is particularly ironic given the widespread cooperation of many Ukrainians with the Germans in the dispossession of the Jews’ material goods and their frequent participation not only in independent acts of murder and cruelty against Jews but even in supervised executions. Now there are even memorial plaques celebrating the pogromshchiki of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). None of the plaques there now connect the murder of Kiev’s Jews with the Holocaust itself, but instead, this time in the service of Ukrainian nationalism, assert that over 130,000 Ukrainians (including Jews, other civilians, Soviet prisoners of war, and so on.) were murdered there. The numbers have always been in dispute as along with the tens of thousands of Jews, probably an equal number of Soviet prisoners of war and other civilians were also killed in Kiev during the course of the entire Nazi occupation from mid-September 1941 to early November 1943. The daily action reports of Einsatzgruppen C documented that 33,731 Jews were executed the last two days of September 1941 and this number is now widely accepted. The Extraordinary State Commission reported at the Nuremberg trial that during the occupation of Kiev over 100,000 Soviet citizens were killed.45 Ukrainian nationalists continue to insist on their own memorials and, like the Soviets before them, try to subsume the Jewish victims into their own possibly inflated figure. Trying to reconcile these competing memories, on the seventy sixth anniversary of the massacre, in September 2017, President Petro Poroshenko called Babi Yar “a mutual tragedy for Ukrainian and Jewish people and the deepest wound of the Holocaust.”46

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Of the millions of Jews who found themselves trapped behind German lines very few survived. Soviet Jewish soldiers captured by the Germans were summarily executed precisely because they were Jews. Many others died fighting for the Soviet Motherland but their sacrifices were officially minimized and discounted despite the fact that a greater proportion of Jews died in battle than any other ethnic group, including Russians. A pernicious myth circulated that most Jews evaded military service and were often to be found in the rear echelon even if they were in the army. This same myth was propagated during World War I in Russia and after that conflict in Weimar Germany. In fact, all told fully half of the five million Jews in the Soviet Union perished in the conflict. Even worse, the JAC was eventually accused of treasonous activity and thirteen of its participants executed in 1952 for “spreading the exceptionally nationalistic idea that the Jews suffered more than anyone.” While these may have been the last political prisoners executed by Stalin, on the eve of his death there is anecdotal evidence linking the so-called Doctor’s Plot to a plan to embark on a nationwide pogrom.47 Stalin had, however, made clear his wish to “ethnically cleanse” all Jews from European Russia to the Soviet Far East in the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan. The denial of Jewish victimhood and of their sacrifices for their country, along with Stalin’s musings about the possible expulsion of virtually the entire Jewish population to the east of the Urals, which was in fact similar to some of the earlier plans drawn up by the Nazis, could have presaged yet another genocide of the remaining Jews in the Soviet Union if not for the sudden death of Stalin in March 1953. Historians have not found any definitive evidence that such a deportation was imminent. As Robert Service, in his biography of Stalin writes “Whether Stalin really intended the deportations of the Jews in the early 1950s remains unknown, though this is widely treated as a fact; and no conclusive proof has come to light.”48 Stalin’s murderous expulsions of Kalmyks, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and Volga Germans from their homelands during the war, however, had provided all the proof the remaining 2.5 million Soviet Jews needed that they had been spared a similar fate by the dictator’s sudden demise.

Notes 1 Nina Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 2 Quoted in George Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996), 25. 3 Ibid., 31. 4 Nota Narodnogo Komissara Inostranykh Del Tov. V. M. Molotova o Chudovischnykh Zloedeianiiakh Zverstakh i Nasiliiakh Germanskikh Vlastei Za Eti Prestupleniia, RG-22.009.01.06 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), 13. 5 Ibid., 2.

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 75 6 Ibid., 13. 7 Richard Dougall, Arthur G. Kogan, Richard S. Patterson, and Irving L. Thomson, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conference at Quebec, 1944 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972), 123–125. 8 Quoted in Joseph Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Viking, 1994), 17. 9 USHMM, RG 22.009.01.07, 12. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 17. 13 Ibid., 19. 14 Ibid. 15 N.S. Lebedeva, Podgotokva Niurnbergskogo protsessa (Moscow, Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1975), 26–30. 16 Quoted in Lebedeva, Podgotovka, 65. 17 Joshua Rubenstein and Ilya Altman, The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German Occupied Territories (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 29. 18 Ibid., xix. 19 Ibid., xxii. 20 Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road, 38. 21 Ibid., 38–39, USHMM, RG 22.009.01.07, 25–31. 22 Ginsburgs, Moscow’s Road, 38. 23 There were three to five of these committees assigned to each Red Army “front.” There were several dozen of these “fronts” and although they were usually identified with a geographic region (1st Baltic Front, 2nd Ukrainian front, Caucasus Front, etc.) they were in fact military formations unique to the Russian and Soviet military; composed of three to five armies and they should not be confused with the Western usage of the term which denotes a broad geographic area of military operations. 24 USHMM, RG 22.008M, 72–73. 25 Soobshchenia Chrezvychainoi Gosudarstvennoi Kommissii po Ustanovleniiu i Rasledovaniiu Zlodeianii Nemetsko-Fashistikh Okkupantov i ikh posobnikov na Vremenno Okkupirovannoi Territorii SSSR, Moscow, 1944, tom 27, 864. 26 Yitzhak Arad, The Holocaust in the Soviet Union (Lincoln, NE and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009), 539–540. 27 Quoted in Aleksandr Burakovskiy, “Holocaust remembrance in Ukraine: memorialization of the Jewish tragedy at Babi Yar,” in Nationalities Papers 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 373. 28 Ian Kershaw’s concept of “working toward the Fuhrer” elaborated in a 1993 essay and elsewhere has been enormously influential. In short, Kershaw argues that Hitler did not manage the daily workings of the Nazi state, instead issuing broad policy goals and ambitions that state and party officials scrambled to fulfill as they sought to please him and advance their own careers. 29 USHMM, RG 22.009.01.04, 33. 30 USHMM, RG 22.009.01.04, 24–25. 31 USHMM, RG 22.009.01.04, 39–40. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid., 32. 34 Pravda, July 26, 1943, 1. 35 Quoted in Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 216.

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36 Shimon Redlich, ed., War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documentary History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR (Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 365–366. 37 USHMM, RG 22.008.01.05, 459. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid., 460. 40 For a complete discussion of the Soviets impressive effort at the compilation of evidence see Marina Sorokina “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR,” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no.4 (2005), 797–831. 41 Francine Hirsch, “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order,” American Historical Review 113, no.3 (June 2008):703. 42 Telford Taylor, The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir (New York: Skyhorse), 27. 43 Quoted in Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 39, no. 3 (May 2011): 375. 44 Vyacheslav Hrynevych, “Babyn Yar after Babyn Yar,” in Vyacheslav Hrynevych and Paul Robert Magosci, eds. Babyn Yar, History and Memory (Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016), 145–146. 45 Niurembergskii Protsess: Sbornik Materialov, 3rd edition (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridecheskoi litertury, 1955), I, 548. 46 Vlasti Ukrainy vystupili s zaiavleniiami v den’ 76th anniversary of the Babi Yar tragedy. September 29, 2017, https://www.news.ru.com/29sep2017/ravine.html 47 Louis Rapoport, Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctor’s Plot and the Soviet Solution (New York: Free Press, 1990). 48 Robert Service, Stalin: A Biography (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 637.

Bibliography Archival sources Nota Narodnogo Komissara Inostranykh Del Tov. V. M. Molotova o Chudovischnykh Zloedeianiiakh Zverstakh i Nasiliiakh Germanskikh Vlastei Za Eti Prestupleniia, RG-22.009.01.06 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Niurembergskii Protsess: Sbornik Materialov, 3rd edition. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo iuridecheskoi litertury, 1955. Soobshchenia Chrezvychainoi Gosudarstvennoi Kommissii po Ustanovleniiu i Rasledovaniiu Zlodeianii Nemetsko-Fashistikh Okkupantov i ikh posobnikov na Vremenno Okkupirovannoi Territorii SSSR, Moscow, 1944.

Publications Arad, Yitzhak. The Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Lincoln, NE and Jerusalem: University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2009. Burakovskiy, Aleksandr. “Holocaust Remembrance in Ukraine: Memorialization of the Jewish Tragedy at Babi Yar.” Nationalities Papers 39, No. 3 (May 2011): 371–389. Dougall, Richard, Arthur G. Kogan, Richard S. Patterson, and Irving L. Thomson, eds., Foreign Relations of the United States: The Conference at Quebec, 1944. Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1972.

Soviet denial of Jewish victims’ identity 77 Ginsburgs, George. Moscow’s Road to Nuremberg: The Soviet Background to the Trial. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1996. Hirsch, George. “The Soviets at Nuremberg: International Law, Propaganda, and the Making of the Postwar Order.” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 701–730. Hrynevych, Vyacheslav and Paul Robert Magosci, eds. Babyn Yar: History and Memory. Kyiv: Dukh i Litera, 2016. Lebedeva, Natalia Sergeevna. Podgotokva Niurnbergskogo protsessa. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Nauka, 1975. Persico, Joseph. Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial. New York: Viking, 1994. Rapoport, Louis. Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctor’s Plot and the Soviet Solution. New York: Free Press, 1990. Redlich, Shimon, ed. War, Holocaust and Stalinism: A Documentary History of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the USSR. Luxembourg: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995. Rubenstein, Joshua and Ilya Altman. The Unknown Black Book: The Holocaust in the German Occupied Territories. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008. Service, Robert. Stalin: A Biography. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. Sorokina, Marina. “People and Procedures: Toward a History of the Investigation of Nazi Crimes in the USSR.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005), 797–831. Taylor, Telford. The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials: A Personal Memoir. New York: Skyhorse, 2013. Tumarkin, Nina. The Living and the Dead: The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia. New York: Basic Books, 1995. Weiner, Amir. Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.

5

Commemorating colonial violence from the Dutch golden age: New Netherland and Coen’s conquest of the Banda Islands in Dutch memory cultures Mark Meuwese

The remarkable economic growth and the impressive scientific and cultural achievements of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic have become known as the Dutch Golden Age. In Dutch museums today, exhibits about the Golden Age continue to draw large numbers of visitors from around the world. This was the age of Rembrandt and Vermeer, after all. One aspect of the Dutch Golden Age that is less edifying has only recently become the subject of public debate and criticism: Dutch colonialism and, in particular, Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the role of slavery in the Dutch colonies. The public debate in the Netherlands about the negative aspects of the Dutch Golden Age has at times become highly divisive and politicized. This polarizing discussion is evident when comparing the ways in which two seventeenth-century Dutch colonies have recently been commemorated in the Netherlands.1 In 2009, lectures and exhibits were organized in Amsterdam, New York City, and elsewhere to commemorate the 400–year anniversary of Henry Hudson’s voyage to North America in 1609. Hudson was an English navigator who sailed in service of the Dutch East India Company in an attempt to find a passage to Asia. Instead, Hudson found a major river which the local Mahican nation knew as the Mahicanituk—where the “great waters or sea … are constantly in motion,” said a Mahican leader at the time—which would later come to be known as the Hudson River.2 During Hudson’s exploration of the Mahicanituk River, relations with Indigenous peoples varied from peaceful to violent. In the wake of Hudson’s voyage, the Dutch colonized the region and called it New Netherland. During the commemorations of 2009, little was said about the impact of Dutch colonialism on the Indigenous peoples of New Netherland. Descriptions of the Dutch massacres of hundreds of Algonquians in the early 1640s, for example, were not allowed to disturb the festivities. Instead, all the focus was on the Dutch as the founders of New Amsterdam, the colonial town that would later become the great, world-class metropolis of New York City.3 Two years later, another event from the Dutch Golden Age was publicly discussed in the Netherlands. This time a public discussion centered on the DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-5

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statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen, one of the first Governor-Generals of the Dutch East Indies in the early seventeenth century. Since 1893, a statue of Coen has been prominently displayed in the old town square of the Dutch city of Hoorn, the birthplace of Coen. While the statue of Coen was originally established to celebrate the “founding father” of the Dutch Empire in Southeast Asia, over the course of the late twentieth century the statue has become linked with Coen’s violent policies toward the people of the Banda Islands in eastern Indonesia. In 1621, Governor-General Coen initiated a brutal military campaign on behalf of the Dutch East India Company against the peoples of the Banda Islands in order to enforce a monopoly on the cultivation of nutmeg and mace, two tropical commodities that were exclusively grown there. In this genocidal campaign, hundreds of native islanders were killed and thousands of others were enslaved by the Dutch East India Company army led by Coen. After 1622, the Dutch East India Company repopulated the Banda Islands by importing slaves and servants from other Southeast Asian islands.4 In 2011, concerned citizens submitted a petition to the city council of Hoorn to ask for the removal of the statue of Coen because they held him responsible for the genocide of the native Banda Islanders. A discussion took place in the Hoorn city council but also at the national level in the Netherlands about what to do with the statue. A special exhibit was held in Hoorn in which visitors could vote about whether Coen’s statue should be removed. The outcome of the local and national debate was that the statue would stay but that a permanent interpretive sign would be installed to refer to his violent actions on the Banda Islands.5 When comparing the Henry Hudson commemorations of 2009 with the heated debate about Coen in 2011, it is clear that Dutch-Indigenous relations from the Dutch Golden Age are remembered in similar but evolving ways in the contemporary Netherlands. While interactions with Indigenous peoples were absent from the Henry Hudson celebrations in 2009, the statue of Coen was almost toppled in 2011 because of public criticism for Coen’s genocidal actions against the Banda Islanders in 1621. To explain the discrepancy between the absence of Indigenous peoples in the public memory of New Netherland and the strong public criticism of Coen’s actions, it is important to first discuss the development of Dutch memory cultures of New Netherland and the Banda Islands. Collective memory cultures refer to the multifaceted ways in which the seventeenth century Dutch colonies in North America and the Banda Islands have been represented in Dutch media, literature, exhibits, monuments, and public events.6 The Dutch memory culture of New Netherland has consistently downplayed the impact of Dutch colonialism on Indigenous peoples. This is quite different from the Dutch memory culture surrounding Coen and the conquest of the Banda Islands, which since at least the late nineteenth century has regularly inspired outrage at the perpetration of colonial violence. At the same time,

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radically revising Dutch memory culture about Dutch colonialism in the East Indies remains contentious in the contemporary Netherlands.

New Netherland memory culture before 2009 By the late seventeenth century, the once-extensive Dutch Empire in the Atlantic world had been reduced to several small Caribbean islands, the plantation colonies of Surinam, Berbice, and Essequibo in South America, and a handful of fortified trading posts on the coast of West Africa. As the Dutch geopolitical and economic roles in the Atlantic world further declined over the course of the eighteenth century, awareness within the Dutch Republic about the history of Dutch expansion in North America largely disappeared. It was only after the independence of the United States and the rise of Dutch nationalism following the Napoleonic wars in the early nineteenth century that New Netherland was rediscovered by Dutch authors and scholars. This renewed interest focused primarily upon Dutch colonial rulers, political institutions, and the Dutch Reformed Church in North America. Some authors also expressed interest in the transmission of Dutch culture and customs to North America. Dutch relations with Native Americans did not receive much attention. During the nineteenth century, memory culture about New Netherland remained limited to publications and lectures. No exhibits or public commemorations were held in the Netherlands to celebrate the largely forgotten Dutch colony in North America.7 After World War Two, memory culture of New Netherland became more public-oriented through exhibits and other events. In 1955, Petrus Stuyvesant, the last Director-General who governed New Netherland from 1647 until 1664, was commemorated in his birth-province of Friesland. A modest exhibit was held which mostly celebrated his role in the founding of New Netherland. Dutch dignitaries attended the festivities, and a small memorial and statue honoring Stuyvesant were unveiled. It still stands tall in the Frisian countryside. Dutch-Indigenous relations did not feature in the commemoration or concurrent exhibit.8 It was not until 1966 that a Dutch scholarly publication focused on Dutch-Indigenous relations in New Netherland. An article by J.W. Schulte-Nordholt, one of the first Dutch academics to specialize in American history, provided an explicit, strong critique of Dutch violence against Native Americans.9 During the 1980s, more critical attention was paid to the Dutch colonial impact on the Indigenous peoples of North America. In November 1980, the Fourth Russell Tribunal was held in Rotterdam. This non-binding tribunal, consisting of prominent legal scholars, philosophers, and public intellectuals, was the fourth in a series held in different international locations to call attention to serious human rights violations.10 The fourth tribunal focused on the rights of the Indigenous peoples of North and South America. One of the many Indigenous presenters was Oren Lyons, an

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Onondaga-Haudenosaunee leader. Lyons spoke of the Two Row Wampum alliance that the Haudenosaunee had established with the Dutch in the early seventeenth century. According to the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) interpretation of the Two Row Wampum, the Dutch respected the independence of the Haudenosaunee. Although the weeklong tribunal was well-covered by the Dutch media, the testimony by Lyons did not result in any significant reflections on the impact of Dutch colonial violence on the Indigenous peoples of New Netherland.11 More indicative of the Dutch memory of New Netherland in the early 1980s was the unveiling of a statue of Petrus Stuyvesant in Amsterdam. In 1981, a statue of Stuyvesant was placed in the courtyard of the restored West-India House in Amsterdam. This building had served as the headquarters of the West-India Company in the first half of the seventeenth century. To mark the completion of the restored building, a Dutch tobacco company gifted a bronze statue of Stuyvesant to the West-India House. The statue, made by the artist Hans Bayens, shows Stuyvesant looking angrily toward the meeting rooms of the West-India Company directors because they did not provide him with adequate support to defend the Dutch colony against the English. Stuyvesant surrendered the colony to the English in 1664. The statue symbolized how the Dutch remembered New Netherland as a colony that had tragically been lost to the English. If only the WestIndia Company directors had supplied Stuyvesant with more support, New Netherland could have somehow remained Dutch. Within this memory of New Netherland as a “lost colony,” the Dutch were the victims, and there was no place for critical reflection on Dutch colonialism’s negative effects upon the Indigenous peoples.12 In February and March 1983, a comprehensive exhibit was held in Amsterdam about the birth of New York City. The exhibit was held in conjunction with an exhibit in New York City as part of the two hundredyear anniversary of formal Dutch-American relations. The Amsterdam exhibit and catalogue paid substantial attention to Dutch-Indigenous relations, including the several wars fought between the two sides. However, the exhibit remained small in scale and did not receive much national attention.13 Several years later, in the fall of 1995, a small exhibit was organized at a major art museum in Rotterdam entitled “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” This exhibit was remarkable because it focused on how seventeenth-century European material goods were used and transformed by Indigenous peoples, in particular the Haudenosaunee. In the seventeenth century, the Dutch established extensive trade relations with the Haudenosaunee. The exhibit was accompanied by a collection of essays that was aimed at a specialized audience rather than the wider public. Generally, though, Dutch public interest in New Netherland remained limited throughout the late twentieth century and the history of colonial violence there was rarely acknowledged.14

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New Netherland memory culture from 2009 to 2017 It was not until the 2009 commemoration of Henry Hudson’s voyage to North America in 1609 that New Netherland became a more prominent subject of Dutch memory culture. On both sides of the Atlantic, festivities and cultural events were organized to celebrate the 400–year anniversary of Hudson’s voyage. In the Netherlands, state institutions and private businesses, such as the electronics giant Philips, played an active role in shaping the Hudson commemorations.15 Apart from celebrating Hudson’s voyage, the events emphasized the founding of New Netherland, especially the city of New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island. To highlight the connections with present-day New York City and on American-Dutch relations, emphasis was placed on the legacies of ethnic diversity, economic opportunity, and religious tolerance in New Netherland. This became especially clear in the inaugural lectures to the commemorations held in Amsterdam in April 2009 in which Geert Mak and Russell Shorto, two popular authors and public historians, one Dutch and the other American, highlighted the themes of cultural diversity and toleration. Although scholars have questioned whether the seventeenth-century Dutch were truly tolerant or champions of multiculturalism, for the early twenty-first century Dutch government and the wider public in the Netherlands the values of multi-culturalism and religious toleration were quickly and proudly embraced.16 It was perhaps predictable that Dutch-Indigenous relations in New Netherland were largely absent from the Hudson commemorations. However, following the talks by Shorto and Mak, two individuals took to the microphone to ask how the Indigenous peoples had been treated by the Dutch. The two audience members were Mohawks, one of the peoples of the Haudenosaunee confederacy. One of the two Mohawks, Jerry Thundercloud McDonald, had asked to be included in this anniversary program, but the Dutch organizers had rejected his request for unspecified reasons. Eventually they were able to visit the Netherlands with help from NANAI, a Dutch support group of North American Indigenous peoples. The two Mohawks reminded the audience in Amsterdam in April 2009 that the supposedly tolerant and multicultural colony of New Netherland was built on land taken from Indigenous peoples. The two Mohawks were entertained as guests of honor at a film and documentary festival organized by NANAI in Amsterdam the next day. At the festival they were able to formally offer a ceremonial belt of wampum to the Deputy Mayor of Amsterdam. This wampum belt was a traditional way for the Haudenosaunee confederacy to mark an important event. According to the two Mohawks, the wampum belt symbolized the enduring alliance established between the Dutch and the Indigenous peoples in New Netherland in 1613. The Amsterdam Deputy Mayor reportedly accepted the belt but also admitted that she did not know what to do with it. The reaction

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of the Amsterdam official was indicative of a general Dutch ignorance of Indigenous perspectives surrounding the 2009 commemoration.17 For younger Dutch audiences, a comic book about the history of New Netherland was also published in conjunction with the 2009 commemoration. The comic book was sponsored by the Roosevelt Institute for the Study of American History, which is located in the Netherlands and authorized by the U.S. Embassy in The Hague and by the Dutch Department of Foreign Affairs. Based on these credentials one would expect a relatively nuanced discussion of Dutch-Indigenous relations, yet this was not the case. The comic book is entitled Struggle for New York, but the struggle refers primarily to the Anglo-Dutch wars for control of the North American colony. Relations between Native Americans and Dutch settlers are covered in some detail. Without much documentary evidence, the comic book portrays Henry Hudson as a sympathetic explorer who establishes friendly relations with the Natives. The book gives a chronological overview of the Dutch colony up to the English conquest of 1664. Throughout, Native Americans are stereotypically portrayed as Plains Indians. One Native American character is even called “Geronimo,” the name of the famous Apache leader from the American Southwest. The lack of historical accuracy and stereotypical depictions collapse the Natives into a caricature. Dutch violence against the Indigenous peoples of New Netherland is discussed though, including the massacres of the Algonquian communities by the Dutch in the early 1640s. Director Willem Kieft, the colonial official who initiated the bloodbaths, is portrayed as an evil man who needlessly plunged the colony into chaos. After the war, one of the Dutch characters is shown trading with the Indians. Although he indirectly tells the reader that as long as you treat them with respect relations will be fine, he is also shown manipulating the Indians during trade relations. His manipulation is justified by stating that this is simply how the shrewd Dutch do business. Indigenous peoples are portrayed as a simple people who can be easily taken advantage of. Natives are infantilized, and readers are positioned to see them only as in need of protection from liquor consumption and aggressive settlers. The main purpose of the comic book is not to illuminate previously evaded colonial violence inflicted on indigenous people, but to celebrate the history of the Dutch colony as well as the role played by famous Americans of Dutch descent, such as the Roosevelts.18 This functions to perpetuate the myth that indigenous people were destined to become victims to “progress.” A similarly well-intentioned but simplistic and demeaning portrayal of Indigenous peoples was displayed by a popular Dutch TV children’s show Klokhuis (“Apple-core”) three years after the Hudson commemorations. Originally aired on October 30, 2012, the show broadcast an episode called “New Amsterdam” which covered the Dutch origins of New York City. The host expresses amazement that present-day New York City was once a Dutch colonial town. The host interviews the American historian Evan Haefeli, who talks about a seventeenth-century Dutch manuscript kept in

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the Brooklyn Historical Society. There is also a scene in which actors dressed up as Henry Hudson and Indigenous people act out the Dutch “purchase” of Manhattan Island in 1625. While the actor playing Hudson is allowed to speak, the actors playing Indigenous people remain silent and sit around an anachronistic tepee. The actors appear to be Dutchmen dressed up as Native Americans. Eventually the “Indians” smoke a peace pipe with Hudson. The explorer then explains to the Dutch journalist, also dressed up as a seventeenth-century Dutchman, that he is about to make a very lucrative real estate deal: “don’t tell the Indians that Manhattan will later become the site of a great city, it will drive up the price.” There is no attempt in the scene to explain what the “purchase” of Manhattan meant for the Indigenous people. Echoing the depiction of Native peoples in the comic book, the Indigenous people of New Netherland in this television episode are presented as simplistic people who can be easily manipulated.19 These depictions contribute to a Dutch narrative that avoids confronting the violence of colonization. One year later, Dutch-Indigenous relations in New Netherland again received significant public attention. However, this time the event was driven by Haudenosaunee initiatives, not by Dutch ones. In 2013, the Haudenosaunee held a public campaign in North America to draw attention to the Two Row Wampum Alliance, concluded exactly four hundred years earlier between their peoples and the Dutch in New Netherland. As part of the commemoration, a Haudenosaunee delegation traveled down the Hudson River from their ancestral homelands in upstate New York. When they arrived in Manhattan in August 2013, the Iroquois delegation had a meeting with the local Dutch consul-general, in which the Two Row Wampum belt relationship was renewed. It was emphasized that this alliance was based on mutual respect for each other’s sovereignty. The Two Row Wampum Alliance could therefore be celebrated by the Haudenosaunee as a model for how the United States and Canada should treat Indigenous peoples. One month after the event on Manhattan, the Netherlands Centre for Indigenous Peoples, a Dutch activist group supporting Indigenous causes, organized a similar ceremony in The Hague in the Netherlands. During this event, Onondaga leader Oren Lyons, now eighty-three years old, met the official Dutch ambassador for Human Rights. During their meeting the Two Row Wampum Alliance was highlighted once again. Through the initiatives of the Haudenosaunee, the Dutch government was forced to acknowledge its ongoing relationship with the Indigenous peoples of its former colony.20 Two additional, more recent expressions of Dutch memory culture of New Netherland show the ongoing ambivalence about the portrayal of Indigenous peoples in the former Dutch colony. In the summer of 2017, a new exhibit opened in Madurodam, a major tourist attraction in The Hague where many prominent and famous Dutch houses, buildings, and churches have been reconstructed in miniature. Madurodam is popular with children and families and receives almost 700,000 visitors each year. As part of

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Madurodam’s ongoing expansion, an exhibit opened in 2017 simply called “Nieuw Amsterdam.” This is an immersive virtual reality experience described as a “family attraction that tells the story of New York’s Dutch roots.” Visitors start in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, where they board a ship to set sail to New Amsterdam, “the city currently known as New York.” The exhibit focuses primarily on the struggle of Stuyvesant against the English in 1664. After arriving in New Amsterdam visitors enter a large room where one sees an animatronic Stuyvesant urging visitors to fire a cannon toward English ships in the New York harbor, while the English fire virtual cannonballs in return. This is accompanied by the sounds of cannonfire and splashing water. When the artillery exchange ends and New Netherland surrenders, a voiceover discusses how contemporary New York City emerged in its place. In the entire exhibit no mention is made whatsoever of Native Americans. New Amsterdam and New Netherland are to be exclusively remembered as places where the Dutch heroically struggled against the English and as a place where the Dutch paved the way for what later became New York City. Visitors leave without ever knowing that Indigenous peoples played a fundamental role as allies—and enemies—in the Dutch colony.21 This omission contributes to ongoing denial of the genocidal atrocities against indigenous peoples. From a much more nuanced and realistic perspective came the publication in the fall of 2017 of a novel aimed at teenagers, Hendrick, the Dutch Indian by Bianca Mastenbroek, a Dutch author of several other historical novels for young readers. The well-researched novel is about a sixteen-year-old Dutch boy named Hendrick who is captured by the Esopus tribe in 1659 during the so-called Esopus War between Dutch settlers and the Esopus tribe in the Hudson River Valley. The novel describes how Hendrick is eventually adopted by the Esopus people and how he learns their language and becomes familiar with their culture. Over time, Hendrick learns to appreciate the Esopus point of view of their conflict with the Dutch settlers. Marginalized histories are often resurrected in Young Adult literature as a way to encourage younger generations to learn more about the past, especially parts that are left out of school curriculum. This young adult novel is one of the few ways in which the Dutch public is encouraged to reflect on the topic of Dutch-Indigenous violence in New Netherland.22 For the broader public, though, New Netherland continues to be represented in a romantic and nationalistic manner. It is a place where Dutch settlers heroically and against all odds established the foundations for what later became the prosperous city of New York. Indigenous peoples play only a marginal or supportive role in the current Dutch representations of New Netherland.

Dutch memory culture of Coen and the Banda Islands In contrast to the largely positive celebration of New Netherland in Dutch culture, there is a much stronger awareness in contemporary Dutch society

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about the destructive colonial policies of the East India Company against the Indigenous peoples of the Banda Islands. One reason that Coen and his role on the Banda Islands was treated much more critically is that the Banda Islands remained a continuous Dutch colonial possession until the decolonization of Indonesia in 1949. Additionally, since the late nineteenth century Governor Coen’s role in the ethnic cleansing of Banda had already been viewed from a critical perspective by some Dutch authors and public intellectuals. Several years before the statue of Coen was unveiled in Hoorn in 1893, some prominent Dutch scholars were already criticizing Coen for his violent conquest of the Banda Islands. This negative view of Coen and the conquest of Banda was best summarized by J.A. van der Chijs, the head of the Dutch colonial archives in Batavia. In 1886, Van der Chijs published an important collection of primary sources related to Coen’s conquest of Banda. Van der Chijs concluded that Coen’s behavior in Banda had been horrific. The archivist believed that Coen’s heroic reputation as the founder of the Dutch empire in Asia was forever tainted by the bloody events at Banda.23 At the same time, the critical interpretation of Coen’s conquest of Banda by Van der Chijs did not radically change the public understanding of Dutch colonialism more broadly. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Coen continued to be celebrated as a Dutch national hero who had laid the foundations of the Dutch empire in the East Indies. This celebratory view was most clearly expressed through the construction and public unveiling of statues of Coen in the Netherlands and in the Dutch East Indies. In 1876 a statue of Coen was first put up in Batavia, followed by one in Amsterdam in 1883 and a third one in Hoorn in 1893. The statue of Coen in Amsterdam, an exact copy of the one in Batavia, was positioned at the main entrance of the 1883 World Exhibition, which unabashedly showcased the Netherlands as a prominent colonial power. In 1903, a likeness of Coen with one of his famous phrases was displayed on the façade of the modern commodity exchange building in Amsterdam. During the 1920s smaller statues of Coen were also constructed at the main entrances of the Royal Institute for the Tropics and the Dutch Trade Corporation, both in Amsterdam. As historian Emmie Snijders has pointed out, the main purpose of all these Coen statues was to honor Coen as the founder of the Dutch empire. That is, the glorification was less for the individual, Coen, than for the Dutch colonial past and present.24 Another indication of the positive memory of Coen in the early twentieth century is that Dutch high school history textbooks celebrated Coen as a founding father of the Dutch empire. In the most widely used schoolbooks, Coen was presented as a courageous empire builder who had bravely defended Dutch interests against aggressive English competitors and despotic Asian rulers. Some of the publications acknowledged that Coen used violence to build the Dutch empire. However, the violence used by Coen was justified as being necessary in order to maintain Dutch colonial possessions.25 This suggest

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that even though the actions were genocidal, colonial violence was considered acceptable. During the first half of the twentieth century, Dutch memory of Coen and his conquest of Banda became contested. A more critical view of Coen was influenced by the Ethical Policy (Ethische Politiek) of the Dutch in Indonesia after 1900. Ironically, after the brutal pacification of many parts of Indonesia by the Dutch colonial army, the Dutch state initiated a campaign to uplift the Indonesian population through better healthcare and education. Beginning in 1900, an increasing number of Dutch politicians and commentators also advocated greater self-governance for the Indonesian peoples. In this changing social and political context, Coen’s violent conquest of Banda became an awkward historical event, contradicting official rhetoric and propaganda. More critical views of Coen’s policies in Banda were expressed by professional historians, especially the Dutch leftist historians Jan Romein and his wife Annie Romein-Verschoor. In 1938 they published the first parts of their multi-volume biographical history of the Netherlands. In the volume on the seventeenth century, the Romeins discuss the life and career of Coen, acknowledging that Coen was a notable figure of the Dutch Golden Age because of his influential role in the establishment of the Dutch empire in Asia. However, the Romeins also note that Coen, in contrast to seventeenth-century Dutch naval heroes such as Piet Hein and Michiel de Ruijter, had never been celebrated as a national hero until the late nineteenth century. The Romeins recommend that those who celebrate Coen as the founder of the Dutch empire should also realize that his foundations were at the expense of the peoples of Banda. The Romeins couple’s serious examination of Coen’s actions opened the door to a possible Dutch recognition of the genocide of the peoples of Banda.26 Despite the critical interpretations of Coen by the Romeins, the Dutch governor continued to be widely honored for his role in solidifying the Dutch empire in Asia. For example, in 1919 the Dutch Queen Wilhelmina presided over a wreath-laying ceremony at the statue of Coen in Hoorn to commemorate Coen’s founding of Batavia three centuries earlier. Similarly, in 1937, large festivities were held in Hoorn to mark the three hundred and fifty–year anniversary of Coen’s birth. The festivities were attended by the conservative Prime Minister Hendrikus Colijn. In that same anniversary year, three popular biographies of Coen were published, expressing positive as well as critical views. Finally, from 1919 to 1934 most of Coen’s personal correspondence was published. The extensive correspondence was edited by the prominent Dutch historian H.P. Colenbrander, who also wrote a detailed biography. Although Colenbrander admitted that Coen’s behavior at Banda had been excessive and inhumane, he supported the prevalent view of Coen as “one of the toughest, bravest, and most authentic Netherlanders who has ever been born.”27 From the end of the War for Indonesian Independence in 1949 until the 1980s Coen and his conquest of Banda disappeared again from public memory in the Netherlands. Significantly, during the Dutch military

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campaigns against independence fighters in Indonesia from 1945 to 1949, two popular biographies of Coen were published in the Netherlands. Following the independence of Indonesia in December 1949, Dutch history textbooks devoted less attention to Coen as a founding father of the now greatly reduced Dutch empire. Additionally, because of changing curriculum concerns in the 1960s Dutch history schoolbooks also began to focus more on twentieth century history. Less space was made available for the Golden Age, and the Dutch colonial empire was downplayed.28 Interestingly, Dutch professional historians also ignored Coen and the conquest of Banda after the independence of Indonesia in 1949. In fact, from 1949 until the late 1960s there was little scholarship published on the history of the Dutch empire in general. This lack of scholarly interest was undoubtedly caused by the traumatic loss of the East Indies Empire after World War Two. It was only in the 1970s that a new generation of historians re-discovered the Dutch Empire in the East Indies as a subject of study. However, Coen and the conquest of Banda were largely ignored by this new generation of historians. Influenced by the methods and ideals of social history, the new generation of Dutch colonial historians was primarily interested in neglected social and economic aspects of Dutch expansion. Neither Coen nor the conquest of Banda fit into the new approach of these social historians. A popular survey of the Dutch East India Company written by prominent social historian Femme Gaastra, published in 1986, is indicative in its treatment of Coen and Banda. In Gaastra’s survey Coen and his conquest of Banda receive little attention and readers are more or less expected to be familiar with the violent conquest of Banda.29 At the same time, in the 1980s popular audiences in the Netherlands continued to be fascinated by the adventurous and heroic aspects of Dutch overseas expansion. This became evident in the popular TV series, The Dutch Overseas, which was broadcast from 1983 to 1986. The documentary series discussed the rise of the Dutch overseas empire from 1585 to 1650. It attracted large viewing audiences, sometimes of up to two million people. One episode discussed Coen’s conquest of Banda and acknowledged the excessive violence used by the Dutch. However, the general tone of the series was celebratory. It portrayed Dutch expansion as an exotic and heroic adventure in which a small country was able to establish a global empire against great odds.30 Perhaps encouraged by the tone of the popular TV series, the city of Hoorn in 1986 organized a new round of festivities to honor its famous son. By this time, however, a significant and vocal minority of people protested the celebration of Coen. Influenced by decolonization, changing school curricula, and social history, these protesters viewed Coen as a mass murderer. Although the majority of the city council was in favor of hosting the events to mark the four hundredth anniversary of the birth of Coen in Hoorn, leftist and progressive political parties voted against them. Some individual citizens of Hoorn also voiced their displeasure that their town was honoring an individual who was closely linked to genocide.

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Moreover, protesters from the Dutch Moluccan community distributed leaflets on the square where Coen’s statue was located. The leaflets drew attention to Coen’s actions on Banda as well as to the larger story of Dutch colonial expansion on the Maluku Islands (aka Spice Islands). Despite these protests, the Coen festivities were held, suggesting that the positive image of Coen as a heroic historical figure still resonated with the public. Furthermore, the Dutch National Mint issued a commemorative coin honoring Coen. While one side of the coin showed Coen’s facial features, the other side featured one of Coen’s memorable phrases. The one depicted by the Dutch mint was Coen’s assertion “to engage in honorable trade.”31 The selection of this quote for the commemorative coin in 1987 shows that Dutch national institutions continued to highlight Coen’s role as a successful merchant, rather than as an aggressive colonizer. This tendency was a precursor to the even more positive celebration of early Dutch expansion in Asia beginning in the late 1990s. As some historians have noted, during the 1990s and into the present century the Dutch became increasingly concerned about their “loss of identity.” This concern was caused by the accelerating integration of the Netherlands into the European Union as well as by the transformation of the country into a truly multi-ethnic society. In this uncertain context, a stream of popular and scholarly books about Dutch history were published. The most popular topic of this new flood of historical publications was the Golden Age, including the rise of the Dutch overseas empire. The success of the Dutch East India Company, shorn of the Company’s less attractive history, became an especially attractive subject which culminated in 2002 with the four hundred-year anniversary of the founding of the trade organization, but the focus of attention was selective. Perhaps for obvious reasons, it was not Coen and his violent conquest of Banda that drew public interest. Most popular histories and scholarly publications of the East India Company focused on international commerce and suggested that the company functioned in many ways as a modern multinational business organization. These sorts of publications also emphasized, among other superficial and uncritical topics, the adventures of sailors and soldiers in exotic Asian countries. Clearly the new wave of Dutch East India Company publications in the early twenty-first century did not devote much attention to the impact of Dutch colonialism on the Indigenous peoples of Southeast Asia.32 However, as the public controversy over Coen’s statue in Hoorn in 2011 made dramatically clear, the public image and memory of Coen and the Dutch conquest of the Banda Islands is now no longer exclusively celebratory. It is unlikely that public festivities will be held in Hoorn to honor Coen in the near future. Through the inclusion of a critical plaque on the Coen statue in Hoorn as well as due to the public attention, the Dutch public is now more aware of the violent aspects of seventeenth-century Dutch empire building in Southeast Asia and less comfortable celebrating a man who perpetrated genocide.

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Conclusion Contemporary debates and exhibits in the Netherlands about colonial violence committed against Indigenous peoples in the Dutch Golden Age have remained remarkably conservative. Although the brutal conquest of the Banda Islands is now generally accepted as a genocide, Coen’s statue in Hoorn continues to stand despite the heated public debate in 2011. What was also revealing about the debate in 2011 was that most of the discussion centered on Coen rather than on the impact of the Dutch policies and actions against the Banda Islanders. Instead of shedding more light on the Dutch destruction of the Banda Islanders and the implications of this for Dutch colonialism, the discussion in 2011 was mostly focused on Coen as a controversial figure in Dutch history. Similarly, in the memorialization of New Netherland the violence committed against Indigenous peoples in North America continues to be largely ignored. As is evident from the Hudson celebrations in 2009 and the Madurodam show of 2017, New Netherland is widely remembered as something the Dutch should be proud of. The fact that the struggling seventeenthcentury Dutch colony laid the foundations for the future metropolis of New York City plays a powerful role in the shaping of this positive Dutch memory of New Netherland. This positive memory continues to overshadow any negative memories such as the legacy of Dutch colonial violence against the Indigenous peoples. One of the few ways that people in the Netherlands are confronted with the legacies of colonial violence in New Netherland is through visits by members of the Haudenosaunee confederacy. This examination of the recent commemorations of seventeenth-century Dutch colonialism in North America and Southeast Asia shows that contemporary Dutch society prefers to conceal rather than to confront the legacies of colonial violence, including the genocide committed against the Banda Islanders. As a small but increasingly multicultural country in an uncertain world, the Netherlands cherishes its positive memory of the Golden Age. Although most people in the present-day Netherlands probably do not condone the ruthless actions of Governor-General Coen on the Banda Islands or the dispossession and massacres of the Algonquian peoples in New Netherland, the ongoing public celebration of Dutch overseas expansion in the Golden Age continues to marginalize and obscure the colonial violence that was also committed.

Notes 1 For an overview of the Dutch Golden Age, see Helmer J. Helmers and Geert H. Janssen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For the recent discussion about the role of slavery in the Dutch Golden Age, see the bilingual guide by Dienke Hondius and Annemarie de Wildt, eds., Amsterdam Slavery Heritage Guide (Arnhem: LM Publishers, 2014). For a critical perspective, see P.C. Emmer, Het zwart-wit

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7 8 9 10 11

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denken voorbij. Een bijdrage aan de discussie over kolonialisme, slavernij, en migratie (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2018). In a very recent development, even the term ‘Golden Age’ has become controversial in the context of Dutch colonialism, See Daniel Boffey, “End of Golden Age: Dutch Museum Bans Term from Exhibits,” The Guardian, September 13, 2019, accessed September 13, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/end-of-golden-age-amsterdammuseum-bans-term-from-exhibits. The quotation is from the eighteenth-century Mahican spokesman Hendrick Apaumaut, quoted in Robert Steven Grumet, Native American Place Names in New York City (New York City: Museum of the City of New York, 1981), 22. A.G. Sulzberger, “400 Years Later, and Still Proud of New Amsterdam,” New York Times September 13, 2009, accessed May 16, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/ 09/14/nyregion/14dutch.html. For the genocidal campaign against the Banda Islanders, see David Onnekink and Gijs Rommelse, The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of Global Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 35–36. See Stephanie Koenen, ed., Coen! Geroemd en verguisd (Hoorn: Westfries Museum and Poldervondsten, 2012), a glossy magazine about the Coen exhibit held in the Westfries Museum in Hoorn in 2012. For the local debate in the city council of Hoorn, see Emilie van Outeren, “Sorry dat dat standbeeld hier toch blijft,” NRC Handelsblad, Wednesday July 13, 2011 and for the national discussion, see Bart Funnekotter, “Eerst de ‘Maarten’, nu de ‘Coen!,” NRC de week: Internationale editie, Monday April 16, 2012, 1. The national debate about Coen also triggered a discussion about whether to change the name of the “Coen Tunnel,” a major highway-tunnel connecting Amsterdam with the region in which Hoorn is located. See Roelf Jan Duin, “Ondanks dubieuze reputatie mag J.P. Coen zijn tunnel houden,” Het Parool January 21, 2015, accessed May 16, 2019, https:// www.parool.nl/nieuws/ondanks-dubieuze-reputatie-mag-j-p-coen-zijn-tunnel-houden~b8bb13f7/?referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F. For a brief recent discussion of the challenges and opportunities of memory studies, especially as they relate to Indigenous history, see Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 12–14. Jaap Jacobs, Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de Zeventiende Eeuw (Amsterdam: Prometheus-Bert Bakker, 1999), 14–16. See the English-language catalogue edited by Martha Eerdmans, Pieter Stuyvesant: An Historical Documentation (Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1957). J.W. Schulte Nordholt, “Nederlanders in Nieuw Nederland: De oorlog van Kieft met als bijlage het Journael van Nieu-Nederland,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 80 (1966), 38–77. Initiated by Bertrand Russell and others in 1966 to investigate and publicize U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, the first tribunal remains the best-known, but several additional Russell Tribunals have been convened, long surviving Russell’s death in 1970. For Oren Lyons at the tribunal, see this article on the website of the Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign, accessed May 15, 2019, http://honorthetworow.org/ oren-w-two-row-russel-tribunal-198012_5_02-smaller/. For a critical review of the tribunals such as the Fourth Russell Tribunal, see Arthur W. Blaser, “How to advance Human Rights without Really Trying: An Analysis of Nongovernmental Tribunals,” Human Rights Quarterly 14, no. 3 (August 1992), 339–370. For the statue of Stuyvesant, see T.W.M. van Berkel, “Hans Bayens: ‘Peter Stuyvesant,’” accessed November 14, 2019, https://vanberkelbeelden.wordpress.com/ beeldhouwers/a-i/hans-bayens/peter-stuyvesant-amsterdam/. See also the website of

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16 17

18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27

Mark Meuwese the current owners of the West-India Huis in Amsterdam, https://www.taste.nl/2 014/10/16/historie-standbeeld-peter-stuyvesant/. I also obtained information about the statue from Jaap Jacobs, email communication March 2018. See the catalogue exhibit, edited by Roelof van Gelder, The Birth of New York: Nieuw Amsterdam, 1624-1664, Amsterdam Historical Museum, 1982 (exhibit held in Amsterdam from February-March 1983). Alexandra van Dongen, et al, One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure: The Metamorphosis of the European Utensil in the New World (Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1995). The Dutch National Archives helped organize the exhibit at the South Street Seaport Museum in New York City. This led to the book written by Martine Gosselink, New York, Nieuw-Amsterdam: De Nederlandse oorsprong van Manhattan (Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam and Nationaal Archief, 2009). Geert Mak and Russell Shorto, 1609: The Forgotten History of Hudson, Amsterdam, and New York (Amsterdam: Stichting Henry Hudson, 2009). For the presentation by the two Mohawks in Amsterdam in April 2009, see the blog posts by Frans Horbach of ‘Amsterdam-New York Art Station’: “Dutch and Mohawk” and “Re-thinking History: Mohawk meets Amsterdam,” accessed January 4, 2020, https://web.archive.org/web/20111118212946/http:// newyork.amsterdamart.net/blog.html. See also Jon Parmenter, “Separate Vessels: Iroquois Engagement with the Dutch of New Netherland, c. 1613-1664,” in Jaap Jacobs and L.H. Roper, eds., The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014), 120; and Sam Roberts, “Proud Amsterdam Celebrates New York, and Itself,” New York Times, 6 April 2009, accessed January 4, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/ 06/nyregion/06amsterdam.html?searchResultPosition=1. Marc Verhaegen and Jan Kragt, Strijd om Nieuw York (Stichting Eureducation, n.p., second edition, 2010). See also the representation of Indians in New Netherland by Thom Roep and Co Loerakker, Van Nul tot Nu, deel 2: De vaderlandsche geschiedenis van 1648 tot 1815 (Heemstede, Big Balloon, 2009), especially the passage on page 6. This episode is available here, accessed January 5, 2020, http://www. uitzendinggemist.nl/afleveringen/1300559. It is about fifteen minutes long and is intended for teens. See for example the website about the Two Row Wampum renewal campaign: http://honorthetworow.org/. For the visit to the Netherlands, see “Haudenosaunee leaders travel to Netherlands to mark Two Row Wampum Agreement,” accessed May 15, 2019, https://intercontinentalcry.org/haudenosaunee-leaders-travelnetherlands-mark-two-row-wampum-agreement/. Brochure “Nieuw Amsterdam,” Madurodam, The Hague, in English and Dutch (2017). Bianca Mastenbroek, Hendrick, de Hollandsche Indiaan (Rijswijk: De Vier Windstreken, 2017). J.A. van der Chijs, De vestiging van het Nederlandsche gezag over de Bandaeilanden (1599-1621) (Batavia and The Hague: Albrecht and Nijhoff, 1886). Emmie Snijders, “Coen Monumenten,” Coen!, 66–69; Martin Bossenbroek, Holland op zijn breedst: Indië en Zuid-Afrika in de Nederlandse Cultuur omstreeks 1900 (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996), 161. Bossenbroek, Holland op zijn breedst, 273–276. Jan Romein and Annie Romein-Verschoor, Erflaters van onze beschaving, volume 2 (Amsterdam: Querido, 1938). Colenbrander quoted in Luc Kiers, Coen op Banda: De Conqueste getoetst aan het recht van den tijd Utrechtse bijdragen tot de geschiedenis, het staatsrecht en de

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28 29

30

31

32

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economie van Nederlandsch-Indië XIX (Utrecht: A. Oosthoek, 1943), 6. H.T. Colenbrander, ed. Jan Pietersz. Coen. Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indie (1919-1934). Jasper Rijpma, “Jan Pieterszoon Coen op school. Historisch besef en geschiedenisonderwijs in Nederland, 1857-2011,” MA Thesis in History, University of Amsterdam, January 2012, table on p. 120. Karel Davids, “Van loser tot wonderkind: De VOC in de geschiedschrijving van 1800 tot heden,” in Rotterdammers en de VOC: Handelscompagnie, stad en burgers (1600-1800), eds. Manon van der Heijden and Paul van de Laar (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002), 11–29. For the TV series and its reception, see Nederlanders Overzee, “Een aantal persartikelen uit de periode 1983-1986,” accessed September 14, 2019, https:// www.nederlandersoverzee.nl/pers1983-6.html. For the accompanying book, see Leonard Blussé and Jaap de Moor, Nederlanders Overzee: de eerste vijftig jaar (Franeker: Wever, 1983). For the coin, see Ruud Spruit, J.P. Coen. Dagen en daden in dienst van de VOC (Houten: De Haan, 1987), 124. For the festivities held in 1987, see Emmie Snijders, “Een tragedie van kwade trouw. De symboliek en functies van het standbeeld van Jan Pieterszoon Coen in Hoorn, 1893-1937,” MA Thesis in public history, University of Amsterdam, 2011, 1. See also Lisa Johnson, “Renegotiating dissonant heritage: The statue of J.P. Coen,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 6 (July 2014), 589–598. Gert Oostindie, “Squaring the Circle: Commemorating the VOC after 400 years,” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 159 (2003), 135–161; Alex van Stipriaan and Ellen Ball, “De VOC is een geloof: Kanttekeningen bij een populair Nederlands imago,” Rotterdammers en de VOC, 213–244.

Bibliography Publications Blaser, Arthur W. “How to advance Human Rights without Really Trying: An Analysis of Nongovernmental Tribunals.” Human Rights Quarterly 14, no. 3 (August 1992): 339–370. Blussé, Leonard, and Jaap de Moor. Nederlanders Overzee: de eerste vijftig jaar. Franeker: Wever, 1983. Bossenbroek, Martin. Holland op zijn breedst: Indië en Zuid-Afrika in de Nederlandse Cultuur omstreeks 1900. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996. Chijs, J.A. van der. De vestiging van het Nederlandsche gezag over de Banda-eilanden (1599-1621). Batavia and The Hague: Albrecht and Nijhoff, 1886. Colenbrander, H.T., edited by Jan Pietersz. Coen. Bescheiden omtrent zijn bedrijf in Indië. Five volumes. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1919-1934. Davids, Karel. “Van loser tot wonderkind: De VOC in de geschiedschrijving van 1800 tot heden.” In Rotterdammers en de VOC: Handelscompagnie, stad en burgers (1600-1800), edited by Manon van der Heijden and Paul van de Laar, 11–29. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002. DeLucia, Christine M., Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018. Dongen, Alexandra van, et al. One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure: The Metamorphosis of the European Utensil in the New World. Rotterdam: Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, 1995.

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Eerdmans, Martha. Pieter Stuyvesant: An Historical Documentation. Grand Rapids: William Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1957. Emmer, P.C., Het zwart-wit denken voorbij. Een bijdrage aan de discussie over kolonialisme, slavernij, en migratie. Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam, 2018. Gelder, Roelof van, ed., The Birth of New York: Nieuw Amsterdam, 1624-1664. Amsterdam Historical Museum, 1982. Gosselink, Martine. New York, Nieuw-Amsterdam: De Nederlandse oorsprong van Manhattan. Amsterdam: Nieuw Amsterdam and Nationaal Archief, 2009. Grumet, Robert Steven. Native American Place-Names in New York City. New York: Museum of the City of New York, 1981. Helmers, Helmer J. and Geert H. Janssen, eds., The Cambridge Companion to the Dutch Golden Age. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hondius, Dienke and Annemarie de Wildt, eds., Amsterdam Slavery Heritage Guide. Arnhem: LM Publishers, 2014. Jacobs, Jaap. Een zegenrijk gewest: Nieuw-Nederland in de Zeventiende Eeuw. Amsterdam: Prometheus-Bert Bakker, 1999. Johnson, Lisa. “Renegotiating dissonant heritage: The statue of J.P. Coen.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 20, no. 6 (July 2014): 583–598. Kiers, Luc. Coen op Banda: De Conqueste getoetst aan het recht van den tijd. Utrechtse bijdragen tot de geschiedenis, het staatsrecht en de economie van Nederlandsch-Indië XIX. Utrecht: A. Oosthoek, 1943. Koenen, Stephanie, ed., Coen! Geroemd en verguisd. Hoorn: Westfries Museum and Poldervondsten, 2012. Mak, Geert, and Russell Shorto. 1609: The Forgotten History of Hudson, Amsterdam, and New York. Amsterdam: Stichting Henry Hudson, 2009. Mastenbroek, Bianca. Hendrick, de Hollandsche Indiaan. Rijswijk: De Vier Windstreken, 2017. 2017 “Nieuw Amsterdam,” Madurodam, The Hague, in English and Dutch, 2017. Onnekink, David, and Gijs Rommelse. The Dutch in the Early Modern World: A History of Global Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Oostindie, Gert. “Squaring the Circle: Commemorating the VOC after 400 years.” Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde 159 (2003): 135–161. Parmenter, Jon W. “Separate Vessels: Iroquois Engagement with the Dutch of New Netherland, c. 1613-1664,” In The Worlds of the Seventeenth-Century Hudson Valley, edited by Jaap Jacobs and L.H. Roper, 103–133. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2014. Rijpsma, Jasper. “Jan Pieterszoon Coen op school. Historisch besef en geschiedenisonderwijs in Nederland, 1857-2011.” Unpublished MA Thesis, History Department, University of Amsterdam, 2012. Roep, Thom, and Co Loerakker. Van Nul tot Nu, deel 2: De vaderlandsche geschiedenis van 1648 tot 1815. Heemstede: Big Balloon, 15th edition, 2009. Romein, Jan, and Annie Romein-Verschoor. Erflaters van onze beschaving. Volume 2. Amsterdam: Querido, 1938. Schulte Nordholt, J.W., “Nederlanders in Nieuw Nederland: De oorlog van Kieft met als bijlage het Journael van Nieu-Nederland,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 80 (1966), 38–94. http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/ retroboeken/bmhg/#page=0&accessor=toc&view=homePane

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Snijders, Emmie. “Een tragedie van kwade trouw. De symboliek en functies van het standbeeld van Jan Pieterszoon Coen in Hoorn, 1893-1937.” Unpublished MA Thesis in public history, University of Amsterdam, 2011. Spruit, Ruud. J.P. Coen. Dagen en daden in dienst van de VOC. Houten: De Haan, 1987. Stipriaan, Alex van, and Ellen Ball. “De VOC is een geloof: Kanttekeningen bij een populair Nederlands imago.” In Rotterdammers en de VOC: Handelscompagnie, stad en burgers (1600-1800), edited by Manon van der Heijden and Paul van de Laar, 213–244. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2002. Verhaegen, Marc, and Jan Kragt. Strijd om Nieuw York. N.p.: Stichting Eureducation, 2nd edition, 2010.

Online sources Boffey, Daniel. “End of Golden Age: Dutch Museum Bans Term from Exhibits.” The Guardian, September 13, 2019. Accessed September 13, 2019. https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/13/end-of–golden-age-amsterdam-museum-bans-term-from-exhibits. Duin, Roelf Jan. “Ondanks dubieuze reputatie mag J.P. Coen zijn tunnel houden.” Het Parool, January 21, 2015. Accessed May 16, 2019. https://www.parool.nl/ nieuws/ondanks-dubieuze-reputatie-mag-j-p-coen-zijn-tunnel-houden~b8bb13f7/? referer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F. Funnekotter, Bart. “Eerst de ‘Maarten’, nu de ‘Coen!.” NRC de week: Internationale editie, April 16 2012 , Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www.nrc.nl/ nieuws/2012/04/14/eerst-de-maarten-nu-de-coen-12286569-a1089829. Horbach, Frans, “Dutch and Mohawk” and “Re-thinking History: Mohawk meets Amsterdam,” posts on the blog ‘Amsterdam – New York Art Station’, April 2009. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://web.archive.org/web/20111118212946, http:// newyork.amsterdamart.net/blog.html. Overzee, Nederlanders, “Een aantal persartikelen uit de periode 1983-1986.” Accessed September 13, 2019. https://www.nederlandersoverzee.nl/pers19836.html. Outeren, Emilie van. “Sorry dat dat standbeeld hier toch blijft.” NRC Handelsblad, July 13, 2011. Accessed May 2, 2020. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2011/07/13/sorrydat-dat-standbeeld-hier-toch-blijft-12025497-a1270721. Roberts, Sam. “Proud Amsterdam Celebrates New York, and Itself.” New York Times, April 6, 2009. Accessed January 4, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/ 06/nyregion/06amsterdam.html?searchResultPosition=1. Sulzberger, Arthur Gregg, “400 Years Later, and Still Proud of New Amsterdam.” New York Times, September 13, 2009. Accessed May 16, 2019. https:// www.nytimes.com/2009/09/14/nyregion/14dutch.html. Two Row Wampum Renewal Campaign, “Haudenosaunee Leaders Travel to Netherlands to Mark Two Row Wampum Agreement.” https://intercontinentalcry. org/haudenosaunee-leaders-travel-netherlands-mark-two-row-wampum-agreement/. Van Berkel, Theo. “Hans Bayens: ‘Peter Stuyvesant’.” Accessed November 14, 2019. https://vanberkelbeelden.wordpress.com/beeldhouwers/a-i/hans-bayens/peter-stuyvesant-amsterdam/.

Part II

State-sanctioned and politicized forms of denial

6

Triumphalism: The final stage of the Bosnian genocide Hikmet Karčić

The first funeral and burial of genocide victims in Srebrenica was held in 2003, on the eighth anniversary of the massacre. The commemorations held in those years were concluded with the collective burial of hundreds of coffins, wrapped in green cloth, the color of Islam. As a high school teen­ ager, for me the most remarkable events of the commemorations were not the burials, commemorative speeches, or religious prayers but rather the journey from Sarajevo to Srebrenica. The anniversary events I remember most were those that took place in the first few years, as the column of buses bearing the families of victims, who had travelled from all across Europe and Bosnia, passed through the town of Bratunac. This town is located a few kilometers from the Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial and one must pass through Bratunac en route. Like so many other towns in the Serb Republic (Republika Srpska or RS), before the war Bratunac had a majority Bosniak Muslim population. After the genocidal violence from 1992-1995, this po­ pulation was entirely destroyed. A few hundred returned after the war. In those years, travelling through Bratunac on the anniversary date, July 11, meant witnessing the celebratory antics of several hundred local Serbs, who would wait on the corner of the street where the buses turn right towards Potočari. Tricolor flags, posters of the wanted war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić, racists chants such as “ubij turčina” (Kill the Turk), hand gestures symbolizing the universal sign language for slaughter, as well as the tri-finger salute—along with the occasional stone thrown towards the buses—were all to be expected. These events were remarkable and trau­ matic because these were not simply youngsters or hooligans. These were entire families, including young children being taught hate at a young age. It was as if children were brought out of their homes and onto the streets to be shown a “Turk,” a species they never had seen before.1 I cannot say when these gatherings stopped, but they faded away over the years. The tension seemed to dissipate, and experts talked about re­ conciliation and coming to terms with the dark past. I believed that this was a process that every people had to go through and that the non-existence of the crowds on July 11 were a positive sign. I was wrong. As the years passed, though, the hatred, which had been localized, became widespread and DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-6

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institutionalized. Attending commemorations and visiting the region throughout the year, as well as monitoring the political rhetoric in the country, I found that the Bosnian Genocide was in its final stage, according to Gregory Stanton’s classification: the phase of denial.

Celebrating “ethnic cleansing” In 2010, a convicted war criminal from Višegrad, Mitar Vasiljević, was granted early release by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). He arrived in Višegrad to a hero’s welcome. A column of cars from Sarajevo to Višegrad welcomed Vasiljević in the town center. There were hundreds of locals with Serb nationalist iconography along with specially ordered trumpet players from the Serbian town of Užice. Vasiljević addressed the crowd: Never happier in life, never! I welcome all my Serb men and Serb women, and others, young people, especially children who were born during my absence. I greet you, Višegrad. I greet every village. I’m speechless. Normally, a hundred percent unjust. Lies!2 This event was not an isolated case. They have become more common and more visible and go beyond mere denial. This kind of glorification and cele­ bration of mass atrocities, and the rehabilitation of war criminals, had already been seen in some previous post-genocidal societies. However, the Republika Srpska is the first state-like entity that was established through genocide that celebrates its own “triumph” as a core civic and political value. Identifying this behavior, Bosnian-Australian scholar Hariz Halilovich coined the term “triumphalism” and argued that it represented an additional eleventh stage to Stanton’s classification, at least in the case of the Bosnian Genocide: If unpunished, genocide can also result in an eleventh stage. Building upon Stanton’s ideas and basing it on my research on genocide in Bosnia, I call this stage “triumphalism.” In this stage, perpetrators, their sponsors, and the politics behind genocide do not deny the killings any longer, but rather they glorify them, celebrate their deeds, humiliate the survivors, build monuments to the perpetrators at the sites of the massacres, and create a culture of triumphalism such as has been seen in the parts of Bosnia where Serb militias committed genocide against Bosniaks.3

Triumphalism unleashed Halilovich’s insights are useful and this chapter will expand and deepen them. The first and most obvious action was the celebration of convicted war criminals as heroes. The ICTY sentenced several dozen high-ranking Serb

Triumphalism 101 political, military, and police authorities for various crimes including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. The aim of the ICTY, beyond bringing perpetrators to justice, was to ensure reconciliation efforts through public trials and outreach programs aimed at communities in the former Yugoslavia. However, the trials of war criminals created a counter-effect within the Serb communities. The court in The Hague was far away and seemed as an instrument of punishment. The release of convicted Serb war criminals was an opportunity to reinforce the perception of Serbian victim­ hood. War criminals were seen as heroes and saviors, who did what had to be done: a “preventive genocide” of some sort. Thus, the perpetrators were deemed as heroes and received a hero’s welcome back in their communities. “Welcome home” celebrations have been organized for convicted perpe­ trators who completed their sentence. This started off in the grassroots local level but soon rose to the official state level in the Republika Srpska. The local media, as Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc correctly notes, played a large role in this rehabilitation, portraying the homecoming events for war criminals as a cultural manifestation. “Local media use word doček (wel­ come reception) for these events, in the same way it is used for the welcome” for athletes returning from the Olympic Games, for instance. “Precisely this dimension of ‘settling accounts’,” Trbovc continues, “is what makes these homecoming events relevant for the study of international criminal law.”4 Biljana Plavšić, the former University of Sarajevo Professor of Biology who was Vice-President of Republika Srpska (RS) among other high posi­ tions during the war, was sentenced by the ICTY in 2003 to eleven years imprisonment for crimes against humanity. She is remembered for in­ famously misusing her biological knowledge to claim that Bosniak Muslims were former Serbs with “genetically deformed material” that embraced Islam. She was granted early release in October 2009.5 The Prime Minister of Republika Srpska at that time, Milorad Dodik, himself traveled in the RS’s official jet and brought Plavšić back to Belgrade.6 The local media in Republika Srpska and Serbia were enthusiastic about her release. As Predrag Bašić’s research shows, Glas Srpska, the RS government-controlled newspaper, worked intensively on Plavšić's celebration, lauding her as “a highly moral statesman who bravely and with her head up high admitted her share of responsibility for the tragic happenings of the past war, although she didn’t order a single misdeed.” The author nearly elevated her to the status of sainthood by adding that she went “through Golgotha during the past eight years,” “carried her cross with dignity,” and now she is “born again”—imagery that is well-understood by the newspaper’s audience, as it drew heavily upon nationalist and religious mythology dating back many centuries.7 Biljana Plavišič was the first major convicted war criminal who was publicly celebrated. After her public rehabilitation and triumph, it be­ came clear that there would be no sanction for welcoming and celebrating war criminals. These celebratory welcomes continue to be organized in Republika Srpska and Serbia.8

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Another aspect of “triumphalism” is that public and private media in Republika Srpska and Serbia have normalized war criminals and transformed them into reality show celebrities. In 2002, Serbian web portal Blic published a news report about the weddings of four Serbs from Prijedor who were married while in prison in The Hague.9 The report simply stated that the four Serb men from Prijedor were to be married. The news title “U zatvoru se oženila četvorica Prijedorčana” (In prison four men from Prijedor married) and the article does not mention the crimes for which the men were convicted nor acknowledge their victims. Instead, the report focused on details of the mar­ riage ceremony while emphasizing the fine personal qualities of the young lads. Further, in 2007, two students from the Belgrade Faculty of Dramatic Arts made a sitcom called Mladići, which is about two students who were depicted sharing an apartment with Ratko Mladić—the Commander of the Bosnian Serb Army during the war, orchestrator of the Srebrenica genocide, and at the time still a fugitive from justice. This can be considered a start in the relativization of the actions of the mastermind of the infamous war criminal, showing Mladić as an elderly, genial grandpa in military uniform who likes to drink beer and party.10 These sorts of incidents were becoming commonplace during the late 1990s and into the new century as Serb nationalist politicians gained a stronger hold. In more recent years the presence of war criminals in the public sphere has become completely normalized. In November 2018, Mladić participated via telephone, arranged by his son Darko, in a morning show aired by the private pro-government network “Happy TV.” Darko Mladić sat in the studio along with Russian State Duma deputy Pavel Dorokhin and convicted Serbian war criminal and nationalist politician Vojislav Šešelj. For his part, Mladić greeted the audience and told Šešelj to lose weight, eliciting laughs. He ended his call by jovially declaring, “Ljubi vas deda Ratko!” (Grandpa Ratko loves you).11 In May 2019, Radovan Karadžić delivered an address via telephone to a rally organized in Podgorica, Montenegro.12 The event was organized by the Serb community in Montenegro and included Momčilo Krajišnik, Republika Srpska’s war-time Prime Minister. Karadžić called in and talked about the establishment of Republika Srpska and about Serbian and Montenegrin identities, displaying no fear that his appearance might be controversial. The shocking aspect of these public appearances is that they have become so routine that they no longer cause any reaction or outrage and rarely even attract notice. This is true even in examples involving former ordinary foot soldiers, the direct perpetrators.13 The news and entertainment media play a large role in the normalization or glorification of genocidaires by huma­ nizing convicted war criminals and providing them with a platform.

Triumphalism in popular music Other highly visible displays of triumphalism can be found in popular music. During the genocidal violence against Bosniak Muslims, Serb nationalist

Triumphalism 103 music was one of the main weapons of the mobilization of the masses.14 (This is one of several elements of this genocide—such as the systematic use of sexual violence—that it shared with the Rwandan genocide.) Previously unknown local folk singers quickly became popular through their antiMuslim nationalistic songs. The most infamous were Baja Mali Knindže, Miro Semberac, and Lepi Momčilo.15 Baja Mali Knindže’s most popular song is Ne volim te Alija, zato sto si balija (“I don’t love you Alija, because you are Balija”), followed by May the River Drina carry a hundred mujahedin every day.”16 “Balija,” a derogatory term for Bosniaks, had become part of the mainstream terminology commonly used by Serb media, political and military leaders, and Orthodox Church figures to refer to Bosniaks. In 1993, Miro Semberac had a hit song titled Jadna Bosna suverena (“Poor in­ dependent Bosnia”) that ridiculed Bosnia and Herzegovina and its president Alija Izetbegović, with the lyrics “Alija, because you declared Bosnia’s in­ dependence / There won’t be a head on your shoulders” and “It is time for Serbian revenge / All the mosques will be blown away.”17 Two of the newer performers are Žare and Goci, whose songs include Da zna bula (“If Bula knew,” released in 2011), which states, “If Bula knew what bacon tastes like, she would never kiss a Turk.”18 Another hit song includes the lyrics, “I was born where there isn’t a Mosque, I hate Muslims since I was a child.”19 Although these are war songs—and therefore one can more easily imagine their popularity in the 1990s—they remain popular, finding new, receptive audiences. There are two reasons for this. First, singers like Baja Mali Knindže are still active and are performing in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia, but also more significantly for the Serbian diaspora in Western Europe, the United States, and Australia. Second, songs such as Od Bihaća do Petrova sela (“From Bihać to Petrovo village”) have become a sort of unofficial anthem of the new right-wing movements in Europe. The song contains the lyrics: “Be Careful Ustasha and Turks.” The term “Turk” in this lyric refers to the Bosniak Muslim population. The presence of the song on social media and on YouTube has grown since its release. This started among 4Chan and 8Chan users,20 who introduced a meme called Remove Kebab. The meme contained the image of two Serb soldiers, one with a harmonica and the other with a trumpet: a screenshot from the Od Bihaća do Petrova sela music video. The use of the Remove Kebab meme has been widespread within Serbian diaspora, alt-right, and right-wing movements. Thus, the original song—intended for Bosniaks as the group referred to derisively as “Turks”—evolved into a generalized anti-Muslim, antiimmigrant song in which the term “Kebab” refers to all Muslims and im­ migrants. The song became infamous after the March 2019 attack on the Christchurch mosques when the shooter live-streamed his drive to the Mosque and played Od Bihaća do Petrova sela in his car. This brought at­ tention to the extent to which this kind of hate music had become trans-state and trans-national, inspiring mass violence even in a country so far away as New Zealand.

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Additionally, small-time village entertainers also indulge in triumphalist songs, sometimes with grisly and violent overtones. In 2014, a brief scandal ensued when a video emerged from a wedding party in the Serb-majority town of Bratunac, showing a local performer singing “Oh, Pazar, New Vukovar, Oh Sjenica, New Srebrenica”—referring to Bosniak majority towns in the Sanjak region in Southern Serbia, which presumably deserve the fate of Srebrenica.21

Erasing history, celebrating genocide through memorials Probably the most visible evidence of triumphalism are the monuments and memorials built for the perpetrators throughout the Republika Srpska. Monuments and memorials have been built for the members of the Bosnian Serb Army and Police, the direct perpetrators in the genocidal violence against Bosniaks and Bosnian Croats. The memorialization of perpetrators is often placed intentionally in areas where mass atrocities against the Bosniak population took place. Prijedor, a town in north-western Bosnia and Herzegovina that became a synonym for concentration camps and mass graves, is a textbook example of memorial-triumphalism. Since the end of the war in 1995 the local autho­ rities have continually refused Bosniak and Bosnian Croat victims’ per­ mission to build memorials at the site of the former concentration camps. These sites have been brought back to their pre-genocide use. The infamous Omarska camp is once again a mine, now operated by a British multi­ national company. Entrance to this former camp is virtually impossible for non-employees, and each year the former detainees and the victims’ family members have to fight for the right to gain entrance and hold a com­ memoration within the former camp premises. There is no sign that this mine was ever a camp or that detainees were held there and tortured, raped, and killed. Also in Prijedor, one of the most striking examples of memorial tri­ umphalism is at Trnopolje concentration camp. On the site of the Trnopolje camp, a few years after the war, a monument for fallen Serb soldiers was built—a concrete double-headed eagle with an Orthodox Christian cross. The Trnopolje camp located near the town of Prijedor is within the entity of Republika Srpska. The local authorities deny the right to former camp detainees to build a memorial for the victims of these camps. This act of hijacking memory became a popular mainstream activity among local au­ thorities throughout Republika Srpska. In eastern Bosnia, in the town of Višegrad, a different triumphalistic approach was taken by the Serb authorities. On the site of a former town park, an entirely new small town—Andrićgrad—was constructed. Višegrad, which before the genocide had a 60% Bosniak majority, totally destroyed its Bosniak community and is today an exclusively Serb town. According to Emir Kusturica, the once-lauded Serbian filmmaker who conceived of

Triumphalism 105 Andrićgrad, the Balkans needs to accomplish a Renaissance retroactively since they were supposedly limited by the Ottoman Empire during the time of the European Renaissance.22 Kusturica claimed, “This town needs to pacify, to bring back time to the end of the middle age and beginning of the new age when on these lands, because of the Ottoman empire, the Renaissance did not come to be.”23 Thus, as a result, millions of dollars were poured into this project by Serbia and Republika Srpska with the sole aim of creating a new historical narrative precisely by hijacking the previous memories of this area. This “new town,” called the “Disneyland of Serb nationalism” by some, stands triumphantly on the ground where blood was shed, covering the traces of atrocity with concrete and stone. Some non-Serbs have joined the pantheon of nationalist heroes. In 2015, a British-sponsored United Nations Security Council Resolution on Srebrenica was vetoed by the Russian ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin, who called the Resolution “confrontational” and “politically motivated.” Russia’s veto of the Resolution was praised by Serb nationalists who saw this as the announcement of Russia’s re-emergence as a world factor. Russia was seen as the “big brother” and protector of Orthodox Christian nations while Russian President Vladimir Putin was glorified for defying Western popular opinion. As a result, local Serb NGOs placed Putin’s posters throughout the Srebrenica region including inside the Kravica warehouse, which is the site of the July 13, 1995 massacre of 1,300 Bosniak men and boys (Figure 6.1).24 After Ambassador Churkin’s death in February 2017, an initiative was proposed to build a monument for him in Srebrenica. After international outrage and pressure, the monument was built instead in Republika Srpska-administered Eastern Sarajevo.25 Eastern Sarajevo is also home to the “Radovan Karadžić student dormitory” opened by Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik and Karadžić’s wife in Pale.26 Dodik said the moment was “strongly symbolic” and was chosen just a few days before Karadzic’s anticipated conviction at The Hague. Dodik decried the im­ minent verdict as “humiliating for the Serb Republic. … We see that this is selective justice, that it’s not the justice for all parties, that it is directed against one people and its representatives,” Dodik said to an enthusiastic crowd of students, teachers, and local officials.27 The Serb political establishment has spearheaded the denial campaign. Milorad Dodik, first as Republika Srpska Prime Minister and then as President, was one of the first post-war politicians who publicly started using denial as a tool for his political campaigns. On multiple occasions he re­ ferred to the genocide in Srebrenica as a “fabricated myth” adding that “[Bosniaks] did not have a myth, so they decided to construct one around Srebrenica.”28 Thus Dodik’s political pattern can be viewed as a combina­ tion of both denial and triumphalism with a touch of anti-Muslim bigotry. Dodik’s former Party colleague Rajko Vasić uses social media to glorify the genocide. In 2018, he made headlines when he tweeted: “Just thinking. If you [Bosniaks] love the genocide committed against you that much, wait for

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Figure 6.1 Warehouse in Kravica where approximately 1,300 Bosniak men and boys were killed on July 13, 1994. A quarter century later, there is no effort to hide the crime or to patch up bullet holes and other evidence of the crime. Like much of this region of the so-called Serbian Republic, Kravica once had a large Bosniak population but is now 90-95 percent Serbian. (Photo credit: John Cox, June 2, 2019.)

the next opportunity.” The same year, Hatidža Mehmedović, a Srebrenica genocide survivor and victim-rights activist, passed away. During the gen­ ocide, her husband and two sons were killed by Serb forces in July 1995. Being one of the most vocal survivors, many Serb nationalists glorified her death on social media. The most shocking statement came from a female member of the Serb Radical Party who wrote: “I wonder who will bury her. Her husband or her sons?”29 The denialist and triumphalist rhetoric has slowly become part of main­ stream public opinion in Republika Srpska and Serbia, deeply embedded in the state and local political, cultural, academic, and religious circles. Dissident voices are being marginalized and discredited, leaving only a minority of public figures who publicly recognize and condemn genocide and other acts of mass atrocities. In recent years, Orthodox churches and crosses have begun to be built in areas previously populated by Bosniaks (Figure 6.2 is a characteristic ex­ ample). The most controversial example is the church in Budak, which is

Triumphalism 107

Figure 6.2 A few hundred meters from the site of the massacre in Kravica ( Figure 6.1) stands this triumphalist memorial, which is also discussed in Chapter 7. Built in 2006, it features religious and nationalist iconography and vastly exaggerates the number of “Serb martyrs” by including vic­ tims of four different wars, dating back to 1912, in order to have a number that exceeds the well-known number of 8,372 killed at Srebrenica. (Photo credit: John Cox, June 2, 2019.)

several hundred meters from the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial. This church, built on a hill overlooking the memorial center and visible from the road when travelling towards Srebrenica, was built by the Serb Orthodox Church as a provocation. The insult to victims was compounded by the fact that the church was built only a few meters from where the Budak two mass grave were located, a grave from which 175 genocide victims were exhumed. The EU Delegation and the U.S. Embassy both condemned this action,

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stating in a press release: “This church’s location far from a sizable human settlement and so close to a former mass grave and the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial is one designed to provoke rather than to serve the legitimate needs of the faithful.” The church was built anyway.30 Recent developments have shown that these celebrations and support for the atrocities has become a transnational and transgenerational phenom­ enon. The case of Eric Frein, a U.S. extremist influenced by Serb nation­ alism who shot and killed a Pennsylvania (U.S.) State Trooper in 2014, and more recently, the 2019 Christchurch massacre in New Zealand, proved that social media can successfully transfer murderous forms of hate from one part of the world to another.31

Conclusion Genocide usually ends with either the perpetrators’ defeat—as in the case of Nazi Germany, the Cambodian and Rwandan genocides, and many other cases—or with the near-total destruction of the victim group’s communities and the maintenance of the perpetrator state. One can point to colonialsettler societies such as the United States and Australia for examples. The Bosnian genocide is a different case. The perpetrator was not defeated, and the victim group managed to defend itself. The genocidaires are celebrated as public figures, embraced by the community. Sites of atrocities are not al­ lowed to be memorialized and commemorated while perpetrator monu­ ments are erected on those same sites. The Bosnian Serb authorities use the educational system to establish a counter-narrative in which the distribution of guilt for mass atrocities is equally divided. There are no lessons about Srebrenica or the Siege of Sarajevo. The authorities have even reversed or buried some earlier measures that partially acknowledged Serb crimes against humanity, such as the 2004 Srebrenica Commission Report. The triumphalist treatment of mass atrocities has become locally embedded and is a popular mainstream phenomenon. Nationalistic songs celebrating atrocities and announcing new ones are played at local weddings and football matches. Thus, in the case of the Bosnian genocide, Gregory Stanton’s stages of genocide can be expanded, adding triumphalism as the final stage. The above examples show that the Bosnian genocide is in a unique phase of denial, strengthened and made more ominous by its strong component of triumphalism. The core foundations of this glorification are in the main­ stream state, academia, media, and Church apparatus. In other words, within Serbia and the RS, accepting the facts and coming to terms with the past has become an exception and a rarity. On the contrary, lessons from the Bosnian genocide have not been learned, and perpetrators have been turned into victims or heroes. This poses great danger for the future. As Halilovich argued, “denial, relativism and triumphalism relating to genocide are not only ethnically inappropriate, potentially dangerous and damaging for

Triumphalism 109 reconciliation efforts, but should also be regarded as hate speech with a potential to incite ethnic tensions and violence.”32

Notes 1 An excellent analysis on the othering of Bosniaks into Turks was provided by genocide survivor and scholar Emir Suljagić in “Targeting ‘Turks’: How Karadzic Laid the Foundations for Genocide,” Balkan Insight, April 15, 2019, accessed November 5, 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2019/04/15/targetingturks-how-karadzic-laid-the-foundations-for-genocide/. 2 Dženana Halimović, “Ovacije zločincu i festival nacionalizma,” Radio slobodne ev­ rope, March 15, 2010, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/ a/vasiljevic_visegrad/1984442.html. 3 Hariz Halilovich, “Globalization and Genocide,” in A. Faraymand, ed., Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance (New York: Springer, 2018), 2498. 4 Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc, “Homecomings from 'The Hague': Media Coverage of ICTY Defendants after Trial and Punishment,” International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (2018), 411. 5 BBC, “Bosnian Serb ‘Iron Lady’ released,” October 27, 2009, accessed November 5, 2019, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8327714.stm. For a detailed explana­ tion of Plavšić’s role during the war and genocide, see Jelena Subotić, “The Cruelty of False Remorse: Biljana Plavšić at The Hague,” Southeastern Europe 36, no. 1 (2012). 6 Predrag Babić, “The Self-Sacrifice of Biljana Plavšić: Gender and Nationalism in the Bosnian Serb Media,” Master’s thesis, Central European University (2012), 30, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.academia.edu/12348863/The_SelfSacrifice_of_Biljana_Plavsic_Gender_and_Nationalism_in_Bosnian_Serb_Media. 7 Ibid. For more on Serbian nationalist-religious-racist mythology, see Michael Sells’s excellent book, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998). 8 Nenad Pejić, “A Land Where War Criminals Are Heroes,” Radio Free Europe, October 31, 2009, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.rferl.org/a/A_Land_ Where_War_Criminals_Are_Heroes/1865935.html. 9 “U zatvoru se oženila četvorica Prijedorčana,” Blic, May 20, 2002, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.blic.rs/vesti/hronika/u-zatvoru-se-ozenila-cetvoricaprijedorcana/5n3wzs2. 10 “Ratko je kod Smiljke,” B92, October 4, 2007, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.b92.net/info/vesti/index.php?yyyy=2007&mm=10&dd=04&nav_ca­ tegory=11&nav_id=266419. 11 Filip Rudić, “Probe Launched After Ratko Mladic Speaks on Serbian TV,” Balkan Insight, November 16, 2018, accessed November 5, 2019, https:// balkaninsight.com/2018/11/16/mict-investigating-mladic-s-serbian-tv-addressover-telephone-11-16-2018/. 12 Lamija Grebo, “Karadzic Phones in to Montenegro Debate From Jail,” Balkan Insight, May 6, 2019, accessed November 5, 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/201 9/05/06/karadzic-phones-in-to-montenegro-debate-from-jail/. 13 Pero Petrašević, a former member of the infamous Scorpions units, has become a media star. The Scorpions unit, which became well-known because of the Srebrenica execution video that was aired in 2004, took part in the direct execu­ tions of thousands of Bosniak men and boys in July 1995. After the video was leaked to the media, Serbian authorities arrested members of the unit. Petrašević

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was the only one who pleaded guilty to the crimes. He received a light sentence and was released after a few years. See Zločin i kazna, “Rodjenog Ratnika,” TeslaVision.tv, July 8, 2017, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxH-2KKBE9E. See Robert Hudson, “Songs of Seduction: Popular Music and Serbian Nationalism,” Patterns of Prejudice 37, no. 2 (2003). For more on this, see Martina Plantak, The Role of Music and Film as Potential Mediators during the War in Yugoslavia, FOMOSO, January 16, 2019, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.fomoso.org/en/mosopedia/research/the-role-ofmusic-and-film-as-potential-mediators-during-the-war-in-yugoslavia/. Baja Mali Knindže, Ne volim te Alija, accessed November 5, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrH9yiJdPeg. Miro Semberac, Jadna Bosna suverena, accessed November 5, 2019, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rNWQE5ammw. “Da zna bula kakva je slanina, nikad ne bi ljubila turčina.” “Rođen sam gdje džamije nema, muslimane mrzim od malena.” 4Chan and 8Chan are English-language imageboard websites where users can anonymously post content. Srpska svadba: “Oj Pazaru novi Vukovaru, oj Sjenice nova Srebrenice,” February 11, 2014. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM0_ eeCIzGQ In 1985 and 1995 Kusturica won the highest honor at the Cannes film festival, the Palme d’Or. His nationalist, right-wing politics later became more evident to European intellectuals and film critics and he has largely fallen out of favor in Western Europe. Hikmet Karčič, “Andrićgrad: Hijacking Memories And The New Serb Identity,” Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory Network Working Paper No. 9 (June 2016), accessed November 5, 2019, https://historicaldialogues.org/2016/06/17/ working-paper-no-9-andricgrad-hijacking-memories-and-the-new-serb-identity/. Elisabeth Zerofsky, “The Counterparty,” Harper’s Magazine, December 2015, accessed November 5, 2019, https://harpers.org/archive/2015/12/the-counterparty/. Filip Rudić, “Serbs to Honour Srebrenica Genocide-Denying Russian Diplomat,” Balkan Insight, June 6, 2018, accessed November 5, 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2018/06/06/serbs-plan-russian-memorial-honoring-sreb­ renica-genocide-denial-06-05-2018/. No author, “Student dorm named after war crimes suspect Radovan Karadžić,” The Guardian, March 21, 2016, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/21/student-dorm-named-after-warcrimes-suspect-radovan-karadzic. Daria Sito-Sucic, “Defiant Bosnian Serbs honor Karadzic before Hague genocide verdict.” Reuters World News, March 20, 2016, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warcrimes-karadzic/defiant-bosnian-serbshonor-karadzic-before-hague-genocide-verdict-idUSKCN0WM0SH. Zamira Rahim, “Srebrenica massacre is ‘fabricated myth’, Bosnian Serb leader says,” The Independent, April 14, 2019, accessed November 5, 2019, https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/srebrenica-massacre-genocide-mi­ lorad-dodik-bosnia-myth-a8869026.html. Jasmina Rose, “Mothers of Srebrenica Justice Advocate Hatidza Mehmedovic Dies,” DW, July 24, 2018, accessed November 5, 2019, https://www.dw.com/en/ mothers-of-srebrenica-justice-advocate-hatidza-mehmedovic-dies/a-44798537. Elvira M. Jukić, “Church Accused of ‘Senseless Provocation’ in Srebrenica,” Balkan Insight, 18 April 2018, accessed November 5, 2019, https://balkaninsight.com/2013/ 04/18/orthodox-church-urged-to-end-construction-in-srebrenica/.

Triumphalism 111 31 Terrie Morgan-Besecker and David Singleton, “Eric Frein infatuated with Serbian military,” The Morning Call, October 12, 2014, accessed November 5, 2019, https:// www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-eric-frein-serbian-20141012-story.html. 32 Hariz Halilovich, “Lessons from Srebrenica: The United Nations after Bosnia,” in D. Mayersen, ed., The United Nations and Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 93.

Bibliography Publications Babić, Predrag. “The Self-Sacrifice of Biljana Plavšić: Gender and Nationalism in the Bosnian Serb Media.” Master’s thesis. Central European University, 2012. Halilovich, Hariz. “Globalization and Genocide.” In Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance, edited by A. Faraymand, 2493–2502. New York: Springer, 2018. Halilovich, Hariz, “Lessons from Srebrenica: The United Nations after Bosnia.” In The United Nations and Genocide, edited by Deborah Mayersen, 77–99. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Hudson, Robert. “Songs of Seduction: Popular Music and Serbian Nationalism.” Patterns of Prejudice 37, no. 2 (2003), 157–176. Mihajlović Trbovc, Jovana. “Homecomings from 'The Hague': Media Coverage of ICTY Defendants after Trial and Punishment.” International Criminal Justice Review 28, no. 4 (2018), 406–422. Sells, Michael. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998. Subotić, Jelena. “The Cruelty of False Remorse: Biljana Plavšić at The Hague.” Southeastern Europe 36, no. 1 (2012): 39–59. The Guardian. “Student dorm named after war crimes suspect Radovan Karadžić.” March 21, 2016. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2016/mar/21/student-dorm-named-after-war-crimes-suspect-radovan-kar­ adzic.

Online sources Grebo, Lamija. “Karadzic Phones in to Montenegro Debate From Jail.” Balkan Insight, May 6, 2019. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://balkaninsight.com/2019/ 05/06/karadzic-phones-in-to-montenegro-debate-from-jail/. Halimović, Dženana. “Ovacije zločincu i festival nacionalizma.” Radio slobodne evrope, March 15, 2010. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.slobodnaevropa.org/a/ vasiljevic_visegrad/1984442.html. Jukić, Elvira M. “Church Accused of ‘Senseless Provocation’ in Srebrenica.” Balkan Insight, April 18, 2018. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://balkaninsight.com/2 013/04/18/orthodox-church-urged-to-end-construction-in-srebrenica/. Karčič, Hikmet. “Andrićgrad: Hijacking Memories and The New Serb Identity.” Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory Network Working Paper Series no. 9, June 2016, 1–6. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://historicaldialogues.org/201

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6/06/17/working-paper-no-9-andricgrad-hijacking-memories-and-the-new-serbidentity/. Morgan-Besecker, Terrie and David Singleton, “Eric Frein infatuated with Serbian military.” The Morning Call, October 12, 2014. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.mcall.com/news/local/mc-eric-frein-serbian-20141012-story.html. Plantak, Martina. “The Role of Music and Film as Potential Mediators during the War in Yugoslavia,” FOMOSO: Forum für Mittelost- und Südoesteuropa, January 16, 2019. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.fomoso.org/en/ mosopedia/research/the-role-of-music-and-film-as-potential-mediators-duringthe-war-in-yugoslavia/. Pejić, Nenad. “A Land Where War Criminals Are Heroes.” Radio Free Europe, October 31, 2009. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.rferl.org/a/A_Land_ Where_War_Criminals_Are_Heroes/1865935.html. Rahim, Zamira. “Srebrenica massacre is ‘fabricated myth’, Bosnian Serb leader says.” The Independent, April 14, 2019. Accessed November 5, 2019. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/srebrenica-massacre-genocide-mi­ lorad-dodik-bosnia-myth-a8869026.html. Rose, Jasmina. “Mothers of Srebrenica Justice Advocate Hatidza Mehmedovic Dies.” DW, July 24, 2018. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.dw.com/en/ mothers-of-srebrenica-justice-advocate-hatidza-mehmedovic-dies/a-44798537. Rudić, Filip. “Probe Launched After Ratko Mladic Speaks on Serbian TV.” Balkan Insight, November 16, 2018. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://balkaninsight.com/2 018/11/16/mict-investigating-mladic-s-serbian-tv-address-over-telephone-11-16-2018/. Rudić, Filip. “Serbs to Honour Srebrenica Genocide-Denying Russian Diplomat.” Balkan Insight, June 6, 2018. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://balkaninsight.com/2018/06/06/serbs-plan-russian-memorial-honoring-sreb­ renica-genocide-denial-06-05-2018/. Sito-Sucic, Daria. “Defiant Bosnian Serbs honor Karadzic before Hague genocide verdict.” Reuters World News, March 20, 2016. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-warcrimes-karadzic/defiant-bosnian-serbshonor-karadzic-before-hague-genocide-verdict-idUSKCN0WM0SH. Suljagić, Emir. “Targeting ‘Turks’: How Karadzic Laid the Foundations for Genocide.” Balkan Insight, April 15, 2019. Accessed November 5, 2019. https:// balkaninsight.com/2019/04/15/targeting-turks-how-karadzic-laid-the-foundationsfor-genocide/. Zerofsky, Elisabeth. “The Counterparty.” Harper’s Magazine, December 2015. Accessed November 5, 2019. https://harpers.org/archive/2015/12/the-counterparty/.

7

The Bosnian genocide and the “Continuum of Denial” Simon Massey

In July 1995, in and around the town of Srebrenica, more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were murdered by Bosnian Serb forces. This eventually led to a finding of genocide by the International Court and Tribunal for Yugoslavia. Despite incontrovertible evidence of the atrocity and of its orchestration at the highest levels, within Serbia and the so-called Republika Srpska (RS), denial remains the accepted public narrative. Those convicted of war crimes are actually celebrated as heroes.1 To investigate how this level of denial is possible, I propose an analytical framework I term “The Continuum of Denial.” This framework addresses a perceived narrow construction of denial in the literature, which tends to be concerned with post event refutations, while less attention has been paid to the development and evolution of denial and its function during genocide itself. Israel Charny suggests that to combat denial we need to know the “cognitive structure” of the denier, to understand why people engage in denial deny.2 The Continuum can be seen as part of the same project, to deconstruct and understand denial. Using data from the ICTY, scholarly, and news media sources, this chapter applies this framework to Bosnia and the genocide at Srebrenica. The Continuum of Denial is complex, extending far beyond the mere rejection of facts. The basic premise of the Continuum is that without opposition, denial will deepen and strengthen over time and that it exists in a variety of forms, with different target audiences and strategies. I divide the Continuum is into six phases, though they often overlap: The six phases of the Continuum of Denial • dehumanization as denial: the pre-violence roots of denial; • emergent denial: contemporaneous strategies of denial as violence begins; • bounded denial: retrenchment as facts emerge; • interpretive denial: partial justifications as the meaning of facts are disputed;3 • embedded denial: glorification, de-memorialization, institutionalized denial; • forgetting as denial: strategies develop to erase the memory of genocide. DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-7

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Phase I: Denial by dehumanization This phase of the Continuum considers the influence of ideology in the formation of denial. The central concept employed is Stanley Cohen’s idea of “accounts.”4 Cohen argues that whenever a crime is committed, the criminal employs a paradigm of reasons, excuses, and justifications. An ideology of dehumanization, Cohen asserts, provides the societal narrative or master script for the formation of individual accounts when genocide occurs. The theoretical importance of dehumanization to genocide is rooted in social psychology. In everyday life, most people act with moral restraint and regulate their behavior in harmony with some form of a “social contract.” Dehumanization is a mechanism that can lower moral restraint, allowing “moral disengagement” from atrocious actions. Many scholars argue that the human species is inherently benign or humane and that it is only by considering another as subhuman that it becomes possible to commit atrocities against them. Dehumanization, in this sense, is regarded as a precondition of genocide. At Srebrenica, perpetrators frequently dehumanized their victims, in the sense that they did not treat them with humanity, committing acts of murder, torture, and cruelty while often humiliating and degrading them.5 However, this is not necessarily evidence that perpetrators viewed their victims as less than human. Johannes Lang contends that deliberate, gratuitous cruelty may be the result of sadism or the desire to exert power over another. To do either there must be an awareness of the humanity of the victim. He suggests that there may be a misunderstanding of atrocities—a conflation of atrocity with dehumanization.6 This matters in the context of denial because the idea of moral disengagement may lead to a misunderstanding of perpetrators and a simplification of complex motivations. In the Continuum, dehumanization is not framed as a psychological mechanism or phenomenon. Rather, its function is seen as an ideological strategy that provides for the motivation, justification, and later denial of genocide.7 At the macro level, a dehumanizing ideology creates a false master script of the other to provide a justification or validation for genocide. Often this narrative convinces one group that they must kill the other or be killed themselves by the other and that in killing the other, they are saving their own kind. At the micro level the master script provides discourses for the individual speech acts; Cohen refers to such speech acts as “accounts.” Accounts include the rationalizations and excuses which allow the individual to justify and later deny involvement in genocide. Accounts both prepare the perpetrators for criminal acts and perform the defensive act of denial. Cohen explains that “Accounts range from the true, consistent and totally believed to the ad hoc and ad lib improvisations or carefully calculated deception.”8 In this way dehumanization as an ideology is functional; its purpose is to inspire hatred, to validate and justify genocide, and to build and sustain denial.

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Ideology of dehumanization in Bosnia The creation of a master script takes time. In Bosnia, there was an escalating historical progression from diversity to uniformity. Bosnian researcher Mirsad Tokaca reviewed 5,000 post-conflict statements from witnesses of all ethnicities and found no evidence of pre-conflict ethnic divisions.9 However, this apparent radical assimilation between ethnic groups should be contextualized against a background of atrocities committed by Muslims, Croats, and Serbs during WWII, during which one million Yugoslavs are thought to have died, mainly at the hands of each other. Under Tito, open discussion of the war was prohibited, preventing an effective reconciliation process. In their masterly overview and analysis of the war, the British journalists Laura Silber and Allan Little argue that there was a deliberate resurrection and emotional manipulation of “atrocities that had passed from living memory.”10 Political leaders were able to exploit beliefs and fears that lurked beneath the surface of most peoples’ consciousness. The myth of the Battle of Kosovo 1389 and the epic poem “The Mountain Wreath” (1847), taught to most Serbian school children, dehumanize Muslims by defining them as traitors, “Turks,” and as an existential threat.11 Further, from the mid-1980s ethno-nationalist ideas were exploited by leaders, particularly Milosevic, in Serbia and endorsed by intellectuals as well as by the Orthodox Church. The SANU Memorandum of Serb intellectuals of 1986 warned of genocide against Serbs. In 1988, the Orthodox Church paraded the bones of Prince Lazar, the tragic hero of 1389, around Serbia bearing the placard, “we will do our utmost to crush their race.”12 Milosevic controlled the media, which became a mouthpiece of nationalism. As conflict in Bosnia was being planned, press agencies in Bosnian Serb towns worked with the Bosnian Serb leaders headed by Karadžić. In Bosnia, Muslims became the subject of labels such as “Turks,” “mujahedin,” and “fundamentalists.”13 Muharem Nezirevic, a resident of Prijedor, refers to this as the “syndrome of the Turks,” the constant repetition of the Kosovo myth whereby “Turks” are presented as “the people who kill.”14 Thus, the creation of the master narrative to support an ideology of dehumanization of Bosniaks was “carefully calculated deception.”15 Development of individual accounts The master script necessary for the formation of accounts may be distilled into three propositions: Bosnian Muslims are subhuman, are responsible for Serbian misfortune, and have long been planning the genocide of Serbs. The master script may be further simplified by individuals. Cohen suggests that a populist discourse may develop using stereotypes and jokes, or by the use of labeling.16 Survivors of mass executions at Srebrenica, such as “Witness O,” attest to the frequent use of the terms “Turks” and “balijas” (a derogatory term for Muslims) by Bosnian Serb forces.17 The use of derogatory labels

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was encouraged by leaders who used identical language. On arrival in Srebrenica, General Mladić announced to the television cameras: “Now is the time to take revenge on the Turks in this region.” The persistent use of this sort of racist terminology suggests a crude framing of the dehumanizing ideology. Using only labels to categorize groups of people by their otherness collapses their individual identity. Since the group identity is considered threatening, perpetrators feel justified in causing their suffering. There is also some evidence of a conviction among perpetrators that a heroic religious crusade was being fought against the Muslim “other.” According to Michael Sells, the notorious paramilitary warlord “Arkan” believed he was fighting for his faith, the Serb Orthodox church.18 Likewise the infamous “Scorpions” video showing Serbian paramilitaries executing Muslims at Srebrenica began with the blessing of a priest before the “sacred” act.19 In her TED Global talk, Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie explains the “danger of a single story” (or master narrative) of any group of people. She states, “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become,” and she links the narrative of a group of people to power. Adichie explains that “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person.”20 Serbian leaders understood the power of a single story, and utilized curriculum, media, religious dogma, and language to construct Bosnians as a dangerous, evil other. Even dominant ideologies have a variable impact on individuals, however, and other factors are important in the formation of “accounts,” including, for example, conditioning, a predisposition to violence, and emotional development. The precise impact of a particular ideology on an individual is impossible to determine; nonetheless, the dehumanizing ideology in Bosnia provided a license to perpetrators to commit atrocities and the framework to justify and thereby deny their actions. Yet there is an evidential gap in determining how individual participants framed accounts. This is because, other than denial of participation, there is very little evidence from Srebrenica perpetrators. Only two mid-ranking officers, Obrenović and Nikolić, along with a foot soldier admitted guilt at the ICTY. The accounts of these perpetrators, if their evidence is to be believed, were not influenced by the dehumanizing ideology, at least in obvious ways. Nikolić and Obrenović knew that massacring men and boys at Srebrenica was wrong but like other officers they did not “overtly question the orders whether they agreed with them or not.”21 These officers’ accounts attempt to lessen responsibility by arguing that they were submitting to authority.22 This is often associated with the claim “I was just following orders.” Indeed, Erdemović admitted to the murder of some seventy civilians yet his account was that he was an ordinary soldier acting in accordance with the orders of his superiors.23 This account suggests an inherently dehumanizing ideology that is integral to transforming civilians into soldiers, who must kill or be killed by the enemy “other.”

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At the level of the bystander and civilian populations, accounts may only need to justify passivity, inaction, and an absence of protest or intervention. This analysis may also apply to perpetrators who conducted duties such as guarding prisoners or other activities not directly related to the executions. Indifference to the fate of the target group may be sufficient. However, to achieve this state of indifference “discursive preparations must be convincing.” In other words, the ideology must be broadly accepted.24 For such perpetrators, a denial account may equate to silence or a denial of knowledge or a state of “knowing but not knowing” where there is a refusal to give rational thought to one’s own actions or inactions.25

Phase II: Emergent denial In phase one of the Continuum, the dehumanizing ideology is focused on internal populations. Once violence begins, though, leaders adopt different strategies because they must also appease an international audience. Although only the Srebrenica massacre has been determined as genocide by the ICTY, there is arguably little difference between Srebrenica and events in other parts of Bosnia, such as Prijedor and Višegrad, which are typically described as “ethnic cleansing” but not genocide (and of course, such massacres could be characterized with both terms). Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia targeted the social fabric, in essence a “total war against space, memories, tradition, family and religion.”26 This is important in the formation of denial for two reasons. First, there was a deliberate tactic to involve the whole Serb community in planning and executing the strategy.27 By implicating as many as possible in criminality, Serb leaders discouraged honest admissions from those involved, while prefiguring denial accounts. Secondly, as Muslim populations were removed, history was targeted by cultural destruction. Mosques were demolished and then grassed over as if they had never existed. UNESCO historian Colin Kaiser testified that minarets were always targeted as they represented the existence of a Muslim community.28 Destroy the minaret, and you eliminate the Muslim presence. Cultural destruction makes it possible to later deny that Muslims were ever part of the community and it enables history to be erased and rewritten. Verbal denial strategies Serbian leaders developed several verbal strategies to deny or deflect culpability. The intended audience of this strategy is the external, international community. By the time violence erupted the domestic audience had been subjected to years of media propaganda and would believe even the most absurd claims. When the international media disclosed atrocities, such as the concentration camps at Trinopolje and Omarska, the atrocities were denied or covered up. When well-documented evidence emerged of ethnic cleansing, the crimes could be dismissed as actions of undisciplined “rogue units” or as

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stemming from local vendettas. Despite their absurdities these denials were not seriously contested by the international community, although it was the United States and the UN themselves that possessed clear evidence of atrocities. But for at least the first two or three years they had no desire to enter the conflict and preferred to depict the conflict as arising from “ancient hatreds” or as a civil war with blame on all sides, while deliberately avoiding the use of the word “genocide” which would call for intervention under the terms of the 1948 Genocide Convention. Helen Fein refers to the framing of the conflict as “civil war” as a form of genocide denial.29 Planning to deny genocide In this phase of emergent denial, several discrete denial strategies can be identified which contribute to creating a false record of events to facilitate denial or encouraging perpetrators to enable them to develop accounts or both. Bureaucratization of the killing process has been cited as an important factor in genocide, particularly during the Holocaust. At Srebrenica, the criminal operation closely resembled a legal military operation. Fuel and ammunition were requisitioned and transport and troops were organized in a bureaucratic manner requiring the paperwork of legal procedures.30 This fake legality produces a “shared illusion of engagement in a legitimate enterprise” which can feed into accounts.31 Military expert Richard Butler testified at the ICTY that within the Bosnian Serb army (VRS) regulations and laws consistent with the Geneva Convention gave the impression that the military operated legally. Such regulations were disseminated within the command structure on a regular basis. Indeed, at the same time as the logistics of the murder operation were being planned, Major General Tolimir, later convicted of genocide at the ICTY, sent out an order to “treat civilians and prisoners in accord with the Geneva convention.”32 Meanwhile intercepted communications seized by ICTY investigators used euphemisms for killing, such as “triage,” with prisoners being described as “parcels.”33 Again, there is evidence of language being manipulated to create the circumstances for later denial. This language not only points to the bureaucratization that took place but also shows how the dehumanizing ideology continued to be reinforced in other, often less explicit ways. Bureaucratization is linked to denial, as aside from the executioners, those involved in the killing process can deny responsibility by reference to their own discrete tasks.34 Authorization Authorization conveys a message that violence is required or is permitted and allows leaders to distance themselves from the actions of direct perpetrators thereby facilitating denial.35 At Srebrenica, leaders adopted two specific methods of authorization: “directives” and tacit encouragement. “Directives” are general orders that convey broad strategic objectives as well

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36

as ideology and principles. For example, a directive in 1992 restates key principles of the dehumanizing ideology by stating that the task of the VRS was to protect Serb populations from extermination, which coded imminent genocide.37 Directives allowed soldiers to understand wider ideological objectives and their genocidal implications but at the same time were sufficiently vague to facilitate denial by their leaders. The tacit encouragement of brutality by leaders was a second method of authorization. Assistant chief of security Momir Nikolić testified that he witnessed numerous beatings and the verbal abuse of Muslims, with troops using labels such as “balijas,” Turks,” and “Ustasha” (to refer to Croats).38 In court, he accepted the notion that his non-intervention must have encouraged the perpetrators. At least it assured the perpetrators that national security forces were not going to retain, arrest, or punish them. Witness and survivor PW169 testified that during his detention at a school gym, General Mladić arrived and spoke to a large group of prisoners who were being held in appalling conditions. When a prisoner complained to Mladić about his treatment, he was beaten and murdered by a VRS soldier. Mladić did not directly order the murder but did nothing to prevent it.39 During the emergent phase, subordinates, especially those whose military training has emphasized dehumanizing ideologies and authoritarian control, appeared to anticipate the wishes of leaders and do what they assumed their superiors desired without their leaders having to say a word. Physical acts of denial Finally, to make it appear as if victims had fallen in combat, steps were taken to remove bodies from the original massacre sites and rebury them elsewhere.40 Following the genocide, residents of the town of Bratunac, near Srebrenica, such as Desimir Dujkanovic, were tasked with collecting bodies and reburying them in mass graves.41 The use of civilians for this task was deliberate and consistent with the policy of involving as many as possible in criminality. Genocide in Bosnia was committed in plain sight, most likely so that bystanders could be later threatened with charges, if necessary, to influence their accounts.42 Dujkanovic recalled being at the bus station in Bratunac, when bodies were being transported for reburial. According to Dujkanovic the town “stank badly” suggesting that the residents must all have been aware of the reburial operation but remained silent.43 Destroying physical evidence that may have helped to counter the master narrative contributed to later denial.

Phase III: Bounded denial It is perhaps an obvious point that post conflict, denial will depend on the power retained by those responsible and the political costs of denying. Bounded denial refers to a situation that may exist in the period following

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discovery of genocide, when denial is restrained and discouraged by external pressures. As the horrors of Srebrenica emerged in the international news media, pressure was placed on domestic governments in the West to react, leading eventually to the Dayton Peace Plan (Dayton) and the ICTY. The ICTY, at least initially, can be regarded as a restraint on denial. First, the principle architects of ethnic cleansing and genocide were indicted as war criminals. This silenced and removed a powerful and vocal group of leaders, such as Mladić and Karadžic, limiting their political power. Secondly, following the first arrests in 1996, several defendants made admissions. The most significant admissions were from Plavsic at a senior political level and Erdemovic as a direct perpetrator. Thirdly, in 2001, the conviction of Kristić established for the first time at an international tribunal that genocide had taken place at Srebrenica.44 These developments at the ICTY made it more difficult to deny genocide. However, the majority of accounts from defendants at the ICTY were either outright denials or partial admissions containing excuses and minimizations, often tactical ploys to avoid heavier sentences.45 The Dayton Peace Plan had an ambiguous influence on denial. Dayton created a dual structure with the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) existing alongside two self-governing entities, the Republika Srpska (RS) and the Bosnian-Croat Federation. As part of the Dayton agreement, the conduct of BiH and the two entities were to be overseen by the Office of the High Representative (OHR). The OHR had the power to sanction acts of non-cooperation with Dayton including the veto of legislation and the removal of leaders from office. The most striking example of the use of this power concerned the overturning of an official RS report released in 2002 which stated that around hundred men were killed at Srebrenica through personal revenge or ignorance of the law.46 Intense pressure from the OHR resulted in a further report in 2004 that confirmed “that between July 10 and July 19, 1995, several thousands of Bosniaks were liquidated in a manner that represents a serious violation of International Humanitarian law.”47 This concession remains the height of acceptance in the RS. The ambiguous nature of Dayton is in its structure; the agreement endorsed ethnic cleansing by granting territory gained by aggression to the RS. Further, it effectively granted a virtual statehood to the RS, allowing ethnic nationalism within to thrive and facilitate future denial. Post conflict, there is a paucity of evidence of guilt, remorse, or contrition within the general population of the RS. Višegrad had a majority Muslim population before 1992, but like much of eastern Bosnia, it became almost wholly Serb during ethnic cleaning in 1992 as thousands were murdered or terrorized and forced to leave. Journalists who visited Višegrad in 1996 were confronted by denial in the form of an unspoken code of silence. This is partly because post conflict many Serbs appropriated Muslim property or moved into houses formerly occupied by Muslims.48 Arguably, this encouraged denial as guilt and profiteering discourage disclosure.49 Most importantly, the dehumanizing ideology at the root of denial did not disappear. This is

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evidenced, in part by how well extreme nationalists did in elections in 1996, which as reported by the New York Times, “further jeopardiz[ed] hopes for unity.”50 Overall, it would appear that denial during this phase of the Continuum was not substantially weakened but simply became more implicit and less visible, at least to international audiences.

Phase IV: Interpretive denial51 As genocide fades from global attention, and in the absence of international restraints, space opens for denial to continue in the form of revisionism. During the phase of “interpretive denial” established facts are begrudgingly accepted but their meaning is disputed.52 Confusion and doubt are created not by outright denial, but by contesting the legal meaning of genocide, creating euphemisms for genocidal acts, and questioning the accuracy of forensic evidence and witness testimony. These revisions tend to rewrite the master narrative. The new narrative acknowledges fatalities but suggests that casualty figures have been inflated. The authors of these strategies may concede that there have been criminal acts but that these acts cannot be defined as genocide.53 The principle denial strategy in this phase is equivalence—the mantra that all sides share guilt and it is time to move on, to forgive and forget. Yet, as suggested by Cohen, such claims are often bogus and are invented to avoid accountability. In the phase of Interpretive Denial, equivalence accounts extend from suggestions that Srebrenica can be justified as retaliation for Muslim atrocities in the local area to placing it within the wider context of “civil war.” Unfortunately, academics outside Serbia and the RS have contributed and given credibility to revisionist ideas. For example, Edward Herman has referred to Srebrenica as a gigantic hoax.54 Diana Johnstone has described Srebrenica as a spontaneous act of revenge where only one hundred ninety nine victims were executed.55 These revisionist ideas can deepen denial even when debunked, and sometimes it was left- rather than right-wing forces who peddled such arguments. An article in the British magazine Living Marxism sought to establish that the film by British journalists at Trmpojolie camp was deceptive, misleading viewers into believing that Trmpojolie was a concentration camp.56 Despite the vindication of the journalists at a libel trial, the lie has been repeated and referenced in other bogus arguments.57 As our age of information overload and “fake news” was setting in, it became more rare for the average person to follow such stories to their conclusion, and purported “facts,” even when refuted successfully are employed, in this case, for denial. The support of the freedom to articulate such revisionist views under the banner of free speech is an academic version of equivalence that suggests all views have equal right to be expressed no matter how fabricated or erroneous.58 It is also an extension of postmodern approaches, dominated by relativism, where the point of view of the perpetrator is given equal weight to that of the victim. This faulty

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methodology echoes the “civil war” and “fault on all sides” arguments of the international community at the time of the genocide and supports equivalence accounts of political deniers in the RS.

Phase V: Embedded denial The cumulative effect of these strategies of denial along the Continuum strengthens a master narrative that allows more space for denial to the extent that it becomes embedded in society. In this phase, there is rarely, if any, attempt to recognize genocide or even make partial admissions. In Bosnia three strategies are of primary importance in this phase: glorification, dememorialization, and institutional denial. Glorification Typically, when we think of someone being glorified, it is a victorious sports star or a compelling musician. In Bosnia, however, the glorification of genocide can be observed in various ways. Glorification can be observed in the public and political reaction to the convictions of war criminals. Following the conviction of Ratko Mladić on July 22, 2017, RS President Dodik publicly commented that Mladić was a hero who had saved Serbs from genocide. His statement echoes the master narrative that begins with dehumanizing the enemy other and convincing Serbs that they must kill or be killed. Further, when war criminals have been released, no matter how heinous the crime from genocide to rape to crimes against humanity, they are invariably welcomed by an organized celebration of homecoming. The public celebration of war criminals returning suggests that genocide denial is embedded within the society and that somehow their crimes were justified. In the public sphere, the persistence of dehumanizing ideology and extreme nationalism can be observed in frequent, apparently spontaneous, acts of glorification. For example, at football matches and other public gatherings a familiar chant is “Knife, wire, Srebrenica.”59 The glorification extends to Serbia. In 2017, fans at Red Star Belgrade chanted the name of Mladić, while a junior league football team wore shirts printed with his image.60 Transforming the genocidal leader into someone to be glorified, even among the youth, perpetuates denial and reignites ethnic divisions and dehumanization. De-memorialization In many of the sites in the RS where atrocities occurred, attempts have been made to change the meaning and significance of the locations. An example of de-memorialization can be seen at one of the Srebrenica massacre sites, Kravica. There, 100 yards from the warehouse where 1,300 Muslims were slaughtered, a cross has been erected to 3,267 “Serb martyrs” of the war.61 (See Figure 6.2, in the previous chapter.) No memorial exists to the victims

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of the genocide, and the Kravica warehouse has returned to its pre-war function. A monument at the former concentration camp of Trnopolje functions, paradoxically, as both a symbol of denial and a glorification of the atrocities that occurred at the camp. Hariz Halliovich describes the monument as a large two-headed eagle, a symbol of Serb nationalism, dedicated by its inscription to “fallen Serb heroes.”62 Sudbin Musić, a survivor from Prijedor returned to his hometown, but was re-traumatized by the injustice of this memorial and the glorification of those responsible for his suffering. For Musić and many like him, such actions deepen the trauma and extend the genocidal process because, with the lack of accountability, the lack of justice, there can be no reconciliation. Acts of dememorialization that go uncontested indicate that any push for justice and reconciliation is in vain since genocide denial has become so embedded. Institutionalized denial Notwithstanding the pain that glorification and de-memorialization must cause to victims, deeper structural problems exist due to the failure of the two primary institutions of transitional justice, the Dayton agreement and the ICTY. As aforementioned, Dayton has created a structural and political reality that embeds ethnic politics and has inevitably led to an entrenchment of ethnic division in all facets of society, including commemorations and education.63 The most telling example of this institutionalized denial is the policy of two schools under one roof, where each ethnic group is instructed separately using different history textbooks.64 The history of the conflict is taught differently depending on a student’s ethnicity, and RS President Dodik has made it clear that Srebrenica will not be taught to Serbian children in the RS.65 The second institutional arrangement, which was designed to provide transitional justice, the ICTY, has been able to establish an irrefutable record of events but has failed to have these facts accepted by the Bosnian Serbs.66 Even the irrefutable facts of the ICTY have been subject to interpretive denial. Moreover, many Bosnian Muslims express dissatisfaction with the functioning of the ICTY. In general, rather than providing a pathway to a more integrated, stable society, the ICTY’s decisions have deepened mistrust between ethnicities as evidenced by the polarized reactions to conviction or acquittal in prominent cases. Nonetheless, the long-term legacy of the tribunal, which has assembled a huge database of material, is to establish the facts of the genocide for future generations beyond any reasonable doubt. However, as the chapters in this book evidence, genocide denial never stops simply because irrefutable evidence is provided.

Phase VI: Forgetting as denial The ultimate aim of denial is arguably to remove genocide from political debate. Forgotten genocides, often the result of colonialism such as the

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Belgian Congo or destructions of Indigenous peoples by settlers in the colonies, are not often seriously debated and therefore, ironically, do not need to be denied. This phase has not yet been reached in Bosnia, though attempts are constantly being made to enable forgetting. Selimovic argues that post-conflict order in Bosnia can be defined by what to remember and what to forget.67 However, the roots of forgetting can perhaps be traced back in The Continuum, to the phase of emergent denial and the deliberate destruction of culture. Branimir Anzulovic describes this as “memorycide.”68 The historic 450-year-old Alzuda Mosque in Foča was destroyed in 1992 together with eleven other mosques in Foča. The purpose was to destroy Muslim culture so that years later, people would forget that Muslims had been on the land for centuries.69 At Srebrenica, forgetting is unlikely to be a successful strategy due to the high international profile of the genocide. Yet for other towns in the RS, there is a daily battle against a strategy of forgetting. In Višegrad, the scene of some of the most appalling atrocities of the conflict, two notable attempts have been made at forgetting. The first is at the Hotel Vilna Vas, the scene of a notorious rape camp and multiple murders in 1992. The hotel now features on Trip Advisor advertised as a health spa with its terrible past apparently forgotten. There is no memorial and the present mayor of Viśegrad denies all knowledge of its history.70 A further example of an attempt to facilitate forgetting can be found at a house in Pionirska Street, also in Viśegrad, where in June 1992 at least fifty-nine people including children and the elderly were burnt alive.71 This atrocity formed part of the ICTY indictment against Milan Lukić, who was later convicted of war crimes. The presiding judge wrote: At the close of the twentieth century … these horrific events stand out for the viciousness of the incendiary attack, for the obvious premeditation and calculation that defined it, for the sheer callousness and brutality of herding, trapping and locking the victims in the two houses, thereby rendering them helpless in the ensuing inferno, and for the degree of pain and suffering inflicted on the victims as they were burnt alive.72 On many occasions, local politicians have attempted to erase the existence of the house, which, thanks to brave local activists, still stands as a silent memorial to the victims of the atrocity.73

Conclusions The Continuum may help identify changing strategies of denial over time and assist in understanding how denial can become embedded without effective counter-measures or interventions. Further, the thread of dehumanizing ideology runs through all phases of the Continuum. This suggests that interventions need to challenge dehumanizing ideologies, or indeed any

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ideology that employs ideas of hatred and division. More positively, the analysis of the denial at Srebrenica suggests that progress along the Continuum is not always linear; at times denial stalled, providing opportunities for interventions, which might have halted or diminished the impact of future denial strategies. Such interventions could have facilitated post conflict resolution and reconciliation. Unfortunately, at key points in Bosnia, interventions by the international community, such as Dayton and the ICTY, have failed or may even have contributed to denial. There is hope, however, that we learn from past experiences if the harsh lessons of the 1990s are honestly confronted.

Notes 1 Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, “Challenges of Post conflict Coexistence: Narrating Truth and Justice in a Bosnian Town,” Political Psychology 36, no. 2 (2015): 231–42. 2 Israel Charny, “A Classification of Denials of the Holocaust and Other Genocides,” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no.1 (2003): 5, 11. 3 Stanley Cohen, States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2001), 7. 4 Cohen, 58–60. 5 ICTY 2003, Mevludin Oric, Evidence in Blagojevic and Jokic, IT-02-60, 13421355, accessed March 20, 2020, http://www.icty.org/case/blagojevic_jokic/4. 6 Johannes Lang, “Questioning Dehumanization: ‘Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the Nazi Concentration and Death Camps,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no.2 (2010), 225–46. 7 Rowan Savage, “Modern Genocidal Dehumanization: A New Model,” Patterns of Prejudice 47, no. 2 (2013), 142. 8 Cohen, 58. 9 ICTY 2003, Sentence Judgement, Prosecutor v. Plavsic, IT 0039/40, accessed March 20, 2020, http://www.icty.org/case/plavsic/4.2003 384. 10 Laura Silber and Allan Little, Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 92. 11 Michael A Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (Berkley: University of California Press, 1998), 37. 12 Sells, 79. 13 ICTY1996, Muharem Nezirevic, Evidence in Erdemovic, IT 96-22, accessed March 20, 2020, http://www.icty.org/case/erdemovic/. 1256. 14 Nezirevic, Evidence in Erdemovic IT 96-22 1256. 15 Cohen, 58. 16 See also Herbert Kelman and Lee Hamilton, Crimes of Obedience (Binghamton, NY: Vail-Ballou Press, 1989) and Jerrold Post and Lara Panis, “Crimes of Obedience,” Democracy and Security 33, no.1 (2005), 38. 17 Witness O ICTY 2001 2884-2892, IT 98 -33, accessed March 20, 2020, https:// www.icty.org/case/krstic#tjug 18 Sells, 80. 19 Alex Todorovic, Daily Telegraph June 3, 2005, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/1491328/Serbs-stunned-by-pictures-of-massacre-at-Srebenica.html. 20 Chimamanda Adiche, “The Danger of a Single Story,” TED Talk, July 2009, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_ adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.

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21 Richard Butler, ICTY 2012, Evidence in Tolimir, IT–05-88-2, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.icty.org/case/tolimir#trans 27636. 22 Thomas Blass, Obedience to Authority; Current Perspectives on the Milgram paradigm (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Inc, 2000), 39. Blass contends that military structures can remove personal responsibility and replace it with “legitimate authority.” 23 ICTY1996, Erdemović sentence hearing IT 96-22, accessed March 20, 2020, http:// www.icty.org/case/erdemovic/4. 24 Savage, Modern Genocidal Dehumanization: A New Model, 146. 25 Cohen, 149. 26 Stejapan Mestrovic, Genocide After Emotion: The Post-Emotional Balkan War (London: Routledge, 1996), 56. 27 James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes (London: Hurst and Company Publishers, 2003), 119. 28 Colin Kaiser, ICTY, 2003, Evidence in Radoslav Brdjanin, IT 99 36 T 16402, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/brdanin/tjug/en/brd-tj04 0901e.pdf. 29 Helen Fein, “Civil Wars and Genocide: Paths and Circles,” Human Rights Review 1, no. 3 (2000), 49–61. 30 Dragan Obrenovic, ICTY 2004, Evidence in Blagojevic & Jokic IT-02- 60 -24432548, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.icty.org/case/blagojevic_jokic#tjug. 31 Kelman and Hamilton, 18. 32 Butler, Evidence in Tolimir ICTY, IT–05-88-2 27532-27645, accessed March 20, 2020. 33 ICTY, 2004, exhibit 250a Blagojevic and Jokic IT-02- 60, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/blagojevic_jokic/tjug/en/bla-050117e.pdf. 34 John Darley, “Social Organization for the Production of Evil,” Psychological Inquiry 3, no. 2 (1992), 199–218. 35 Kelman and Hamilton, 17. 36 Reynaud Theunens, ICTY 2011, Evidence in Karadžić IT 95 /5 18 T 16839- 19914, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/karadzic/tdec/en/110714a. 37 Theunens, ICTY 2011 16839. 38 Momir Nikolić, ICTY 2003, Evidence in Blagojevic et al IT-02-60, accessed March 20, 2020. 39 PW169, ICTY 2007, Evidence in Popovic et al IT -05-88 -17211-17377 40 ICTY 2012, Judgement in Tolimir IT 05 88 2, accessed March 20, 2020, https:// www.icty.org/x/cases/tolimir/tjug/en/121212.pdf 170. 41 Desimir Dujkanovic, ICTY 2007 exhibit P00407 (statement) Karadžić IT 95 /5 18 T, accessed March 20, 2020, http://icr.icty.org/frmResultSet.aspx?e=r4k1i0ydg3 byu5453yx2e355&StartPage=1&EndPage=10. 42 Lara J. Nettlefield and Sarah E Wagner, Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 18. 43 Dujkanovic, ICTY 2007, exhibit P00407, accessed March 20, 2020, http://icr.icty.org/ frmResultSet.aspx?e=r4k1i0ydg3byu5453yx2e355&StartPage=1&EndPage=10. 44 ICTY 2001, Judgement in Kristic case number IT 98-33, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.icty.org/x/cases/krstic/tjug/en/krs-tj010802e.pdf. 45 Jelena Subotic, “The Cruelty of False Remorse, Biljana Plavšic at the Hague.” Southeastern Europe 36, no. 1 (2012), 46. 46 Mark Harmon, “Bridging the Gap,” ICTY Website (2005), 33, accessed March 20, 2020, http://www.icty.org/en/outreach/bridging-the-gap-with-local-communities/ srebrenica. 47 Harmon, 33. 48 Cohen, 144.

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49 Slavenka Drakulic, They Would Never Hurt a Fly (London: Abacus: 2004), 27. 50 Chris Hedges, “Bosnia’s Nationalist Parties Dominate Election Results,” The New York Times, September 22, 1996, accessed March 20, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/1996/09/22/world/bosnia-s-nationalist-parties-dominate-election-results.html. 51 Cohen, 7. 52 Eric Gordy, “Tracing Dialogue on the Legacy of War Crimes in Serbia,” Narratives of Justice in and Out of the Courtroom. Springer Series in Transitional Justice 8, (2014), 111. 53 Nettlefield and Wagner, 253. 54 Ed Herman and John Robles “The Srebrenica Massacre was a Gigantic Political Fraud” (2013) 1–3, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.globalresearch.ca/thesrebrenica-massacre-was-a-gigantic-political-fraud/5321388 55 Diana Johnstone, cited in Marko Attlia -Hoare, “Chomsky’s “Genocidal Denial,” FrontPageMagazine, November 23, 2005, accessed March 20, 2020, http://archive.frontpagemag.com/printable.aspx?Artid=6494. 56 David Campbell, “Atrocity, Memory, Photography: Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia: The Case of ITN versus living Marxism.” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 2 (June 2002), 143–72. 57 Ed Herman and David Petersen, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), 46. The authors refer to “fabricated concentration camps.” 58 Israel W Charny, “The Psychological Satisfaction of Denials of the Holocaust and or Other Genocides by Non-Extremists or Bigots and even by Known Scholars,” IdeaJournal.com, July 17, 2001. 59 Ehilimana Memiševic, “Battling the Eighth Stage: Incrimination of Genocide Denial in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 35, no. 3 (2015). 60 Filip Rudic, “Soccer Clubs Line Up to Show Mladić Support,” Balkan Insight, November 27, 2017, accessed March 20, 2020, https://balkaninsight.com/201 7/11/27/soccer-clubs-line-up-to-show-mladic-support-11-27-2017. 61 Nettlefield and Wagner, 62–71 62 Hariz Halilovich, Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-Local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013), 114. 63 Patrice C McMahon and Jon Western, “The Death of Dayton,” Foreign Affairs, September/October 2009, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ articles/bosnia-herzegovina/2009-08-17/death-dayton. 64 Jelena Subotic, “Remembrance, Public Narratives and Obstacles to Justice in the Western Balkans,” Studies in Social Justice 7, no. 2 (2013), 274. 65 Danijel Kovacevic, “Bosnian Serbs to Ban Lessons on Srebrenica Genocide,” Balkan Insight, June 6, 2017, accessed March 20, 2020, https://balkaninsight.com/2 017/06/06/bosnian-serbs-to-ban-lectures-on-srebrenica-sarajevo-siege-06-06-2017. 66 Marko Milanović, “Establishing the Facts about Mass Atrocities; Accounting for the Failure of the ICTY to Persuade Target Audiences,” Georgetown Journal of International Law (March 31, 2016), 89. 67 Johanna Mannergren Selimovic, “Challenges of Post conflict Coexistence: Narrating Truth and Justice in a Bosnian Town.” Political Psychology 36, no. 2 (2015), 232. 68 Branimir Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 142. 69 Anzulovic, 143.

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70 Emma Graham-Harrison, “Back on the Tourist Trail,” The Guardian, January 28, 2018, accessed March 20, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/ jan/28/bosnia-hotel-rape-murder-war-crimes. 71 ICTY 2009, case summary Lukic and Lukic, accessed March 20, 2020, https:// www.icty.org/case/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic. 72 Ibid. 73 Graham-Harrison.

Bibliography Publications Anzulovic, Branimir. Heavenly Serbia: From Myth to Genocide. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Blass, Thomas, ed. Obedience to Authority: Current Perspectives on the Milgram Paradigm. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers, 2000. Campbell, David. “Atrocity, Memory, Photography; Imaging the Concentration Camps of Bosnia: The Case of ITN Versus Living Marxism.” Journal of Human Rights 1, no. 1 (March 2002): 1–33. Charny, Israel W. “A Classification of Denials of the Holocaust and Other Genocides.” Journal of Genocide Research 5, no.1 (2003): 11–34. Cohen, Stanley. States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering. Cambridge, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2001. Darley, John. “Social Organization for the Production of Evil.” Psychological Inquiry 3, no. 2 (1992): 199–218. Drakulic, Slavenka. They Would Never Hurt a Fly: War Criminals on Trial in the Hague. London: Abacus, 2004. Fein, Helen. “Civil Wars and Genocide: Paths and Circles.” Human Rights Review 1, no.3 (2000): 49–61. Gordy, Eric. “Tracing Dialogue on the Legacy of War Crimes in Serbia.” In Narratives of Justice In and Out of the Courtroom, edited by Dubravka Zarkov and Marlies Glasius (New York: Springer Publishing, 2014), 111–130. Gow, James. The Serbian Project and its Adversaries: A Strategy of War Crimes. London: Hurst and Company Publishers, 2003. Gutman, Roy. A Witness to Genocide: The First Inside Account of the Horrors of “Ethnic Cleansing” in Bosnia. Shaftesbury Dorset: Element Books Ltd., 1993. Halilovich, Hariz. Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Translocal Identities in Bosnian War-torn Communities. New York: Berghahn Books, 2013. Herman, Edward S. and David Peterson. The Politics of Genocide. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Kelman, Herbert and Hamilton, Lee. Crimes of Obedience: Towards a Social Psychology of Authority and Responsibility. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989. Lang, Johannes. “Questioning Dehumanization: ‘Intersubjective Dimensions of Violence in the Nazi Concentration and Death Camps.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 24, no. 2 (2010): 225–246.

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McMahon, Patrice and Jon Western. “The Death of Dayton.” Foreign Affairs 88, no. 5 (September/October 2009): 69–83. Memiševic, Ehilimana. “Battling the Eighth Stage: Incrimination of Genocide Denial in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 35, no. 3 (2015): 380–400. Mestrovic, Stejapan. Genocide after Emotion: The Post-Emotional Balkan War. London: Routledge 1996. Milanović, Marko D. “Establishing the Facts about Mass Atrocities; Accounting for the Failure of the ICTY to Persuade Target Audiences.” Georgetown Journal of International Law 47 (2016): 1321–1378. Nettlefield, Lara J. and Sarah E. Wagner. Srebrenica in the Aftermath of Genocide. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Savage, Rowan. “Modern Genocidal Dehumanization: A New Model.” Patterns of Prejudice 47, no. 2 (2013): 139–161. Sells, Michael A. The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and Genocide in Bosnia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Selemovic, Johanna Mannergren. “Challenges of Post conflict Coexistence: Narrating Truth and Justice in a Bosnian Town.” Political Psychology 36, no. 2 (2015): 231–242. Silber, Laura and Allan Little. Yugoslavia: Death of a Nation. London: Penguin Books, 1996. Subotic, Jelena. “The Cruelty of False Remorse: Biljana Plavšic at the Hague.” Southeastern Europe 36, no.1 (2012): 39–59. Subotic, Jelena. “Remembrance, Public Narratives and Obstacles to Justice in the Western Balkans.” Studies in Social Justice 7, no. 2 (2013): 265–283.

Online sources Adiche, Chimamanda. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED: Ideas Worth Spreading. July 2009. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story. Al Jazeera English. “Bosnian Serbs Welcome Freed War Criminal.” August 30, 2013. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/europe/2013/08/2 013830203137245488.html. Charny, Israel W. “The Psychological Satisfaction of Denials of the Holocaust and or Other Genocides by Non-Extremists or Bigots and Even by Known Scholars.” IdeaJournal.com. July 17, 2001. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.ideajournal. com/articles.php? id=27. Graham-Harrison, Emma. “Back on the Tourist Trail: the Hotel Where Women Were Raped and Tortured.” The Guardian. January, 28, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/bosnia-hotel-rape-murderwar-crimes. Harmon Mark. “Bridging the Gap.” ICTY Website, 2005. Accessed March 20, 2020. http://www.icty.org/en/outreach/bridging-the-gap-with-local-communities/srebrenica. Hedges, Chris. “Nationalist Parties Dominate Election Results.” The New York Times. September 22,1996. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/1 996/09/22/world/bosnia-s-nationalist-parties-dominate-election-results.html.

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Herman Edward and John Robles. “The Srebrenica Massacre Was a Gigantic Political Fraud.” Global Research. July 13, 2018. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.globalresearch.ca/the-srebrenica-massacre-was-a-gigantic-politicalfraud/5321388. Hoare, Marko Attila. “Chomsky’s Genocidal Denial.” FrontPageMagazine.com. November 23, 2005. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://archive.vn/20150607194446/ http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=6494. Kovacevic, Danijel. “Bosnian Serbs to Ban Lessons on Srebrenica Genocide.” Balkan Insight. June 6, 2017. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://balkaninsight.com/2017/06/ 06/bosnian-serbs-to-ban-lectures-on-srebrenica-sarajevo-siege-06-06-2017. Rudic, Filip. “Soccer Clubs Line Up to Show Mladić Support.” Balkan Insight. November 27, 2017. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://balkaninsight.com/201 7/11/27/soccer-clubs-line-up-to-show-mladic-support-11-27-2017. Todorovic, Alex. “Serbs Stunned by Pictures of Massacre at Srebrenica.” The Daily Telegraph. June 3, 2005. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/1491328/Serbs-stunned-by-pictures-of-massacre-at-Srebenica.html.

Documents from the International Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia Prosecutor v Blagojevic and Jokic. IT-02- 60. 2004. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.icty.org/case/blagojevic_jokic#tjug. Prosecutor v Brdanin. IT-99-36. 2003. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.icty.org/case/brdanin. Prosecutor v Erdemović. IT 96-22. 1996. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.icty.org/case/erdemovic Prosecutor v Karadzic and Mladić. IT 95-5 /18. 2011. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.icty.org/case/karadzic. Prosecutor v Kristić. IT 98- 33. 2001. Accessed March 20, 2020. https://www.icty.org/ x/cases/krstic/tjug/en/krs-tj010802e.pdf. Prosecutor v Lukic and Lukic. IT 98-32/1. 2009. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.icty.org/case/milan_lukic_sredoje_lukic. Prosecutor v Plavsic. IT 0039/40. 2003. Accessed March 20, 2020. http:// www.icty.org/case/plavsic/4.2003. Prosecutor v Popovic et al. IT -05-88. 2007. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.icty.org/x/cases/popovic/tjug/en/100610. Prosecutor v Tolimir. IT-05-88-2. 2012. Accessed March 20, 2020. https:// www.icty.org/x/cases/tolimir/tjug/en/121212.

8

Beyond erasure: Indigenous genocide denial and settler colonialism Michelle A. Stanley

How should we frame the history of Indigenous peoples on this continent: within the contexts of genocide, crimes against humanity, or colonialism?1 This sort of semantic debate permeates discussions of Indigenous peoples within scholarly discourse—that is, when we are not excluded entirely. It also reduces our histories to the catastrophes visited upon us, leaving us only as victims. Within the wider public realm, beyond academe, the history of this land’s Indigenous peoples is presented with even less seriousness or honesty. In 2018 Reclaiming Native Truth—an extensive report produced by the First Nations Development Institute—found that in surveys conducted between 2016 and 2018, only 36% of Americans “almost certainly” believe that the “United States is guilty of committing genocide against Native Americans.”2 In the collective imagination and also in scholarly projects in this country, Indigenous genocide is largely denied, erased, relegated to the distant past, or presented as inevitable. While genocide denial may seem like the final step of genocide, many scholars, including some in this book, argue that denial is present in each phase of genocide. For Indigenous peoples, denial is another mechanism of the violence of settler colonialism, set in motion centuries ago. Patrick Wolfe explains that settler colonialism possesses a “logic of elimination” that it is “inherently eliminatory but not invariably genocidal.”3 Settler colonialism encompasses a broad range of assimilatory and eliminatory practices, including the “total appropriation of Indigenous life and land” in contrast to the selective extraction of profitproducing resources that we see in other forms of colonialism.4 This total appropriation refers to the processes and procedures used against Indigenous peoples to dispossess them of their lands and resources; control populations; force assimilation; eliminate entire tribal nations; and exert control over Indigenous histories, narratives, and epistemologies. Eve Tuck (Unangax) and K. Wayne Yang argue that settler colonialism simultaneously operates through internal and external colonial modes.5 External forms are extractive and include the removal of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the recasting of Native bodies and land as resources to be exploited.6 Internal modes refer to the biopolitical and geopolitical management of Indigenous populations, land, and flora and fauna.7 Internal DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-8

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modes include the criminalization of Indigenous practices, imprisonment, minoritizing, schooling, policing, segregation, and surveillance.8 Genocide denial functions as an internal variant of settler colonialism, by extending its control over history and knowledge through education and scholarly research, government statements and positions, and news media. Across the United States, Indigenous peoples learn about the settler state’s genocidal efforts from our own people, but our perspectives are marginalized and erased from public discourse and scholarly projects. The settler state controls the history that is taught in schools, which perspectives are prioritized in the political arena, and which genocidal acts are acknowledged— preferably ones that occurred far away, long ago, by regimes unaffiliated to the United States. This has led to widespread, deeply ingrained genocide denial, ensuring that settler sovereignty, colonialism, and the violence of removal is “reasserted each day of occupation.”9 In this way, Indigenous genocide denial is an internal mode of settler colonialism that allows for the continuation of genocidal actions that “destroy, in whole or in part” its victims.10 Further, many settler colonial actions perpetuate cultural genocide, undermining and eroding “the integrity of the culture and system of values that defines a people and gives them life.”11 For Indigenous peoples, culture often refers to ancestral land; modes of governance; sovereignty; reciprocal relationships with the land, plants, and wildlife; modes of descent; language; spiritual and traditional practices and objects; forms of expressions; and ways of knowledge. Therefore, it is impossible to examine genocide denial without also acknowledging how it is a part of a larger elimination process. This chapter focuses primarily on methods of “selective genocide denial” that employ settler-colonial criteria. An analysis of these methods demonstrates that even when genocide is acknowledged, it is from a limited, problematic framework. To demonstrate resistance to these processes, I also examine activism and scholarship related to cultural appropriation, the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) epidemic, and tribal nation recognition issues. Finally, this chapter provides guidance for genocide scholars writing about Indigenous peoples.

Calling things by their correct names First, though, I would like to establish that “genocide” is indeed the correct term to characterize the catastrophes inflicted upon Indigenous peoples on this continent. “The objective of US colonialist authorities was to terminate their existence as peoples—not as random individuals,” explains Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in an important 2016 article, which condenses some arguments from her An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. “This is the very definition of modern genocide as contrasted with premodern instances of extreme violence that did not have the goal of extinction.”12

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As Dunbar-Ortiz points out, “genocide does not have to be complete to be considered genocide”—and indeed, history’s most well-known, widely recognized genocides, including the Holocaust, were not “total.”13 DunbarOrtiz continues: From the colonial period through the founding of the United States and continuing in the twentieth century, this [genocide] has entailed torture, terror, sexual abuse, massacres, systematic military occupations, removals of Indigenous peoples from their ancestral territories, forced removal of Native American children to military-like boarding schools, allotment, and a policy of termination. Within the logic of settler-colonialism, genocide was the inherent overall policy of the United States from its founding, but there are also specific documented policies of genocide on the part of US administrations that can be identified in at least four distinct periods: the Jacksonian era of forced removal; the California gold rush in Northern California; during the Civil War and in the post-Civil War era of the so-called Indian Wars in the Southwest and the Great Plains; and the 1950s termination period; additionally, there is the overlapping period of compulsory boarding schools, 1870s to 1960s.14 Dunbar-Ortiz adds that, “In the case of the Jewish Holocaust, no one denies that more Jews died of starvation, overwork, and disease under Nazi incarceration than died in gas ovens or murdered by other means, yet the acts of creating and maintaining the conditions that led to those deaths clearly constitute genocide,” while pointing out that each of the five actions listed in Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention have been consistently enforced against Indigenous peoples: 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.15 Adam Jones, among the foremost authorities on comparative genocide, argues that “the European holocaust of indigenous peoples in the Americas may have been the most extensive and destructive genocide ever.” Jones then outlines seven categories of “wide-ranging genocidal measures” employed over the last five centuries.16

Denial through discourse and education Genocide denial typically functions as either a complete or selective erasure. The Reclaiming Native Truth report states that invisibility remains one of the

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most important issues faced by Native Americans. Most research on Indigenous genocide denial focuses on the refusal to acknowledge genocide in scholarship or in school curricula. Geographic region, deaths from diseases, distinctions between specific tribal nations, and “tribal warfare” become central points of contention within such debates. For instance, some scholars argue that “genocide” cannot describe settler contact with Native peoples because there was a lack of “purposive behavior” to eliminate the populations.17 An overly strict, legalistic interpretation of the UN’s 1948 definition—in particular regarding the issue of intent—is used to avoid the recognition of genocide. Other scholars are less subtle, denying genocide by arguing that tribal warfare accounts for many of the deaths of Indigenous peoples or that the “warrior” or “savage” nature of tribal nations justified settler violence against them.18 These arguments are common within K-12 History curricula. Studies reveal that history curriculum overwhelmingly portrays Native Americans as outsiders, “existing in the distant past” who had a “cooperation-to-conflict” relationship with settlers and whose “removal” was an “inevitable outcome of westward expansion.”19 And once textbooks enter the 1900s they rarely mention Native Americans at all, implying that they disappeared yet neglecting to reveal the causes of their presumed disappearance.20 The textbooks invariably state that Indigenous peoples died from diseases or were the cause of their own demise by initiating attacks or wars.21 When more serious scholars acknowledge Indigenous genocide, they often do so with caveats or qualifications, or partake in “selective genocide denial” methods—for instance by situating the violence and destruction in the distant past, failing to connect these actions to ongoing processes. These methods are widespread in genocide scholarship. Focusing solely on historical actions suggests that there was an end to Indigenous genocide, even when that is not the intention of the scholar. Methods of selective genocide denial fail to acknowledge genocidal acts except in certain conditions, which are often selected based on prior research, historical records, or the author’s perspective, sources of knowledge that have been influenced by settlercolonial ideals and embedded within a history of genocide denial. One method of selective genocide denial is to only acknowledge genocide within certain tribal nations or regions. Some scholars argue that historical genocide only occurred among tribal nations in the region we now call California.22 Many scholars argue that the genocidal acts in California demonstrate “purposive behavior” unlike other actions, which could imply that others did not experience genocide. Further, this approach positions non-Indigenous genocide scholars as the authority over which tribal nations have experienced genocide, which can reinforce settler-colonial processes that only recognize certain nations based on settler-colonial histories, records, and research. I argue that research that focuses on specific tribal nations must be positioned as part of a discussion of the ongoing, broader, centuries-long patterns of settler colonialism and genocide experienced by all Indigenous tribal nations in the United States.

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Often, the current size of individual nations determines which are included in research. For instance, 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.23 Additionally, most genocide research only addresses federally recognized tribal nations, even though there are over sixty-three state-recognized nations and many more that remain unrecognized by the settler state.24 Greater effort and support should be expended on research that focuses on smaller, state-recognized, and unrecognized tribal nations in addition to the federally recognized and larger nations. While researchers should acknowledge that all Indigenous tribes have been or are victims of genocide, mainstream discourse often paints Indigenous genocide broadly, without acknowledging that genocidal acts against tribal nations varied. The lack of differentiation when addressing specific tribal nations is another method of selective genocide denial. One tribal nation’s experience cannot be used to describe that of every other tribal nation. For instance, genocidal acts in southeastern portions of this country differed tremendously from the methods utilized in the west. Many southeastern tribal nations were forcibly removed while others assimilated or concealed their identities to survive. The tendency to group tribal nations together, eliding differences, coincides with the settler state’s attempts to erase individual nations and instead group all Natives into one category: “American Indian.” Discourse that refuses to acknowledge that genocide, albeit with variations, has been a unified and cohesive process against every unique tribal nation in the past and present helps, knowingly or not, to promote denial.

Cultural appropriation In the simplest terms, cultural appropriation is the “taking, from a culture that is not one’s own, intellectual property, cultural expressions and artifacts, history and ways of knowledge.”25 In the United States some of the most commonly appropriated items include those used for cultural protocols, such as prayer bundles and smudging; the use of war bonnets and headdresses; dreamcatchers; Indigenous images; and traditional regalia. Tobacco is one of the most appropriated items within the United States. Traditionally, tobacco leaves are used for ceremonial protocols within many southeastern tribal nations. Settlers have appropriated tobacco and transformed it into a capitalist cash crop. Further, many Indigenous peoples were forced to become sharecroppers for tobacco farmers, making Natives work for little or no money to over-produce tobacco for the settler society rather than for tribal nations. Cultural appropriation is an expression of settler colonialism because it manifests the ways the settler state controls the

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representation of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and traditions. Native cultural practices are reduced to gimmicks, sometimes reminiscent of minstrel shows, that lack historical contexts. The erasure of Indigenous histories allows the settler state to appropriate and re-write Indigenous narratives for their own benefit. Non-Indigenous settlers make money off Indigenous cultural items and imagery. Further, cultural appropriation is a product of cultural genocide efforts. The 1883 Courts of Indian Offenses was established to prosecute people for practicing various “illegal” traditions, religious ceremonies, and dances.26 These practices remained illegal until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978.27 Additionally, the residential boarding school system with its “Kill the Indian, save the man” philosophy, forced Indigenous children to assimilate.28 Indigenous children were beaten, denied food, and sent to solitary confinement for engaging in any Native cultural practices or possessing Native cultural items.29 Even now, Indigenous students are prohibited from or assaulted for wearing feathers or traditional regalia for ceremonies, while many non-Natives wear Indigenous regalia at festivals, sporting events, and during Halloween, thus erasing the items’ cultural significance and demonstrating the ways settler-colonial processes attempt to control authentic Indigenous cultural expressions in order to co-opt them.30 The inclusion of cultural appropriation as a settler-colonial mode related to the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples challenges selective genocide denial by focusing on current issues that continue to marginalize Native peoples and obscure or camouflage the broader campaign of destruction perpetrated against them.

Tribal nation recognition Another method of genocide denial embedded in settler-colonial ideologies is the refusal to recognize tribal nations. Tribal nations can apply for federal or state recognition. State recognition acknowledges tribal nations within the state, with criteria and benefits determined by the state.31 State recognition does not recognize tribal nations as sovereign entities, however, some states collaborate with tribal nations on legislation and policies that affect Indigenous peoples.32 Federal recognition allows tribal nations to assume legal sovereign status and receive federal funding.33 Further, federally recognized tribal nations have a government-to-government relationship with the United States.34 Criteria for federal recognition includes evidence of the following: Indian “entity” identification on a “substantially continuous basis since 1900;” distinct community from 1900 until the present; political influence or authority over members as an “autonomous entity from 1900 until the present;” governing document outlining procedures and membership criteria; descent from historical Indian tribe(s); unique membership; and lack of Congressional termination.35 Importantly, tribal nations whose federal recognition petitions are rejected are not allowed to

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resubmit at a later date. The inability to resubmit federal recognition petitions dissuades many tribal nations from seeking federal recognition. Both the state and federal recognition processes demonstrate settlercolonial biopolitical authority and control over Indigenous peoples. While state recognition processes are often much simpler than the federal recognition process, individual states are not mandated to offer a formal state recognition process for tribal nations. Currently, only twelve states maintain formal state recognition processes.37 For many tribal nations, federal recognition criteria remain nearly impossible to meet. Only eighteen tribal nations have been approved for federal recognition since 1980; while thirtyfour tribal nations have been denied since 1981.38 Most tribal nations wait decades before receiving a decision, and even if the petition is approved, federal recognition can be revoked. Further, historical genocidal actions, settler colonialism, and racism can interfere with and disrupt the ability for a tribal nation to be “substantially continuous(ly)” identified as an Indian entity.39 For instance, all of the states with formal state recognition processes are located on the east coast of the United States, indicating that federal government “Indian status” was removed when they/we were not forcibly removed.40 Forced removal of Indigenous peoples, the urban relocation efforts, the purposeful or accidental misidentification of race on state and federal documentation, racism that encourages Natives to hide their identities, and other settler colonial and genocidal processes have contributed to gaps in tribal nation history making it difficult to petition for federal recognition. The barriers to federal recognition and the lack of rights associated with state recognition leave many tribal nations as Indigenous nations without their inherent legal rights to sovereignty, land, adequate funding, political power, and governance. The recognition processes are eliminatory procedures that restrict who is legally acknowledged by the settler state. These processes are an attempt to eliminate tribal nations by forcing them to assimilate and weakening legal sovereignty.41 Sovereignty is the lifeblood of tribal nations and ensures that the cultures, traditions, and ways of knowing are continuously reinforced. While all Indigenous tribal nations, regardless of settler-colonial recognition, are inherently sovereign and engage in self-determination, sovereignty is weakened without federal recognition. The settler state standards are based on settler-colonial ideologies and structures that tribal nations must establish and maintain in order to gain recognition. For instance, under The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 the United States developed standardized constitutions and bylaws that were aligned with American government structure for tribal nations to adopt to obtain federal recognition.42 Over time these constitutions erased traditional governance, making it more difficult for tribal nations to engage in cultural resurgent self-determination. In this way, the recognition processes facilitate the elimination of Indigenous modes of governance and kinship by requiring tribal nations to assimilate to obtain sovereignty.

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Further, settler state-imposed blood quantum and tribal identity standards continue to be used to determine tribal recognition. Tribal nations with blood quantum membership policies and formal tribal ID requirements are favored for recognition. These policies are not aligned with Indigenous conceptions of belonging within tribal nations nor Indigeneity. Further, the policies severely restrict the number of individuals who can qualify for membership within tribal nations, which can reduce populations. Recognition processes facilitate the minoritizing of Indigenous peoples and allow the settler state to determine who is included as an Indigenous person and which tribal nations have legal sovereignty.

Missing and murdered indigenous women and girls Indigenous activists have consistently argued that the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls epidemic demonstrates the gendered nature of genocide and settler colonial efforts against Native peoples. The MMIWG epidemic refers to the disproportionate rates of violence and disappearance of Indigenous and First Nations women and girls in the United States and Canada. According to a report funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, 84.3% of Indigenous women in the United States experience violence including sexual violence, intimate partner violence, stalking, or psychological aggression by an intimate partner.43 The National Crime Information Center reports that there were 5,712 reports of missing Indigenous women and girls in 2016.44 The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that murder is the third-leading cause of death among Native women.45 These statistics are all based on incomplete data, due to sample sizes, inaccurate racial coding, and underreporting. It is likely that the actual number of MMIWG is significantly higher. The MMIWG epidemic affects every Indigenous tribal nation regardless of their location or recognition by the settler state. It is one of the most pressing issues within these communities. There are many arguments against acknowledging the MMIWG epidemic as genocidal, including the perceived lack of systematic processes and the race/ethnicity of perpetrators. “Reclaiming Power and Place,” the 2019 national inquiry into MMIWG in Canada, argues for the “application of genocide in both legal and in social terms, and as it persists today.”46 This report connects the MMIWG epidemic to settler-colonial structures such as programs and legislation that were established by colonizers, and continue to subjugate and eliminate Indigenous peoples.47 In the United States, programs and policies that fail to prevent or use resources to protect Indigenous women and girls from exploitation, trafficking, and known killers exist. Other such programs and policies include issues with child welfare brought on from challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act; abuse afflicted on Natives in state institutions; the denial or removal of federal recognition for tribal nations; the history and continued practices of land theft and relocation; the removal of children; the underfunding of human

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services and environmental services; coerced sterilizations; and more. According to the legal definition of genocide, such practices and policies evidence “intent to destroy, in whole or in part” people who belong to a certain group, thus should qualify as genocidal. Further, systematic gendered colonial violence has sought to eliminate all gender identities and expressions that do not conform to the heteropatriarchy.48 In the United States and Canada, many tribal nations are matrifocal, matriarchal, or matrilineal and are accepting of diverse genders and sexualities. The settler state has sought to eliminate these structures by systematically killing or raping individuals who did not conform, implementing federal policies that eliminated women-inclusive modes of governance, and forcing tribal nations to assimilate to heteropatriarchal structures through the boarding school system. Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people represent an alternative to the settler state’s heteropatriarchal governance and kinship structures, and as such have been marked for elimination to promote settler sovereignty and futurity.49 Further, eliminatory practices that target Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people facilitate assimilation efforts by impeding the ability to pass non-heteropatriarchal traditions to future generations, thus severely affecting and distorting our futures. Contrary to many claims, data collected from a survey administered in 2010 indicate that 97% of identified perpetrators of violence toward Indigenous women are non-Native.50 In contrast, only 35% of white women experience violence by an “interracial” perpetrator.51 The overwhelming number of non-Native perpetrators further demonstrates gendered colonial violence resulting from years of policies and practices that seek to eliminate Indigenous women who have been “deemed killable, rapeable, expendable” because they represent “land, reproduction, Indigenous kinship and governance, an alternative to heteropatriarchal and Victorian rules of descent.”52 Additionally, women living on reservations are specifically targeted by perpetrators due to laws that prohibit tribal police and court jurisdiction over sexual assault crimes committed by non-Native perpetrators outside of domestic violence cases.53 Both on and off reservations, MMIWG cases rarely receive adequate investigations or acknowledgment. Police forces usually fail to track MMIWG cases and legislation to standardize tracking has yet to be passed. Grassroot organizations in the United States and Canada have established databases to track MMIWG cases.54 In North Carolina, Indigenous peoples have called attention to the disproportionate rates of MMIWG belonging to the seven state-recognized tribes.55 MMIWG statistics rarely include cases from state-recognized tribal nations, and police and death certificates often misclassify the race of Indigenous peoples.56

Conclusions Genocide scholars have the opportunity to challenge all forms and expressions, overt and covert, of genocide denial and to disrupt settler colonialism.

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To demonstrate one method to challenge genocide denial, this chapter highlights examples of selective genocide methods and ongoing settler-colonial policies and practices that contribute to the longest sustained genocide in the modern era. This chapter has not attempted to address all of the most important developments but points toward the many Indigenous scholars who write extensively about ongoing settler colonial and genocidal acts. NonIndigenous scholars should refer to and cite Indigenous scholarly works rather than replicating existing scholarship. Many important works dating from the early works of Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Sioux) provide excellent introductions to Indigenous issues and research. The critical Indigenous studies discipline has expanded in more recent years to include scholars writing about a vast array of issues from various tribal nation perspectives. These are among the many compelling and powerful voices to emerge: Audra Simpson (Kahnawà:ke Mohawk), Eve Tuck (Unangax), Kim TallBear (SissetonWahpeton Oyate), Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), Qwo-Li Driskill (Cherokee), Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Susan Faircloth (Coharie), Dian Million (Athabascan), Daniel Heath Justice (Cherokee Nation), Sarah Deer (Muscogee [Creek] Nation), Joanne Barker (Lenape [Delaware Tribe of Indians]), J. Kēhaulani Kauanui (Kanaka Maoli), and Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné). These are just a few of the Indigenous scholars who write on a variety of issues from different tribal nation perspectives and contribute to the collective Indigenous voice. Positioning scholarly works in conversation with Indigenous-authored research is important; however, more efforts are necessary to challenge settler colonialism and genocide denial. Gregory Younging’s (Opaskwayak Cree Nation) Elements of Indigenous Style provides essential information that should inform all research about Indigenous peoples.57 The manual provides guidelines regarding appropriate terms, definitions, capitalization, compensation and recognition for Indigenous peoples, and other practices for research. The most important practice is that scholars must have a genuine, honest relationship with the tribal nations they are researching and writing about.58 This principle is aligned with Indigenous protocols and methodologies, which call for the blurring of the boundaries between academia and lived experiences. Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars should collaborate with multiple Indigenous peoples and authors and work with them throughout the research process.59 Collaboration includes respecting and following Indigenous protocols, respecting Elders and traditional knowledge and oral traditions, seeking consent, avoiding breaches of sacred or non-public knowledge and traditions, checking already published works, assigning copyright correctly, and compensating Indigenous contributors, communities, and organizations.60 Indigenous peoples are the only people who can “speak with the authority of who they are, connected to Traditional Knowledge, their Oral traditions, their cultural protocols, and their contemporary identity.”61 Collaboration ensures

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that works represent Indigenous voices instead of speaking for Indigenous peoples. Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma) writes, “The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed. An unattended wound gets infected. Becomes a new kind of wound like the history of what actually happened became a new kind of history. All these stories that we haven’t been telling all this time, that we haven’t been listening to, are just part of what we need to heal.”62 Indigenous genocide denial is an unattended, infected wound that is both a mechanism and producer of settler colonialism. Analyzing Indigenous genocide denial as a settler-colonial action highlights the ways denial becomes embedded within genocide discourse. This leads some genocide scholars to argue that the MMIWG epidemic is not genocidal or exclude analyses of tribal recognition procedures, cultural appropriation, land and water access restrictions, tribal ID card regulations, toxic waste on tribal lands, oil pipelines, and many other issues, because they fall outside the settler colonial and genocide “standard criteria” usually followed within Indigenous genocide discourse. This method of denial has real consequences for Indigenous peoples, both within and outside of academia. When the standard is to position harms in the past or solely within certain tribal nations or regions, Indigenous scholars feel and are excluded from discourse. The debates over what counts as genocide within Indigenous genocide discourse erase the truths that are known by Indigenous peoples: that the settler states committed genocide in the past and continue to eliminate Indigenous peoples, practices, and ways of knowing. We will continue to challenge and resist genocide denial and settler colonialism, as we always have.

Notes 1 In this chapter I use the terms “Indigenous,” “Indigenous peoples,” “Native,” and “Native American” interchangeably to refer to descendants of those who traditionally occupied territory now known as the United States before the arrival of European settlers. I only use the term “Indian” when referring to United States government documents. I use the term “First Nations” when writing about Indigenous populations in Canada. These terms (including Indigenous) are capitalized as a show of respect, recognition, and equality of these identities. 2 Maria Elena Campisteguy, Jennifer Messenger Heilbronner, and Corinne Nakamura-Rybak, “Research Findings: Compilation of All Research,” Reclaiming Native Truth 53 (2018), https://www.firstnations.org/publications/ compilation-of-all-research-from-the-reclaiming-Native-truth-project/. 3 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387. 4 Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, & Society 1, no.1 (2012): 5. 5 Ibid., 4. 6 Ibid. 7 Ibid. For more on the biopolitical processes of settler colonialism, see Scott Lauria Morgensen, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right

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Now,” Settler Colonial Studies: A Global Phenomenon 1, no. 1 (January 2011): 52–76. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 5. United Nations General Assembly, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” accessed May 20, 2020, http:// www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html George E. Tinker in Lindsey Kingston, “The Destruction of Identity: Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples,” Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 1 (2015): 65. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide,” History News Network, May 12, 2016, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/1 62804 John Cox “Introduction.” To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 8. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide,” History News Network, May 12, 2016, https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/162804. Ibid. Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2016), 150. Alex Alvarez, Native America and the Question of Genocide (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). For examples of research that argues that tribal nations were warring with other tribes and settlers see Shepard Krech III, “Genocide in Tribal Society,” Nature 371, no. 6492 (September 1, 1994): 14. Additionally, the Pequot Tribal Nation is often referenced in arguments of “warfare” and “self-defense” of settlers. See Steven T. Katz, “The Pequot War Reconsidered,” New England Quarterly 64 (June 1991): 206–224. Sarah B. Shear, et al., “Manifesting Destiny: Re/presentations of Indigenous Peoples in K-12 U.S. History Standards,” Theory & Research in Social Education 43, no. 1 (January 2015): 72–73. Ibid. Ibid. For examples of research that focuses on genocide in California, see Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873 (Hartford: Yale UP, 2016); Benjamin Madley, “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods;” Benjamin Madley, “California's Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History.” Western Historical Quarterly Vol 39, no. 3 (2008), 303–332. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Tribal Population,” accessed August 30, 2019, https://www.cdc.gov/tribal/tribes-organizations-health/tribes/ state-population.html. National Conference of State Legislators, “Federal and State Recognized Tribes,” accessed August 28, 2019, http://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribalinstitute/list-of-federal-and-state-recognized-tribes.aspx#State. Lenore Keeshig Tobias, in Adrienne Keene, “Engaging Indigeneity and Avoiding Appropriation: An Interview with Adrienne Keene,” English Journal 106 (1): 56. Native Voices, “1883 Courts of Indian Offenses,” accessed August 27, 2019, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/Nativevoices/timeline/364.html. “Joint Resolution: American Indian Religious Freedom,” Public Law 95-341, 95th Congress (1978), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-92/pdf/ STATUTE-92-Pg469.pdf.

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28 Charla Bear, “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, May 12, 2008, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865; Mary Annette Pember, “Death by Civilization,” The Atlantic, March 8, 2019, https:// www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/traumatic-legacy-indianboarding-schools/584293/ 29 Ibid. 30 See Zoey Serebriany, “Right to Regalia: Let those Feathers Fly at Graduation,” Lakota People’s Law Project, June 3, 2019, https://www.lakotalaw.org/news/201 9-06-03/right-to-regalia; Richard Adkins, “Students Disappointed when Board Says ‘No’ to Tribal Wear at Graduation,” WRAL News, May 6, 2019, https:// www.wral.com/students-disappointed-when-board-says-no-to-tribal-wear-at-graduation/18369241/. 31 National Conference of State Legislatures, “State Recognition of American Indian Tribes,” accessed September 5, 2019, http://www.ncsl.org/research/statetribal-institute/state-recognition-of-american-indian-tribes.aspx. 32 Ibid. 33 National Congress of American Indians, “Federal Recognition,” accessed September 5, 2019, http://www.ncai.org/policy-issues/tribal-governance/federalrecognition 34 Ibid. 35 “Title 25: Indians, Part 83-Procedures for Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes,” Electronic Code of Federal Regulations, (July 1, 2015), https:// www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=a7763cb59982d969ad75334890cbc74e&mc= true&node=pt25.1.83&rgn=div5#se25.1.83_14. 36 Ibid. 37 National Conference of State Legislators, “Federal and State Recognized Tribes,” accessed September 5, 2019. 38 U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Affairs, “Decided Cases-Petitions Resolved by DOI,” accessed September 5, 2019, https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/ofa/ decided-cases. 39 “Title 25: Indians, Part 83-Procedures for Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes.” 40 National Conference of State Legislators, “Federal and State Recognized Tribes,” accessed September 5, 2019. 41 For an explanation of legal sovereignty see: Stephanie Lumsden, “Reproductive Justice, Sovereignty, and Incarceration: Prison Abolition Politics and California Indians,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 40, no.1 (2016): 40–41. 42 Native Voices, “1934: President Franklin Roosevelt signs the Indian Reorganization Act,” accessed August 27, 2019, https://www.nlm.nih.gov/Nativevoices/timeline/452. html. 43 Andre B. Rosay, “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men: 2010 Findings from the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey,” National Institute of Justice: 2, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/ violence-against-american-indian-and-alaska-Native-women-and-men. 44 Annita Lucchesi and Abigail Echo-Hawk, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls: A Snapshot of Data from 71 Urban Cities in the United States (2018): 2, http://www.uihi.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Missing-and-MurderedIndigenous-Women-and-Girls-Report.pdf. 45 Ibid. 46 National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, “Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls” (2019): 53, https:// www.mmiwg-ffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a.pdf.

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47 Ibid. 48 Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Conditions of Critique: Responding to Indigenous Resurgence within Gender Studies,” Transgender Studies Quarterly, 3, no 1–2 (2016): 196. 49 Scott Lauria Morgensen, “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism Within Queer Modernities,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 121; Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (2016). 50 Rosay, “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men.” 51 Ibid. 52 Simpson, “The State is a Man.” 53 The United States Department of Justice, “Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization 2013” (2013), https://www.justice.gov/tribal/violenceagainst-women-act-vawa-reauthorization-2013-0. 54 Sovereign Bodies Institute, MMIWG2 Database, accessed May 25, 2020, https:// www.sovereign-bodies.org/mmiw-database. 55 Antoinette Kerr, “North Carolina Officials are Ignoring a Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women,” Scalawag Magazine, May 5, 2020, https:// www.scalawagmagazine.org/2020/05/missing-murdered-indigenous-girls-north-carolina/. 56 See: Lucchesi & Echo-Hawk, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls: A Snapshot of Data from 71 Urban Cities in the United States, 2; Robert A. Hahn, et al., “The Recording of Demographic Information on Death Certificates: A National Survey of Funeral Directors,” Public Health Reports (1974) 117, no. 1 (2002): 37–43; Melissa A. Jim, et al., “Racial Misclassification of American Indians and Alaska Natives by Indian Health Service Contract Health Service Delivery Area,” American Journal of Public Health 104 Suppl 3, no. S3 (June 2014): S295–S302. 57 A note about this chapter’s adherence to the Elements of Indigenous Style guidelines: As a member of the Coharie Tribal Nation, I have varied slightly from the guidelines presented in this manual. Tribal nations in the United States have different protocols for writing, and I have followed these instead, when appropriate. As stated in the manual, Indigenous peoples have “artistic license” to follow Nation-based protocols. Gregory Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Brush Education, 2018), 16. 58 Younging, Elements of Indigenous Style, 30–31. 59 Ibid., 31. 60 Ibid., 31–45. 61 Ibid., 31. 62 Tommy Orange, There There (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018), 137.

Bibliography Publications Alvarez, Alex. Native America and the Question of Genocide. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Cox, John. To Kill a People: Genocide in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017.

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Hahn, Robert A., Scott F. Wetterhall, George A. Gay, Dorothy S. Harshbarger, Carol A. Burnett, Roy Gibson Parrish, and Richard J. Orend. “The Recording of Demographic Information on Death Certificates: A National Survey of Funeral Directors.” Public Health Reports (1974-) 117, no. 1 (2002): 37–43. Jim, Melissa A., Elizabeth Arias, Dean S. Seneca, Megan J. Hoopes, Cheyenne C. Jim, Norman J. Johnson, and Charles L. Wiggins. “Racial Misclassification of American Indians and Alaska Natives by Indian Health Service Contract Health Service Delivery Area.” American Journal of Public Health 104, no. S3 (June 2014): S295–S302. Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2016. Katz, Steven T. “The Pequot War Reconsidered.” The New England Quarterly 64, no. 2 (June 1991): 206–224. Keene, Adrienne. “Engaging Indigeneity and Avoiding Appropriation: An Interview with Adrienne Keene.” English Journal 106, no. 1 (2016): 55–57. Kingston, Lindsey. “The Destruction of Identity: Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples.” Journal of Human Rights 14, no. 1 (January–March 2015): 63–83. Krech, Shepard, III. “Genocide in Tribal Society.” Nature 371, no. 6492 (September 1994): 14. Lucchesi, Annita and Abigail Echo-Hawk. “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls: A Snapshot of Data from 71 Urban Cities in the United States.” Urban Indian Health Institute. (2018). Lumsden, Stephanie. “Reproductive Justice, Sovereignty, and Incarceration: Prison Abolition Politics and California Indians.” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 40, no. 1 (January 2016): 33–46. Madley, Benjamin. “California’s Yuki Indians: Defining Genocide in Native American History.” Western Historical Quarterly 39, no. 3 (October 2008): 303–332. Madley, Benjamin. “Reexamining the American Genocide Debate: Meaning, Historiography, and New Methods.” The American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (February 2015): 98–139. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Conditions of Critique: Responding to Indigenous Resurgence within Gender Studies.” Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (May 2016): 192–201. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “Settler Homonationalism: Theorizing Settler Colonialism within Queer Modernities.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 16, no. 1–2 (2010): 105–131. Morgensen, Scott Lauria. “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now.” Settler Colonial Studies: A Global Phenomenon 1, no. 1 (January 2011): 52–76. Orange, Tommy. There There. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2018. Shear, Sarah B., Ryan T. Knowles, Gregory J. Soden, and Antonio J. Castro. “Manifesting Destiny: Re/presentations of Indigenous Peoples in K-12 U.S. History Standards.” Theory & Research in Social Education 43, no. 1 (January 2015): 68–101. Simpson, Audra. “The State is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gender of Settler Sovereignty.” Theory & Event 19, no. 4 (October 2016): np. Tuck, Eve and Wayne K. Yang. “Decolonization is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.

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Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research, 8, no.4 (2006): 387–409. Younging, Gregory. Elements of Indigenous Style. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada: Brush Education, 2018.

Online Sources Adkins, Richard. “Students Disappointed When Board Says ‘No’ To Tribal Wear at Graduation.” WRAL News, May 6, 2019. Accessed March 13, 2020. https:// www.wral.com/students-disappointed-when-board-says-no-to-tribal-wear-at-graduation/18369241/. Bear, Charla. “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many.” NPR, May 12, 2008. Accessed March 13, 2020. https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php? storyId=16516865. Campisteguy, Maria E., Jennifer M. Heilbronner, and Corinne Nakamura-Rybak. “Research Findings: Compilation of All Research.” Reclaiming Native Truth 53. First Nations Development Institute, June 2018. Accessed March 13, 2020. https:// www.firstnations.org/publications/compilation-of-all-research-from-the-reclaiming-Native-truth-project/. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Tribal Population: 2009-2013 American Indian and Alaska Native State Populations.” Accessed August 30, 2019. https:// www.cdc.gov/tribal/tribes-organizations-health/tribes/state-population.html. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. “Yes, Native Americans Were the Victims of Genocide.” History News Network. Columbian College of Arts & Sciences. The George Washington University. May 12, 2016. Accessed March 3, 2020. https://historynews network.org/article/162804. Kerr, Antoinette. “North Carolina Officials are Ignoring a Crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.” Scalawag Magazine, May 5, 2020. Accessed May 7, 2020. https://www.scalawagmagazine.org/2020/05/missing-murdered-indigenousgirls-north-carolina/. National Conference of State Legislators. “Federal and State Recognized Tribes.” Accessed August 28, 2019. http://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribal-institute/listof-federal-and-state-recognized-tribes.aspx#State. National Conference of State Legislators. “State Recognition of American Indian Tribes.” Accessed September 5, 2019. http://www.ncsl.org/research/state-tribalinstitute/state-recognition-of-american-indian-tribes.aspx. National Congress of American Indians. “Federal Recognition.” Accessed September 5, 2019. http://www.ncai.org/policy-issues/tribal-governance/federal-recognition. National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Vol. 1a (2019). https://www.mmiwgffada.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Final_Report_Vol_1a.pdf. Native Voices. “1883 Courts of Indian Offenses.” National Institute of Health. Accessed August 27, 2019. https://www.nlm.nih.gov/Nativevoices/timeline/364.html. Native Voices. “1934: President Franklin Roosevelt Signs the Indian Reorganization Act.” National Institute of Health. Accessed August 27, 2019. https:// www.nlm.nih.gov/Nativevoices/timeline/452.html.

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“Title 25: Indians, Part 83-Procedures for Federal Acknowledgment of Indian Tribes.” Electronic Code of Federal Regulations (July 1, 2015). Accessed March 13, 2020. https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=a7763cb59982d969ad75334 890cbc74e&mc=true&node=pt25.1.83&rgn=div5#se25.1.83_14. Pember, Mary Annette. “Death by Civilization.” The Atlantic, March 8, 2019. Accessed March 13, 2020. https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/03/ traumatic-legacy-indian-boarding-schools/584293/. Rosay, Andre B. “Violence Against American Indian and Alaska Native Women and Men.” National Institute of Justice. U.S. Department of Justice. June 1, 2016. Accessed March 13, 2020. https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/violence-againstamerican-indian-and-alaska-Native-women-and-men. Serebriany, Zoey. “Right to Regalia: Let those Feathers Fly at Graduation.” Lakota People’s Law Project, June 3, 2019. Accessed March 13, 2020. https:// www.lakotalaw.org/news/2019-06-03/right-to-regalia. Sovereign Bodies Institute. MMIWG2 Database. Accessed May 25, 2020. https:// www.sovereign-bodies.org/mmiw-database. United Nations General Assembly. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” last modified January 27, 1997. http://www.hrweb.org/ legal/genocide.html. United States Department of the Interior Indian Affairs. “Decided Cases-Petitions Resolved by DOI.” Accessed September 5, 2019. https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/ofa/ decided-cases. United States Department of Justice. “Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization 2013,” last modified March 6, 2015. Accessed March 13, 2020. https://www.justice.gov/tribal/violence-against-women-act-vawa-reauthorization-2 013-0.

9

Denying Rwanda, denying Congo Adam Jones

The “memory wars” surrounding the 1994 Rwandan genocide present one of the most intriguing and disturbing instances of genocide evasion, ob­ fuscation, and denial. They are also strange and contradictory, with avowed defenders of human rights among the most vocal deniers, and the regime that claims to have “rescued” Rwanda from genocide itself accused of committing the crime, both in Rwanda in 1994 and subsequently in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In this chapter, I wish to revisit these controversies and examine what they can teach us, both about genocide in Africa’s Great Lakes region and about strategies of denial and counterdenial. I will draw on a comparative framing throughout.

Denying Rwanda Denialist campaigns can be divided into two broad types: state-sponsored and freelance. A classic example of the former is the Turkish government’s decades-long, multi-front, richly funded project to undermine Armenian genocide recognition. I contend that the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) government of Paul Kagame in Rwanda sponsors a similar but hybrid project, in which denunciations of the deniers of anti-Tutsi genocide in 1994 are paired with repressive measures aimed at silencing discussion of the RPF’s own crimes.1 In the absence of state sponsorship and its institutional benefits, genocide denial tends to be concentrated among private actors, rarely with much renown or social standing. Denialist projects lurk in the margins, only rarely breaking into mainstream debate, where they tend to be despised or even criminalized. Jewish Holocaust denial is the most obvious instance. The denialist enterprise surrounding the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis is another prominent example, and it shows no sign of waning after a quarter-century. A freelance-denialist enterprise is predictably composed of diverse agents and their overlapping agendas. Those connected, by affiliation or identity, with genocidal states and institutions are among the likeliest actors—for example, unregenerate Nazis and self-proclaimed “good Germans” who either denied the Holocaust outright or, more commonly, sought to deflect DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-9

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moral responsibility onto as narrow a band of perpetrators as possible. So it has been in the Rwandan case, with the earliest articulations of a denialist discourse concentrated within the diaspora of Hutu Power exiles, or—when they were brought to justice—their legal representatives. The most notable (or notorious) example of the latter is the U.S. lawyer Peter Erlinder, who served as a defense counsel at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) and was arrested and detained in Rwanda in 2010 on a charge of genocide denial.2 If the denialist strand is associated with any measure of state sanction or support, it is probably with France, dating to President Francois Mitterrand’s promotion of a “double-genocide” thesis for the 1994 holo­ caust, shortly after it ended.3 But as investigations of the horrors began, and the evidence coalesced of a systematic and state-directed extermination of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, the “double-genocide” framework was effectively stigmatized and marginalized. Supportive French and other voices notwithstanding, any involvement by the French state has been effectively nil. Bizarrely, what has rescued denialist discourse from the ashes is the antiimperialist left, led by a long-time co-author of Noam Chomsky, Edward S. Herman (1925-2017), and David Peterson. Herman was a key figure in a constituency of leftist scholars and critics who cast events in the former Yugoslavia during the 1990s, including the Kosovo war of 1999, in terms of a NATO-led imperial campaign to advance Western interests in and ex­ ploitation of the formerly socialist region.4 In Herman’s case, this led him to a denialist stance toward both the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 and the Račak massacre of forty-five ethnic Albanians by Serb security forces in January 1999. It was perhaps not entirely surprising, though it was still appalling, that in his co-authored volume with Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (2010), Herman advanced an extreme denialist position. The au­ thors claimed there was no Hutu genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 (or ever). They claimed the Tutsi-dominated RPF was the “only wellorganized killing force” in Rwanda during that period. They asserted that the genocidal Hutu Power dictatorship was not “in control of anything” during that time, and therefore that the RPF were “the initiators and the main perpetrators” of the mass killing in Rwanda. This was, I have argued, “the equivalent of asserting that the Nazis never killed Jews in death camps—indeed, that it was really Jews who killed Germans.”5 Nevertheless, the book was endorsed by Noam Chomsky—who provided a foreword in which he described the slim volume as “powerful”—and by the noted in­ vestigative journalist John Pilger, who like Chomsky had earned great re­ spect in many quarters for his piercing critiques of imperial power and hypocrisy. Admirers of the work of these figures, and of some of Herman’s past efforts, could only cringe.6 For the most extreme leftist-denialists, their opponents on Bosnia, Kosovo, or Rwanda are merely stooges of the capitalist/imperialist system.

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This mindset is well conveyed by an attack launched by the independent journalist Keith Harmon Snow against the Canadian Rwanda specialist, Gerald Caplan, and myself after we had each denounced the denialist tone of The Politics of Genocide. Snow accused Caplan of “epitomiz[ing] a modern day fascism aligned with the Western surveillance apparatus,” and went on to polemicize: So-called “genocide scholars” like Dr. Gerald Caplan and his cohort Dr. Adam Jones are a necessary part of the vast money-making machine that benefits from ideological bullying, using “genocide in Rwanda” and “genocide denialism” as weapons to silence critics, punish victims, and further reward killers. In this profit-driven industry, Rwanda, Uganda, the UK, and the United States use (and abuse) “the Rwanda genocide” as an ideological weapon to promote and advance the interests of the most powerful, much the same as the United States, Britain and Israel use “the Holocaust” as a money making machine and ideological and political weapon. … The prospect of being so completely confronted by the truth is far too frightening for individuals, like Dr. Gerald Caplan or Dr. Adam Jones, who have invested their entire very lucrative profes­ sional [sic] careers on [sic] a system that requires their educations to be premised on a massive falsification of consciousness.7 I should add that I am still waiting for my paycheck from the “vast moneymaking machine.” A relatively small and decentralized coterie of deniers has, therefore, succeeded in “mainstreaming” denial of the 1994 genocide against Tutsis, at least to a limited extent. At the same time, they—and others who can in no way be classed as deniers—have highlighted the atrocities of the Rwandan Patriotic Front before, during, and after the genocide. Is this a valid line of critique? I believe it is, despite its warped manipulation by the deniers.

The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) There is no doubt that the uncritical, “cheerleading” tenor of Western commentary about the RPF/Kagame regime has been more muted in recent years. This reflects a growing awareness of the regime’s repressive and se­ lectively murderous approach to political dissent, at home and abroad, as well as growing disenchantment with the flagrantly rigged elections that have returned Kagame to power, most recently with 99% of the vote. It also attests to a growing unease as evidence of RPF genocide in Congo has emerged, sometimes in the wake of attempted suppression, as with the United Nations “Mapping Report” on the DR Congo, which finally sur­ faced in 2010.8 It is likewise certain that the Kagame regime has benefited immensely from its self-appointed role as the guardian and gatekeeper of genocide

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memory in Rwanda. The continuing advantages in terms of positive media coverage were made clear during the week-long series of commemorative events in April 2019 surrounding the 25th anniversary of the genocide. Backed by severe punishments for “genocide denial”—using such accusa­ tions to advance a denialist agenda is another unusual feature of the Rwandan case—the regime has effectively criminalized attention to the RPF’s mass atrocities in Rwanda and DR Congo. This grants it complete hegemony over “acceptable” discourse within Rwanda, so that investiga­ tions, discussions, and revelations concerning the regime’s crimes have been limited to foreign or foreign-based academics, journalists, and activists. It is important to note that RPF violence and repression in both Rwanda and the DRC have long been reported, investigated, and denounced. Alison Des Forges’s report for Human Rights Watch, published in book form as Leave None to Tell the Story and read by any serious scholar on this topic, includes more than forty pages on RPF killings (including organized mass killings of hundreds or thousands of civilians, followed by systematic de­ struction of bodies to hide the evidence) during the 1994 genocide.9 Roméo Dallaire’s memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil (2003), expressed his anger about the RPF and its destructive role in impeding UN peacekeeper efforts to rein in the 1994 violence.10 Amnesty International was diligent in un­ masking the post-genocide atrocities and mass repression of the new RPF regime.11 Howard French of The New York Times reported bravely and indepth on the RPF/AFDL (Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo) slaughter of Hutu refugees in Congo, both in the pages of the Times and in a subsequent book, A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (2004). Jason Stearns’s account in Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (2011) is equally potent and damning.12 Prominent genocide scholars, including Gérard Prunier, René Lemarchand, Alan Kuperman, and Filip Reyntjens, have been consistently scathing in their assessment of the RPF’s ethnocratic and dictatorial practices within Rwanda, along with its toppling of the Mobutu regime and brutal occupation of eastern Congo, which Prunier called “the first known instance of postcolonial imperial conquest in Africa by an African country.”13 Further, a powerful and wellreceived memoir by a Hutu survivor, Marie Béatrice Umutesi, appeared with the University of Wisconsin Press in 2004—Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire.14 Within this large body of literature, what is the place of Judi Rever’s much-discussed recent book, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (2018)?15 The work is manifestly one-sided, though no less so than some indulgent treatments of the RPF’s role, such as Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, published soon after the genocide. Rever’s text is marred by a distracting tendency for melodrama and narcissism.16 The human in­ formants are standardly anonymous and the footnoting fragmentary; thus, her sources are immune to confirmation and double-checking. Nonetheless,

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assuming a basic honesty and rigor in Rever’s handling of (especially) in­ ternal ICTR documents, she has compiled the most extensive public in­ dictment of RPF “genocide,” as she unhesitatingly refers to it, at least in Rwanda; the engagement with DR Congo is surprisingly skimpy. I doubt that anyone engaging honestly with the evidence she marshals could champion the Kagame-led rebel movement and subsequent ruling authority in Kigali, at least without massive qualification. Moreover, as Gerald Caplan points out, “Rever’s credibility is significantly reinforced by her own explicit acceptance of the full reality of the genocide of the Tutsi. Rever offers no equivocation here. It happened, she declares, just as all but the most fanatical denier agrees it happened. This position greatly bolsters her plausibility.”17 Is Rever’s use of the “genocide” term appropriate for the RPF’s role in Rwanda before, during, and following the 1994 genocide of Tutsis? A valid counterfactual question to pose is: in the absence of any Hutu killing of Tutsis during the 1994 genocide, would the RPF’s actions be considered genocidal? If, that is, our evaluation of its atrocities was not shaped and to some degree clouded by the substantially greater mass killing by the Hutu Power regime, and the enormously greater attention devoted to it in the scholarly and human-rights literatures? In my view, the term would likely be deemed appropriate by any informed observer whose threshold for “geno­ cide” is relatively lower – that is, who believes it should encompass the group-targeted killing of thousands or tens of thousands of predominantly civilian victims, and not be limited to death tolls in the hundreds of thou­ sands or millions. The majority of genocide scholars, students, and legal specialists would probably support such an understanding. So would I. A useful comparator might be Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) after the 1971 genocide of Bengalis by Pakistani military and security forces. “In the blood-letting following the expulsion of the West Pakistani army, perhaps 150,000 people were murdered by independence forces and local vigilantes.” In particular, “Biharis who had collaborated with West Pakistani authorities were dealt with especially harshly.”18 There are parallels here with the Rwandan genocide—the context and ideology of vengeance; the politicized ethnic hatred; the relatively lesser scale of the killing compared with the larger accompanying/preceding genocide. A difference is that the RPF’s killings unfolded both during and after the larger genocide, as rebel forces conquered larger territories between April and July and as they consolidated their au­ thority countrywide by mass-murderous means over the ensuing few months. The challenge for scholars of the Rwandan genocide, it seems to me, is to incorporate a recognition of the RPF’s mass atrocities and to honestly grapple with the “genocide” designation in some cases, in a way that: • •

does not excuse them as understandable acts of vengeance; recognizes the tens of thousands of victims during 1994 and the hundreds of thousands in DR Congo in 1996-1997; and

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acknowledges the incendiary role the RPF played before and during the genocide in impeding peace efforts, placing Rwandan Tutsis at mortal risk and activating Hutu fears of annihilation.19

Denying Congo If the mass killings by RPF forces and agents before, during, and after the 1994 genocide have percolated only slowly into international consciousness, the massive slaughter in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 19961997—which I have dubbed “the genocide of the camps” in other writings—remains sorely understudied, underacknowledged, and un­ prosecuted (Figure 9.1). As noted, contemporary reporting was available, by Howard French, Jason Stearns, and others; the atrocities have long been

Figure 9.1 Map of the First Congo War (1996-1997), showing the RPF invasion of eastern Zaïre/DR Congo and subsequent lines of advance. Genocidal “hunts” of fleeing Hutus occurred throughout. (Credit: Don-kun and Uwe Dedering/Wikimedia Commons).

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known and explored by Great Lakes specialists like Prunier, Reyntjens, and Lemarchand; and the UN has (finally) issued the highly consequential re­ sults of a close investigation of the genocidal crimes by RPF and allied AFDL elements. But a broader conspiracy of silence and collective ignor­ ance has predominated and so far prevailed, despite some post-facto inter­ national pressure on the Rwandan regime to rein in its proxies in Congo and cease its larcenous exploitation of that country’s rich resources. The “genocide of the camps” took place at an early high point of the RPF’s moral standing, with the facts of the genocide of Tutsis still reverberating around a shocked world and murderous attacks into Rwanda launched by Hutu diehards based in the camps strung along the Congolese frontier. Just as the nature of the earlier anti-Tutsi genocide had been clouded in foreign per­ ceptions by the epic flow of Hutu refugees to Congo at the genocide’s end—leading many to assume the Hutus had been the principal targets—so did the mass return of Hutu refugees to Rwanda, after the assault on the camps, serve to cast the RPF’s action in a broadly humane light. What was missed was roughly half of the refugee population that fled deeper into the Congolese in­ terior and was then hunted down by the RPF/AFDL forces, isolated, starved, and systematically massacred. In the words of the UN Mapping Report: The majority of the victims were children, women, elderly people and the sick, who posed no threat to the attacking forces. … Very large numbers of victims were forced to flee and travel long distances to escape their pursuers, who were trying to kill them. The hunt lasted for months, resulting in the deaths of an unknown number of people subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading living conditions, without access to food or medication. On several occasions, the humanitarian aid intended for them was deliberately blocked … depriving them of assistance essential to their survival. … It is therefore possible to assert that, even if only a part of the Hutu population … was targeted and destroyed, it could nonetheless constitute a crime of genocide, if this was the intention of the perpetrators. Regarding the mass-murder component, the UN investigators cited “the scale of the crimes and the large number of victims”—perhaps 233,000 in­ cluding the casualties of privation—along with “the extensive use of edged weapons (primarily hammers) and the systematic massacre of survivors, including women and children, after the camps had been taken. … Such acts certainly suggest premeditation and a precise methodology.”20 When combined with the widespread destruction of corpses to hide the evidence, there is clearly every reason to include the RPF/AFDL”s genocide of the camps” as among the major genocidal campaigns of the past halfcentury in the Great Lakes region—comparable in scale and in its organized character to the 1972 genocide of Hutu males by the Tutsi ethnocracy in

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21

Burundi, which killed an estimated 150,000-250,000 people. Blinded by their Manichean framing of the new Rwandan regime, by the perennial inability to grasp complexity in an African context, and by strategic/cor­ porate interests in the halls of power, the outside world turned its back on Congo in 1996-1997 while hundreds of thousands were deliberately killed. If the country during this period—and long after—was a “heart of darkness” per the Conradian cliché, it was the darkness that descends when you close your eyes. This is itself a form of genocide denial—perhaps the easiest, and hence the most pervasive. Attention to the Congolese genocide was, and is, so limited and scattered that direct state initiatives have hardly been necessary to discourage it. Nonetheless, it is worth noting the spillover of the denialist “anti-denial” measures of the Rwandan regime, whereby accusing the RPF of genocide in Congo constitutes a malicious attempt to deny or relativize the genocide of Tutsis. I had the opportunity to observe the kind of intimidation tactics that the regime employs during the 2014 conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) in Winnipeg, Manitoba. I shared a panel with a Hutu survivor of the “genocide of the camps” who discussed his experience as a refugee on the run from the RPF génocidaires. During the question period, he was subjected to an extended, vituperative verbal attack by a Rwandan government representative and her colleague, who accused him of trying to distract from the Tutsi holocaust. Visibly uncomfortable and intimidated, the survivor stressed that he was not calling the anti-Hutu violence in Congo “genocide” —at which point, I interjected to state that if he declined, I would. I then explained why I felt it met the Genocide Convention’s definition of the crime. Whether this complicated any future attempt to secure a Rwandan visa remains to be seen.

Conclusion What lessons can we draw from the record of genocide and genocide denial in Rwanda and Congo? Both during and after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, there was a conscious attempt by supporters of Hutu Power to deny and obfuscate its extermination campaign against Rwandan Tutsis. The deposing of the genocidal government in July 1994 rendered this denialist enterprise a scattered and not terribly effective one. It nonetheless persists, and needs to be monitored, confronted, and countered. Moreover, the rise of a denialist strand among anti-imperialist leftist commentators, notably in the United States, serves as a reminder that a “progressive” political or­ ientation can be too easily compatible with the most scurrilous forms of genocide denial and misrepresentation. The leftists who deny the genocide of Tutsis, or flirt with that denial, often seem driven by a romantic perception of Hutus as iconic subalterns, eternally victimized by Tutsi repression and humiliation, thereby echoing genocidal propaganda that was itself shaped by racist European concepts imported to the region decades earlier.22

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At the same time, we have witnessed a concerted campaign by the RPF regime in post-genocide Rwanda to conceal and deny the mass atrocities and genocide inflicted both in 1994 and thereafter in Congo. The mounting evidence of these crimes, like the leftist-denialists’ romantic depiction of Hutus and the Hutu Power regime, provides a cautionary reminder that a simplistic and Manichean portrayal of a given genocide can shape and distort interpretations in a way that facilitates denialist enterprises. In a similar way, the uncritical adulation of the RPF and President Paul Kagame, which unites political liberals and conservatives in the United States and elsewhere, paved the way for the “genocide of the camps” in Congo, and for selectively murderous policies toward opponents at home and abroad.23 Lastly, and urgently: ignorance kills. The events in Rwanda and Congo were so easily ignored and distorted because these lands and populations barely register in world affairs. Notoriously, many people were and are unable to keep Hutus and Tutsis straight (the “Whoopsie-Tutu” phenom­ enon), while Congo still occupies its Conradian netherworld in the Western conscience, more than a century after Heart of Darkness.24 Genocide scholars and regional specialists have a special responsibility to familiarize themselves carefully and objectively with genocidal outbreaks of the past and present, including their complex historical and regional contexts. Reflecting those understandings in one’s own work, and engaging with public discussion and debates, can help to inoculate political systems against facile and misleading frameworks, and to craft diplomatic, humanitarian, and juridical policies accordingly.

Notes 1 More complex are cases such as the Western settler colonies of North America and Australasia, where states have promoted counter-narratives (e.g., of “civilizing” indigenous peoples) to suppress knowledge of genocide and claims for restitution. 2 See Peter Erlinder’s 2008 article for Jurist, “Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning … No Genocide?” January 24, 2009, accessed June 13, 2019. https://www.globalresearch.ca/rwanda-no-conspiracy-no-genocide-planning-nogenocide/11997. 3 Andrew Wallis describes “the French government’s attempt to further the ‘double genocide’ myth for its own political motives. At the UN, repeated statements from Hutu Power representatives during the summer of 1994 in­ dicated that they saw the events in Rwanda as justified because the massacres were being carried out ‘by both sides.’ … Once the myth of ‘double genocide’ had been advanced, Mitterrand was quick to use it for his own political benefit. … In the written version of his speech at Biarritz on 8 November [1994], Mitterrand talked about the ‘genocides’ that had happened in Rwanda. When journalist Patrick de Saint-Exupéry quizzed him on this, the president replied, ‘would you say that the genocide stopped after the Tutsi victory? I wonder.’ [Gérard] Prunier reported Mitterrand saying to another journalist, ‘the genocide or the genocides? I don’t know what one should say.”’ Andrew Wallis, Silent Accomplice: The

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Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan Genocide (London: IB Tauris, 2014), 206. Others in this small and somewhat incestuous group—they tended to provide endorsements for each other’s books—included Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, and Diana Johnstone. See, e.g., the interview with Johnstone, “‘Denying’ the Srebrenica Genocide Because It’s Not True,” Counterpunch.org, July 16, 2015, accessed June 13, 2019, https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/16/denying-thesrebrenica-genocide-because-its-not-true-an-interview-with-diana-johnstone/. “I am very much a genocide denier, and I’m proud of it… because what happened was not a genocide. … There was a massacre of prisoners, whose proportions are disputed. That was a war crime. But it was not genocide. When your victims are military age men and you spare women and children, that cannot be genocide by any sensible definition.” More on this lamentable tendency in endnote 22. See Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010), and Adam Jones, “Denying Rwanda: A Response to Herman and Peterson,” Genocide Studies Media File, November 16, 2010, accessed June 13, 2019, http://jonestream.blogspot.com/2010/11/denying-rwanda-responseto-herman.html. The post includes page references for the quotes just cited. See my “Denying Rwanda: An Open Letter to John Pilger,” Pambazuka.org, January 12, 2011, accessed June 13, 2019, https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/ denying-rwanda-open-letter-john-pilger. Keith Harmon Snow, “Dr. Gerald Caplan and the Rwanda Genocide Cranks,” Black Agenda Report, May 14, 2013, accessed June 13, 2019, https://www.black agendareport.com/content/dr-gerald-caplan-and-rwanda-genocide-cranks. Elsewhere Snow has declared, “if anyone planned genocide in Rwanda, it was the RPF, and only the RPF.” Quoted in Roland Moerland, The Killing of Death: Denying the Genocide against the Tutsi (Cambridge: Intersentia, 2016), 201. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993–2003: Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003 (hereafter, UN Mapping Report), August 2010, accessed August 23, 2019, https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/ Countries/CD/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_FINAL_EN.pdf. Her extensive, groundbreaking research was published in book form: Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999). Des Forges perished in an airplane crash ten years later. Roméo Dallaire and Brent Beardsley, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Genocide in Rwanda (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004). See Gerald Caplan, “Rethinking the Rwandan Narrative for the 25th Anniversary,” Genocide Studies International 12, no. 2 (2018): 159. Jason Stearns, Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa (New York: Public Affairs, 2011). Gérard Prunier, Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 333. For my own part, the very first snippet about Rwanda that I published, in 2000, highlighted “gendercidal” atrocities by the RPF/Kagame government against Hutu males deemed subversive, and I have extensively cited genocidal atrocities by the RPF both in Rwanda in 1994 and during the “genocide of the camps” in DR Congo in 1996-97. See, e.g., Adam Jones, “Gendercide and Genocide,” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 185–211; Jones, “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda,” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 1 (2002): 85–86; Jones, “Masculinities and Vulnerabilities in the Rwandan and

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Congolese Genocides,” in Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey, ed. Amy E. Randall (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 62–84; and Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2017), 488–491. Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Judi Rever, In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018). One of the more striking examples is Rever’s account of a stay in Kisangani, DR Congo (then Zaïre): “Around midnight, I heard around midnight … a pop just outside my window, then another pop and another—sounds that melted into each other, like a motor spitting. It took me a moment to realize it was a machine gun firing. … I hit the floor … and lay there, barely able to breathe, wondering if someone was about to enter my room. No one did, but the popping kept on. … Kisangani had been taken in March without a fight. Why had someone shot at this house? … It was possible that the shooting was totally unrelated to me. But I feared it was not. I took it as a stark warning to shut up and get out of Kisangani as soon as possible.” First, there is a substantial difference between hearing gunshots nearby and claiming that they were aimed “at this house;” she mentions no damage to the property. Second, I think it is highly unlikely that the gunshots had anything to do with the author, and she more or less acknowledges that she has no evidence they did. The anecdote, and the breathless manner of its relating, do not leave one with full faith in her journalistic acumen. Rever, In Praise of Blood, 31. Caplan, “Rethinking the Rwandan Narrative,” 169. For a less sensational treatment of RPF atrocities than Rever’s, but a more rounded and persuasive one in my view, see Susan Thomson, Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 464. As memorably explored in Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (New York: Cornell University Press, 2008). The quotes are drawn from the UN Mapping Report, 512–517. Such a framing is advanced in the third edition of my Genocide textbook, in which the Rwanda 1994 case-study is enfolded in a broader study of “Genocide in Africa’s Great Lakes Region” that also incorporates DR Congo and Burundi (see Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 470–511). I have drawn on this chapter in the present work. Other left-leaning writers who contributed to genocide-denial in Rwanda (and also in relation to Bosnia) included Michel Chossudovksy and Michael Parenti, whose sympathy for Stalinist regimes and simplistic understanding of antiimperialism also led them to defend the likes of Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein. “If US imperialism opposes them, we must defend them” was the logic. But of course, U.S. imperialism also (eventually) opposed and fought Hitler, who was as far as possible from a progressive or anti-imperialist. Feelings of collective guilt, in this case about the failure to intervene in the 1994 genocide, can further cloud perceptions and inhibit necessary protests. See Richard Dowden, Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010). Western press accounts referred to “civil war,” “tribal bloodletting,” and “ancient tribal hatreds.” News editors, Dowden wrote, “gig­ gled and spoke about Tutus and Whoopsies in news conferences.” Dowden, 237.

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Bibliography Publications Caplan, Gerald. “Rethinking the Rwandan Narrative for the 25th Anniversary.” Genocide Studies International 12, no. 2 (2018): 152–190. Dallaire, Roméo, and Brent Beardsley. Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Genocide in Rwanda. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Des Forges, Alison L. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999. Dowden, Richard. Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles. New York: PublicAffairs, 2010. Herman, Edward S., and David Peterson. The Politics of Genocide. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Jones, Adam. “Gendercide and Genocide.” Journal of Genocide Research 2, no. 2 (2000): 185–211. Jones, Adam. “Gender and Genocide in Rwanda.” Journal of Genocide Research 4, no. 1 (2002): 65–94. Jones, Adam. Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction, 3rd ed. London: Routledge, 2017. Moerland, Roland. The Killing of Death: Denying the Genocide against the Tutsi. Cambridge: Intersentia, 2016. Prunier, Gérard. Africa’s World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Randall, Amy E. ed. Genocide and Gender in the Twentieth Century: A Comparative Survey. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Rever, Judi. In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front. Toronto: Random House Canada, 2018. Stearns, Jason. Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. Straus, Scott. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda. New York: Cornell University Press, 2008. Thomson, Susan. Rwanda: From Genocide to Precarious Peace. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018. Umutesi, Marie Béatrice. Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), Democratic Republic of the Congo, 1993-2003: Report of the Mapping Exercise Documenting the Most Serious Violations of Human Rights and International Humanitarian Law Committed within the Territory of the Democratic Republic of the Congo between March 1993 and June 2003. Available here. Accessed June 1, 2020. https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CD/DRC_MAPPING_REPORT_ FINAL_EN.pdf. Wallis, Andrew. Silent Accomplice: The Untold Story of France’s Role in the Rwandan enocide. London: IB Tauris, 2014.

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Online Sources Erlinder, Peter. “Rwanda: No Conspiracy, No Genocide Planning… No Genocide?” January 24, 2009. Accessed June 13, 2019. https://www.globalresearch.ca/rwandano-conspiracy-no-genocide-planning-no-genocide/11997. Garrison, Ann. “Denying” the Srebrenica Genocide Because It’s Not True: An Interview with Diana Johnstone.” Counterpunch.org, July 16, 2015. Accessed June 13, 2019. https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/07/16/denying-the-srebrenica-genocidebecause-its-not-true-an-interview-with-diana-johnstone/. Jones, Adam. “Denying Rwanda: A Response to Herman and Peterson.” Genocide Studies Media File, November 16, 2010. Accessed June 13, 2019. http://jonestream. blogspot.com/2010/11/denying-rwanda-response-to-herman.html. Jones, Adam. “Denying Rwanda: An Open Letter to John Pilger.” Pambazuka.org, January 12, 2011. Accessed June 13, 2019. https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/ denying-rwanda-open-letter-john-pilger. Snow, Keith Harmon. “Dr. Gerald Caplan and the Rwanda Genocide Cranks.” Black Agenda Report, May 14, 2013. Accessed June 13, 2019. https://www.black agendareport.com/content/dr-gerald-caplan-and-rwanda-genocide-cranks.

Part III

New directions in analyzing and countering denial

10 Music as a means to combat genocide denial and assert Armenian identity Margarita Tadevosyan

In April 2015 Armenians all over the world commemorated the 100th anniversary of the Armenian Genocide. Beginning a year earlier, events ranging from research symposia to cultural exhibitions and movie festivals took place on multiple continents. These events culminated in an official Remembrance Day at the Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial in Yerevan hosted by the Armenian president and attended by world leaders and other international guests. The centennial events were larger and more widely publicized than any previous commemorations, partially due to the involvement of celebrities. In March 2015, the American-Armenian TV personality Kim Kardashian visited Armenia to bring attention to the cause. Earlier the same year, renowned human-rights lawyer Amal Clooney, wife of the famous American actor George Clooney, appeared at the European Court of Human Rights on behalf of the Government of Armenia. She testified in support of a 2007 Swiss court ruling against Turkish political leader Doğu Perinçek for denying the Armenian genocide. Despite knowing that genocide denial was a criminal offence in Switzerland, in 2005 Perinçek, leader of a left-leaning but nationalist party, declared before a large crowd in Lausanne: The allegations of the “Armenian genocide” are an international lie. Can an international lie exist?… Documents from not only Turkish but also Russian archives refute these international liars. The documents show that imperialists from the West and from Tsarist Russia were responsible for the situation boiling over between Muslims and Armenians. The Great Powers, which wanted to divide the Ottoman Empire, provoked a section of the Armenians, with whom we had lived in peace for centuries, and incited them to violence. The Turks and Kurds defended their homeland from these attacks.1 Perinçek not only denied the genocide of the Armenians, he also suggested that they themselves were perpetrators and instigators—a common feature of denial. Despite the efforts of the Turkish government and of nationalist figures such as Perinçek, one could see during the centennial year that the DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-10

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genocide was becoming much more widely recognized. After decades of ambivalence or silence in the news media in much of the world, the Armenian genocide was in the headlines, in part due to the high profile of the personalities involved. Over the past century, genocide has become one of the strongest components of the Armenian national and ethnic identity. Yet it is vigorously denied, with some success, by its main perpetrator—the Republic of Turkey. The New York Times—which until fairly recently avoided the term “genocide” in favor of “massacres” when referring to these events—reported on April 16, 2015 in an article titled “A Century after Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s Denial Only Deepens,” that under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan genocide denial is as strong as ever. In fact, on the day of the commemoration in April 2015, “the Turkish authorities scheduled a centennial commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli, an event that helped lay the foundation of modern Turkish identity.”2 Since its independence the Armenian government has attempted to counter this denial and promote the recognition of the Armenian genocide by making visible steps including the establishment of the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation in 1995, the organization of multiple academic and scientific conferences on genocide-related topics (e.g., International Conference on the Prevention and Condemnation of the Crime of Genocide in 2010), and the declaration that the recognition of genocide is one of the key foreign policy agenda items. However, as we can see in relation to other genocides, people involved in other areas of cultural and social life, outside official and political circles, have also influenced the fight for rightful recognition. This chapter examines how Armenians have used art, and in particular music, to reclaim the denied genocide victim identity.

Identity and genocide denial Theories of social identity stress that not only are identities constructed, but they are also usually created in contrast to other groups and individuals.3 As a rule, groups tend to overemphasize the positive aspects of their own group while placing significant emphasis on negative and “different” aspects of the other group, thus setting clear boundaries between “us” and “them.”4 Groups typically wish to be seen and perceived as good, noble, and better than others. The need to maintain a positive self-image is one of the key components in the process of identity development.5 This positive identity requires careful cultivation. Groups sift through historical facts and developments and select pieces that feed their positive self-image while looking for events, historical facts, and myths that negatively portray the “other side,” in cases where one’s image is based in part on difference or opposition to another. In this sense, the positive identity only exists in comparison to the negative identity of other groups.

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 165 The Armenian genocide not only directly impacted the identity of those who experienced it first-hand but also continues to affect the identities of subsequent generations of survivors. Levon Boyajian and Haigaz Grigorian argue that the continual denial of the genocide became central to the development of the national identity of Armenians of all generations. The children and grandchildren of genocide survivors often choose to communicate with the rest of the world by telling a story of their people’s past, the validity and truthfulness of which is often contested. The dichotomy of good and evil is clearly tracible in the identity presentation of Armenians. In this identity construction, survivors are portrayed as heroes and those who did not survive as martyrs—those who chose death over conversion to Islam.6 The evolution of Armenian identity is of course closely tied to Armenia’s long history, which was already tumultuous long before World War I. From roughly 1000 BCE, the Armenian people inhabited areas of present-day Syria and parts of Iraq, Turkey, and Iran, as well as the areas that conform to the modern Armenia and Azerbaijan. From the fifth century onward most of Armenia was ruled by various foreign empires, including those of the Seljuk Turks and the Mongols. The region was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. Over the centuries Armenians were subjected to oppression as dominated minorities. Under these historical circumstances, the development of a distinct identity was regarded as a necessary protection and tool to resist assimilation into the dominating cultures of the ruling states. There is a widely shared belief among Armenians that throughout history, they were targeted by other groups because of their distinct identity and faith. The culmination of centurieslong domination was the genocide that began in 1915. The belief that Armenians were targeted purposefully within the Ottoman Empire because they were an impediment to the creation of a unified, homogeneous Turkey is one of the dominant pillars that is central to all narrative domains in Armenia—academic, socio-political, state, and folk. History textbooks and scholarly articles talk about Armenians being an island of Christianity in the Muslim Ottoman Empire.7 The shrinking of the Ottoman Empire in the years before its collapse further emphasized the Ottoman regime’s determination “to unify the empire’s remnants, which they now considered Turkish heartland, as a homogeneous, Turkish-speaking population of Turkic peoples.”8 Armenians and other Christian nations within the Ottoman Empire were viewed as an obstacle and thus subject to elimination. Armenians regard the mass killings of Armenians in 1915–1923 as genocide planned and purposefully executed by the Ottoman Empire and its “Young Turk” (CUP) rulers, which is the consensus of legitimate scholars. Armenians tell the story of how the Armenian intelligentsia was rounded up and executed on the night of April 24, 1915 and how churches, schools, and other cultural and educational centers were destroyed in targeted attacks.9 These genocidal actions of the Ottoman Empire carry a complex meaning for Armenians as they were aimed at the nation as a whole, attacking its cultural, educational,

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political, and religious institutions. The trauma from this catastrophe has left a significant imprint on modern Armenian identity, placing victimhood at its center. The continued denial of the genocide confers an enduring burden on all Armenians to maintain an ethnic identity that is based upon genocide victimhood, thereby distorting this identity and forcing it to look backward. The central aspect of this identity becomes the notion of “people who were slaughtered and expelled from their homeland for no ‘apparent reason.’”10 Maintaining this identity is linked with the ongoing fight for recognition of genocide that would become a stamp of validity for the past of those who were killed but also for those who survived. Recognition of genocide has not only significant moral implications but also carries significant, and often overpowering, political weight. In the case of the Armenian genocide, while many countries accept the fact of mass deportations, killings, and annihilations of Armenians under the Ottoman rule, often countries like the United States, for example, refrain from calling these events a genocide because of political implications of the word. For many years, only a handful of countries officially recognized events of 1915–1923 as genocide. The first country to recognize the Armenian genocide was Uruguay in 1965 and at the time of this chapter’s publication only three dozen governments—primarily European—have joined Uruguay, the large majority of them in the present century.11 The Republic of Turkey continues to deny and downplay the extent of these events. In the official Turkish narrative, there were victims on all sides; the Armenians treacherously rose against the Empire, assisting foreign powers intent on dismembering the Empire; and the Ottoman authorities organized orderly transports of Armenians out of the war zones. Yes, some Armenians died, this narrative concedes—Turkish spokespeople often cite the figure of 300,000—but this resulted from warfare, usually instigated by armed Armenians, according to the deniers. In reality, suffering did indeed exist on all sides, but the other elements of the Turkish narrative have been resoundingly disproven. Why does Turkey persist in this denial, so long after the events? Atatürk and his political descendants fashioned a new nationalist identity that cannot “acknowledge that the new Turkish state had been built not from a war ‘against imperial powers’ but by expunging ‘the Greek and Armenian minorities,’” as the leading experts Peter Balakian and Taner Akçam have pointed out.12 The Australian genocide expert Colin Tatz has pointed to other motivations that have sustained Turkish denial for so long: The country’s leaders do not wish their nation to be tainted by association with that other great European perpetrator of modern genocide, Nazi Germany; they fear that they could be held responsible for reparations; and they even fear “fragmentation of social cohesion in a society still in transition.” The Turkish state “has invested its very soul in denial,” Tatz added, creating a seemingly never-ending cycle of intellectual and moral corruption.13 The lack of a stronger global effort for recognition is due to geopolitical factors, military alliances (Turkey’s pivotal role in the North Atlantic Treaty

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 167 Alliance), regional trade, and investment markets.14 The geopolitical situation is further complicated by the refugee crisis caused, in large part, by the humanitarian disaster in neighboring Syria that began in 2011. Turkey is a natural border hindering refugees from entering the European Union in larger numbers. If the international community pressures Turkey to recognize the Armenian genocide, Turkey could open its borders with Europe and allow the free movement of refugees into the EU—which President Erdogan has threatened to do in the past.15 The ongoing genocide denial of Armenians affects political relationships, cultural groups, and families. Without appropriate recognition of genocide against the Armenians, the trauma inflicted by the Turks is passed down through generations of survivors. The denied genocide victim identity prevents the healing of wounds for generations and does not allow moving forward and creating a positive identity for the next generations. The political weight of recognition carries national importance for Armenia and is declared as one of the foreign policy priorities.16 At the same time, the emotional weight of genocide recognition, intertwined with an identity that is undermined by denial, is equally high for Armenian society and in the diaspora. Genocide includes the physical murder of people of certain ethnic, religious, and political identity, and the denial represents the “‘murder’ of survivors’ rationality, truth and even history.”17 Recognition of the genocide will serve as validation of Armenian collective history and heritage. Group memory based on a century-long denial by the perpetrator does not allow closure or forgetting. To the contrary, it perpetuates the trauma-related past and extends it into the descendants’ present and the future.18

Music, memory, and denial Music is central to the development and maintenance of social and individual identities. Through creating, consuming, and making meaning out of music, members of social groups develop a sense of belonging and enhance their social identity and collective memory. The role of music for maintaining and reproducing national and ethnic identities has special importance for diasporic communities. A diaspora needs to construct a sense of community in a semi-alien environment, after its people have been displaced.19 In cultures around the world, music is often used to tell stories, transfer memories, and deepen cultural values. Humans have always migrated, and music can help transmit the experiences and culture of firstgeneration immigrants to subsequent generations who may not have direct connection to the homeland. Art is crucial in maintaining identity and strengthening group cohesion—but also, for peoples who have endured great suffering, in the transgenerational transmission of trauma. The cultural forms of memory-identity work help the descendants of trauma to access often-silenced ancestral memories.20 While this can strengthen group cohesion, memory practices have the potential of leading societies into

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perpetual cycles of conflict and violence. Barbara Tint argues that remembering the past, honoring it, and continuously replaying episodes of trauma can contribute to the entrenchment of polarizing narratives and create more conflict in the future.21 Yet, there are therapeutic benefits of narrating traumatic stories, and often, these self-narrations play an essential role in the process of healing.22 Narration and expression through popular forms of art, including music, are often more easily accessible to trauma survivors and their descendants because fictional and artistic ways of memory expression fill in gaps when words fail. Yael Danieli points out that traumatic experiences are difficult to articulate clearly. Trauma survivors and their future generations “can find no words to narrate the trauma story.”23 Thus, artistic forms of expression are often used. In addition to providing a form of expression that may lead to healing, music, as a form of popular culture, can have a significant impact on the way people think. Art and music are significant repositories of knowledge that communities and nations often rely on to educate new generations. From Billie Holiday’s rendition of Strange Fruit to John Lennon’s Imagine, which became known as the “ad campaign for peace,”24 to Bob Marley’s Redemption Song—calling for emancipation from mental and physical slavery—this popular form of art has always been a powerful tool for social change, due largely to its universality. People around the world may enjoy music regardless of its country of origin and often even without fully understanding the lyrics. Music is often more evocative than other forms of storytelling and has an emotional impact that may change people’s hearts and minds.25 The influence of music is not always positive, however. Music is often used for harmful purposes. Art and music produced by perpetrators and victims are present in all “eight stages of genocide” identified by Gregory Stanton—classification, symbolization, dehumanization, organization, polarization, perpetration, extermination, and denial.26 Numerous volumes have been written about how Jews used music in Nazi ghettos and camps to develop survival mechanisms and retain some normalcy and dignity in their lives.27 Yet, music was also used by the Nazi leadership as part of its propaganda machine to perpetuate stereotypes and incite violence against Jews. Music was sometimes a form of torture in concentration camps, employed by SS guards to “purposefully attack prisoners’ identities, certainties, selfconceptions, and sense of humanity.”28 In Rwanda, music and popular art were used during the genocide to spread hatred and polarization between Hutus and Tutsis. The impact of music was so profound that in 2008 the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) found Hutu extremist pop singer Simon Bikindi guilty of inciting genocide with his songs.29 The fact that Bikindi was one of the ninety-two people who have been indicted by the Tribunal was a “statement from ICTR about the importance of the role played by music in conflict situations, its relations to certain forms of ethnic and national identity and the severity of its perceived abuse.”30

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 169 While recognizing these paradoxes, I argue that Armenians have been using music to reclaim their denied identity, based as it is upon genocide victimhood. The denial of the Armenian genocide on the highest level by the perpetrator and ongoing denial by the Turkish government places Armenians in a defensive position. Armenian politicians, historians, and scholars spend significant resources and energy to prove that the genocide indeed took place and that its victims were not merely victims of the chaos of World War I but were targeted for destruction.31 Armenian musicians contribute to that work in a variety of ways.

Music and the Armenian genocide Over the past several decades Armenians have created many works of art, in all genres, that tell the story of the genocide. Songs ranging from folk to pop and rock have been written to transmit the Armenians’ suffering, courageous resistance, and hopes for the future. Most contemporary Armenian artists have written or have performed genocide-themed songs either individually or through group performances. The music reflecting the Armenian genocide can be divided into three main thematic categories: songs reflecting physical trauma, psychological trauma, or collective action. Physical trauma songs narrate massacres, suffering, and the physical annihilation of the Armenian people and their homeland. Psychological trauma songs reflect the emotional attachment to the homeland that has been lost and a deep longing for it. Songs that include themes of revenge, justice, and reclamation of homeland and cultural pride are here called collective action songs. These three thematic categories come together to create a specific direction within Armenian popular music that centers around the genocide victim identity. In addition to analyzing Armenian music by theme, music produced within this context can be divided into two broader categories: songs for internal audiences and those that seek international audiences. Songs that are written for the internal audience are exclusively in Armenian and have more direct and graphic lyrics, while the ones that are intended for the international audience are written in English with a heavy emphasis on human suffering and historical injustice. This difference is attributed to the different goals that each set of songs is fulfilling. Internal audience songs are mostly aimed at maintaining and recreating national identity and keeping the flame of revenge alive, while the songs for international audiences aim to develop sympathy in the international community as a path towards supporting the recognition of the genocide. More than a hundred years after the genocide’s inception, with very few survivors who could possibly tell the tale, music and songs of and about the Armenian genocide remain a thread that stretches through history connecting the current generation with their collective national past. These songs not only facilitate recreation of identities but also locate and dislocate Armenian communities in Armenia and around the world. Denial of

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genocide makes it even more urgent for Armenians to find the means to validate their own history. Songs remind the new generations of Armenians about their past and present them, often with the explicit goal of inspiring their audiences to take up the fight for recognition of the genocide. The following section examines the lyrics of six songs and presents a discussion of one musical event to analyze the practical use of music for reclaiming and re-shaping identity.

Genocide in Armenian folk music32 Folk art and folk music, in particular, are essential in transmitting oral history from one generation to another. Folk songs often are created to highlight a specific significant event or feature a particular historical figure. It is important to emphasize that Armenian folk music traces its origins to Western Armenia as the overwhelming majority of songs are written and performed in arevmtdahayern, the language of the region, which is based on the dialect of Armenians from Istanbul. Therefore, the lyrics of these folk songs trace an even more direct connection to the experiences of Armenians in Turkey. The dominance of folk songs in diasporic communities is commonplace, as folk songs are used to maintain a distinct identity, pass down memories, and discourage assimilation. In Armenia, such a significant and traumatic event as genocide became the “inspiration” for the development of many folk songs that narrate the stories and experiences of those who lived through it. The four songs reviewed in this section, Dle Yaman, Adanayi Voghby (The Mourning for Adana), Qele Lao (Let’s Go, Son), and Hasnink Sasun (We Will Reach Sasun) are only a handful of the many folk songs in the Armenian folk music library dedicated to the theme of the Armenian genocide.33 Each of these songs represents one of the three categories described above—songs related to physical trauma, psychological trauma, and/or collective action.34 Dle Yaman Dle Yaman is an Armenian folk song attributed to an Armenian monk, Komitas Vardapet. Born in the Ottoman Empire in 1869, Komitas lived in Istanbul (Constantinople) from 1910-1915. He personally witnessed the genocide, and though he survived the killings by being deported during the early days of massacres, he never recovered from the trauma and died in a mental institution in France in 1935. With its tender and emotive lyrics accompanying a melodic yet mournful melody, this is a psychological trauma song. Alas, Alas, the wind has come like fire, Oh Alas, it reached half of the sea, Alas, Alas, o my love!

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 171 Alas, Alas, the sun has touched Mount Ararat Oh Alas, still I remain yearning for my love, Alas, Alas, o my love! Dle Yaman is a song about two people who loved each other but were separated. The original meaning of the song has no immediate connection to genocide; instead, this song became known as symbolizing the Armenian soul. The lyrics of the song acquired an entirely new meaning after the genocide and dispersal of survivors, and now is interpreted as representing the deep yearning for a lost homeland. The music videos that usually accompany Dle Yaman are invariably shot with backgrounds of deserted churches, Armenian landscapes, and Mount Ararat. With no visual representation of a traditional love story and with primary emphasis on abandoned historical sites mainly in Eastern Turkey, the music videos created for this song emphasize the strong genocide victim identity that this piece of art is trying to transmit. One of the earliest direct connections of this song to the images of genocide can be attributed to the movie Mayrig (1991) by French-Armenian filmmaker Henri Verneuil, staring Omar Sharif and Claudia Cardinale. In one scene Omar Sharif’s character Hagop, whose family escapes the genocide and settles in France, receives a gift from his son—a duduk, a woodwind instrument native to Armenia that can have a deep, melancholy sound, similar to that of the oboe. Hagop’s son asks him to play something from the old times, and Hagop plays Dle Yaman. One can feel the passion, the pain, and the yearning flowing from duduk and through the music in this memorable, poignant scene. Viewers see that the yearning is not for a lost lover, but for a lost homeland to which Hagop knows he cannot return. Further, the instrumental version of the song is often played during the funeral processions of famous Armenians, especially those prominent in the diaspora. The most recent examples are the funerals of French-Armenian singer Charles Aznavour in Paris and Turkish-Armenian photographer Ara Güler in Istanbul. The emotional force of this song is difficult to overstate, as it is widely held among Armenians that “the genocide is the symbolic origin of the Armenian diaspora.”35 In this sense, the tune of the song connects these prominent individuals to their roots and represents them as survivors of the genocide of 1915. Adanayi Voghby (The Mourning for Adana) This is another piece of musical art that holds a special place in the musical library of songs dedicated to the Armenian genocide. This is a relatively graphic song, as it tells the story of the physical trauma, devastation, and annihilation suffered by Armenians in the late years of the Ottoman Empire. However, the most important aspect of this particular musical piece is the timing of the historical event that it depicts. The Adana massacre took place

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in April 1909 and was a prelude to the impending genocide. Within the Armenian identity construction all these events merge into one bloody page in the nation’s history and, in recent times, the overwhelming majority of Armenians associate this song with the events of 1915–1923. A conflict between Ottoman reactionaries and the new Young Turks regime sparked generalized fighting in the Adana region, and frenzied mobs attacked Armenians in numerous cities and towns in the area. Turkish soldiers—both counter-revolutionaries and government troops sent to put down the rebellion—murdered Armenians with impunity, and by the end of the month some 10,000 to 20,000 Armenians had been killed.36 The massacres heightened the vulnerability and marginalization of the Armenian minority, while drawing additional elements of Turkish society into the mentalities and practices that are indispensable for genocide. The lyrics also emphasize the targeted attacks on cultural and educational institutions as another reminder of the all-encompassing aims of the genocide. The massacre is merciless, let Armenians cry Beautiful Adana is turned into a desert. Fire, swords and ruthless looting, The house of Rubenids they turned into ruins. Within minutes thousands of Armenians, Fell under the swords of the ruthless mob. The churches and schools vanished in flames, Thousands of Armenians were ruthlessly killed. The melody of the song is poignant and contemplative, and the music videos created for the song feature ruined churches and abandoned monasteries in Eastern Turkey. Some of the music videos made for this song match the graphic descriptions of the lyrics. These versions often feature documentary footage of the demolition of churches and historical sites; women, children, and elderly on the death marches; hungry Armenian orphans in scruffy clothes; Armenian men at the mass execution sites, and bodies of crucified Armenians. Graphic depictions of physical trauma in the images and words encourage viewers and listeners to not look away and close their eyes and ears to the suffering of the Armenian people. The lasting popularity of this song reflects the intergenerational trauma that cannot be healed due to the lack of recognition of genocide. Further, the song highlights the core aspects of the Armenian identity and once again emphasizes that the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were targeted for their distinct national identity, language, and faith. Qele Lao (Let’s Go Son) Qele Lao is one of the iconic songs in the Armenian folk music repertoire, representing the desire of the Armenian people to return to their historic

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 173 homeland. The loss of loved ones is mostly an individual experience and personal family history. Many Armenians do not have immediate ancestors who witnessed the genocide, and some people have lost all the family history that could have been connected to genocide. However, the loss of the homeland is something that unifies all Armenians. The psychological trauma of lost homeland is transmitted through art and music. Debali MookerjeaLeonard argues that for displaced peoples, the ancestral homeland is often associated with childhood memories, “topography and ecology that was theirs.”37 It is a place where they were happy and prosperous, and this idyllic picture is fractured by forced displacement. Qele Lao is about Sasun district in eastern Turkey, which had a substantial Armenian population and great cultural significance for Armenians. Historically, Sasun was one of the prominent Armenian cultural centers in Western Armenia and later in the Ottoman Empire. The only surviving Armenian epic poem, “Daredevils of Sasun,” emphasizes the valor, the strength of spirit, and love of homeland felt by the people of Sasun. Let’s go my son. Let’s go to our homeland. Let’s go to that valley and pick newly-sprouted khavrtsil. We pick, we pick, and that will save us. Let’s go my son. Let’s go to our homeland. Our father is there, our mother is there. They are crying sweetly and in a pained voice. How can we not go to our homeland? Let’s go my son. Let’s go to our homeland. The tune of the song is usually played by only one instrument—a duduk. The tune is mellow, sad, and full of pain. Traditionally performed by women, this song represents a call of a mother to her son to go back to their ergir that they have left behind. Ergir (or yerkir) is the Armenian word for “country” and the “world,” but it is also used in the Western Armenian language, meaning “homeland.” Referring to the homeland as “the entire world” powerfully conveys the emotional connection for Armenians of the lost homeland. The repetition of the phrase “Let’s go” suggests that the mother and her son may easily choose to return to their homeland; however, the knowledge that returning is not a viable choice gives her plea a sense of desperation. She longs to return to the place of her ancestors and asks why it isn’t possible that this should be allowed. The rhetorical question, “How can we not go to our homeland?” suggests a great injustice and invites empathy from listeners. Hasnink Sasun (We Will Reach Sasun) Finally, reclaiming the denied genocide victim identity manifests itself not only in presenting the story of suffering and losses, but also in a story of

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rightful ownership of the land in Eastern Turkey. One of the most wellknown songs in this category is Hasnik Sasun. The lyrics are a call for action to take back the lost territories. We’ll reach Sasun, we’ll get to Van, To Mush, to Alashkert, and Ardahan. A group of Armenian heroes, For Homeland’s Salvation. All the names used in this song represent towns, districts, and villages in Eastern Turkey from which Armenians were deported. The lyrics of the song portray the unbroken will of the Armenian people and the decisiveness to gain revenge and save the homeland. Often associated with the Armenian revolutionary organizations, most songs in this category are upbeat, resembling military marches and employing more diverse musical accompaniment. The amateur video content that is created for these songs tends to include images of marching soldiers, military equipment, and military action with the participation of the Armenian military forces.38 The message of these songs is clear: Brave sons of the Armenian nation are ready to make sacrifices to get justice and to take back what they see as rightfully belonging to the Armenian people. By its nature folk music is primarily created for in-group audiences. Beyond its cultural value, folk music has an educational component, transmitting history, memories, and experiences across generations. Folk songs carry significant cultural meaning for Armenians and are rarely questioned or critiqued. Within the context of a post-genocidal society, these forms of art and music not only acquire an entirely new meaning but also become powerful tools in educating the next generations and reclaiming the denied identity of the victims.

Genocide in modern Armenian music Modern pop culture in Armenia is a rich repository of music that graphically and vividly describes this most tragic page of the Armenian history. Modern Armenian pop music is largely aimed at fellow Armenians and tend to be direct and graphic both in their visual and verbal representation. The two modern songs included in this analysis are Kyanq Million u Kes (A Million and a Half Lives39) and Aprelu April (April is for Living40). These songs have been specifically written for the Armenian Genocide Centennial and, thus, carry a compelling message and framing. These songs ask listeners to “never forget” and are used to express the continual pain that stems from the ongoing denial of the Armenian genocide. They also combine elements of sorrow, revenge, and mourning for a generation that was completely lost. The song Kyanq million u Kes (A Million and a Half Lives) tells a story of a generation that completely vanished due to the genocide. This is a narration of lost lives, lost potential, lost homeland, lost hopes, and dreams—a lost piece of an entire nation.

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 175 A Million and a half names and erased destinies, A Million and a half homeless and outcast people, A Million and a half tears are flowing unnoticeably, There are a Million and a half hearts in each of us. A Million and a half dreams and shattered hopes, A Million and a half suns and darkened lights, A Million and a half lips will never smile at us again, There are a Million and a half souls in each of us. A Million and a half homes and destroyed temples, A Million and a half brothers, a Million and a half friends, A Million and a half fists will become me and you, We have a Million and Half causes for seeking revenge. Deep in the eyes there’s a burning question, (No one will forget, no one will forgive) Souls lost on the irrevocable days, (Even in a Million and a half years) The hands that won’t embrace, And the prayer that won’t rescue, Time owes me and you, A Million and a half lives. We are with them today, both me and you, We feel we are eleven Million and a half.41 The song and the accompanying music video are produced by one of the most popular media holdings in Armenia—Armenia TV—which has cable broadcasting rights not only in Armenia but also in many countries with significant Armenian populations including Russia, the United States, Greece, and France. The music video of the song features prominent Armenian TV personalities, singers, and actors. According to the producers, the song and the music video were created to express “the Armenian nation’s protest against the denial of the Armenian Genocide.”42 The lyrics of the song bring together several key components of Armenian genocide victim identity: the indifference of the international community to the sufferings of the Armenian people, survivors’ guilt, and the anger and revenge fantasies of the descendants of the survivors. The lyrics suggest that Armenians were driven out of their homes and became outcast while their pleas for salvation remained unanswered. The shared belief that a capable, talented, and promising generation was lost due to genocide speaks to survivors’ guilt. One form of survivors’ guilt is the belief that the “good ones have died during the genocide.”43 The phrase “million and half dreams and shattered hopes” suggests that those who have perished had hopes and dreams that would lead them to new achievements and accomplishments, but this potential was lost with their deaths. The song also suggests a violent response to ongoing

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denial, if necessary, since there are “a Million and Half causes for seeking revenge.” In addition to graphic lyrics, modern popular music introduces some elements of positive identity to augment the traumatic past and to inspire hope for the future. Many modern songs feature the unshaken faith and strength of the Armenian people, which is also combined with the continuing pain from the ongoing injustice due to continual denial. Aprelu April (April is for Living) is another modern Armenian song performed by prominent and talented pop artists, Inga and Anush Arshakyan. The song tells the story of the century-old pain of the Armenian people that suffered through the enormous loss of homeland and lives. At the same time, the song features the hope and faith of the Armenian nation to survive and thrive regardless of the pain and suffering that it endured. My century-old wound is still open Songs from homesickness are still alive Home, dreaming of you sleepless My Home calls me back in my dreams. Let the scream and cry heard from my Armenian homelan Be the brutal hangman for your guilty sould Death, you’ve defeated me for a while But my destiny has been to be alive. They broke my heart with a sword, I continued to live with love They burned my garden, but I planted a new one They demolished my church, but I still pray for you My Lord, Protect me and my nation from evil. Forever. The lyrics emphasize how the continued denial of the genocide prevents the healing of the wounds, and makes reconciliation impossible. It also accentuates other aspects of national identity—resurrection and resilience. The song places the blame on the perpetrators for not only committing the genocide but also for denying their deeds. The phrase “Let the scream and cry heard from my Armenian homeland be the brutal hangman for your guilty soul” suggests that the denial of the genocide by perpetrators not only prevents the souls of victims from finding peace but also keeps aflame their desire to punish Turkey for the crime it has committed. The powerful chorus of the song emphasizes Turkey’s failure to eradicate Armenians and the unbroken will of the Armenian nation whose members rebuilt their identity from ruins and maintain their Christian faith. These two songs are only a small portion of an extensive collection of modern music created in Armenia that feature the stories of the Armenian genocide. In contrast to folk music, songs from this genre are often treated as modern art and are subject to criticism and scrutiny for their execution, message, framing, and visual accompaniment. Unlike folk music though,

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 177 recent popular music is also subject to trends and fashion and does not always become a permanent part of the nation’s musical library. New songs often push the older ones off the air, but each year in April, all of these songs again become part of television and radio programming and refresh the images and narratives of the Armenian genocide within the national discourse.

International audiences and the music of the Armenian genocide International recognition of the genocide is the ultimate goal not only of Armenian foreign policy and American-Armenian lobbying organizations, but also of the cultural and educational elite in Armenia and the diaspora. Within this context, these groups utilize all tools available to them to combat the continual denial of genocide by Turkey and to raise awareness about the events of 1915-1923. While there are different forms of art that are created for the international audience—the most influential ones being movies such as Ararat (2002), The Lark Farm (2007), and The Promise (2016)—musical events are used to propagate and share the stories of the survivors and descendants of the Armenian genocide. One noteworthy musical event was the recent worldwide tour of the internationally-acclaimed American-Armenian rock band System of a Down. The “Wake Up the Soul” tour began on April 6, 2015 in the United States and concluded on October 6, 2015 in Mexico. The band toured thirteen countries and performed in nineteen locations. This music event was explicitly designed to raise awareness and support the international recognition of the Armenian genocide in the context of continuing international denial. While the repertoire of the band is hard-driving rock music with varied political and non-political content, two of its most famous songs, “P.L.U.C.K.” and “Holy Mountains” are dedicated to the Armenian genocide. Bandleader Serj Tankian also has a solo career, and his music is dedicated to the recognition of the Armenian genocide. One of his most well-known songs is “Yes, It’s Genocide!” All the music created by System of a Down and its leader seeks an international audience, and the band opens access to audiences and platforms that are rarely reached by others in the Armenian music industry. They are able to attract international media attention and further the efforts of genocide recognition. Another international artistic forum that is often used to reclaim the denied genocide victim identity is the annual Eurovision song contest. The Armenian entry song for the 2015 competition was performed by a multinational band called Genealogy composed of Armenians representing each of the six continents: Essaï Altounian (France) representing Europe’s Armenians, Inga Arshakyan (Armenia), Tamar Kaprelian (USA) representing Armenians from the Americas, Mary-Jean O’Doherty Vasmatzian (Australia) representing Armenians from Oceania, Vahe Tilbian (Ethiopia) representing Armenians from Africa, and Stephanie Topalian (Japan) representing Armenians from Asia. The name for the group places

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an explicit emphasis on the heritage, ancestral history, roots, and past of the Armenian people. Each of the performers had a pin with an image of an ancestor who witnessed the genocide. Dedicated to the Centennial of the Armenian Genocide, the Armenian entry song was initially called “Don’t Deny.” The force of this title as a command for others to stop denying the Armenian genocide created a significant political controversy that resulted in the renaming of the song. The song was renamed “Face the Shadow.” Even though the title was changed, the lyrics directly condemn the ongoing denial of the genocide and call for recognition. Feels like so many times life was unfair Will you run and forget all the despair? If it’s breaking you down, remember the power inside Face every shadow you denied Time is ticking and you keep thinking that you are tricking your heart, so Don’t deny Ever don’t deny Baby don’t deny You and I The music video created for this song tells a story of a large Armenian family. In each scene, one or two people disappear from the picture. First these are the young men in the family, then older men, and eventually women and children. At end, there are only four empty chairs. This visual presentation follows the course of the genocide: The Ottoman government first eliminated young men to prevent any possible self-defense of the community; then the political, cultural, and religious leadership was rounded up and executed to eliminate the possibility of organization; and finally the elderly, women, and children were systematically deported.44 The song not only showcases the tragedy of the Armenian people but also emphasizes their resilience. Throughout the video a woman embroiders a phoenix on a white canvas, which symbolizes the rebirth of the Armenian nation. At the end of the video, the four empty chairs and the room are filled with the band members, attired in traditional Armenian clothes typical of the early 20th century. The scene is another reminder of Turkey’s failed attempt to eliminate Armenians, who rose like a phoenix from the ashes of burnt churches, schools, and monasteries and continue to live and forge a distinct identity. Even though “Face the Shadow” did not make to the top ten finalists for the Eurovision Song Contest of 2015, it generated significant media discussion within Armenia and abroad. These international musical events are important forums for Armenians to combat the ongoing denial of the genocide and to reclaim their identity as genocide victim identity, which has been so cruelly denied on the political level but finds outlets in the popular forms of art. Music has been a powerful

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 179 genre. Music is actively used to educate generations about the Armenian genocide, to reach to the international community, and to forge a collective identity for all members of the Armenia diaspora. It is important to note that no matter how graphic and brutal, the music and images of the Armenian genocide eventually represent a victory of life over death.

Notes 1 “Perinçek v. Switzerland. European Court of Human Rights,” October 15, 2015, accessed May 15, 2020, https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22itemid%22:[%22 001-158235%22. 2 Tim Arango, “A Century After Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s Denial Only Deepens,” The New York Times, April 16, 2015, accessed May 15, 2020, https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/europe/turkeys-century-of-denial-about-anarmenian-genocide.html. 3 Henri Tajfel and John Turner, “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior,” in Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. Stephen Worchel and William Austin (Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1986), 7–24; Henri Tajfel and John Turner, “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict,” in The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, ed. William Austin and Stephen Worchel (Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979), 33–37. 4 Vernon L. Allen and David A. Wilder, “Categorization, Belief Similarity, and Intergroup Discrimination,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, no. 6 (1975): 971–77; Michael Billig and Henri Tajfel, “Social Categorization and Similarity in Intergroup Behaviour,” European Journal of Social Psychology 3, no. 1 (1973): 27–52; Marilynn B. Brewer and Madelyn Silver, “Ingroup Bias as a Function of Task Characteristics,” European Journal of Social Psychology 8, no. 3 (1978): 393–400. 5 Karina Korostelina, Social Identity and Conflict: Structures, Dynamics, and Implications (New York: Springer, 2007). 6 Levon Boyajian and Haigaz Grigorian, “Psychosocial Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide,” in The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, ed. Richard G. Hovannisian (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 177–186. 7 Selina L. Mangassarian, “100 Years of Trauma: The Armenian Genocide and Intergenerational Cultural Trauma,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 25, no. 4 (April 20, 2016): 371–381. 8 Diane Kupelian, Anie Sanentz Kalayjian, and Alice Kassabian, “The Turkish Genocide of the Armenians,” in International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, ed. Yael Danieli, The Plenum Series on Stress and Coping (Boston, MA: Springer US, 1998), 192. 9 Ibid., 192. 10 Boyajian and Grigorian, 182. 11 The German Bundestag adopted a resolution on the Armenian Genocide Recognition in June 2016: “The Bundestag regrets the inglorious role of the German Empire, which, as a principal ally of the Ottoman Empire, did not try to stop these crimes against humanity, despite explicit information regarding the organized expulsion and extermination of Armenians, including also from German diplomats and missionaries.” 12 Peter Balakian, The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and the American Response (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004), 371; Taner Akçam’s Killing Orders: Talat Pasha’s Telegrams and the Armenian Genocide (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).

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13 Colin Tatz, With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide (New York: Verso, 2003), 130–131. 14 Richard Hovhannisian, “Introduction - The Armenian Genocide: Remembrance and Denial,” in Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, ed. Richard Hovhannisian (Wayne State University Press, 1998), 13–21. 15 Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Patrick Kingsley, “Turkey, Pressing E.U. for Help in Syria, Threatens to Open Borders to Refugees,” The New York Times, February 28, 2020, accessed May 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/world/ europe/turkey-refugees-Geece-erdogan.html. 16 “Foreign Affairs,” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia, accessed May 15, 2020, http://www.mfa.am/en/foreign-policy/ 17 Aida Alayarian, Consequences of Denial: The Armenian Genocide (New York: Routledge, 2018), 61. 18 Carol A. Kidron, “Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity,” Ethos 31, no. 4 (December 1, 2003): 513–544. 19 Rolf Lidskog, “The Role of Music in Ethnic Identity Formation in Diaspora: A Research Review,” International Social Science Journal 66, no. 219–220 (2016): 23–38. 20 Kidron, “Surviving a Distant Past.” 21 Barbara Tint, “History, Memory, and Intractable Conflict,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, April 5, 2010), 239, accessed May 15, 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2263810. 22 Lawrence L. Langer, Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory (New Haven, CT, US: Yale University Press, 1991). 23 Yael Danieli, “Massive Trauma and the Healing Role of Reparative Justice,” Journal of Traumatic Stress 22, no. 5 (2009): 352. 24 Martin Chilton, “Imagine: How A Provocative Anthem Became A Hymn For Peace,” UDiscover Music (blog), October 11, 2019, accessed May 15, 2020, https://www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/imagine-john-lennons-provocative-anthem-became-hymn-peace/. 25 Wojciech Klimczyk, “Foreword,” in Music and Genocide, ed. Wojciech Klimczyk and Agata Swierzowska, New edition (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2015), 7–21. 26 Clint Borgen, “Eight Stages of Genocide: From Classification to Denial,” The Borgen Project, July 28, 2014, accessed February 21, 2020, https:// borgenproject.org/eight-stages-of-genocide/. 27 Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps (Clarendon Press, 2005); Deborah A. Cunningham, “Musical Meaning in the Lives of Those Affected by the Holocaust: Implications for Music Education,” Update: Applications of Research in Music Education 33, no. 1 (November 1, 2014): 65–72. 28 Juliane Brauer, “How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps,” Music and Politics X, no. 1 (Winter 2016). 29 Gregory S. Gordon, “Music and Genocide: Harmonizing Coherence, Freedom and Nonviolence in Incitement Law,” Santa Clara Law Review (2010). 30 James Parker, “The Musicology of Justice: Simon Bikindi and Incitement to Genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda,” SSRN Scholarly Paper (Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2013), 212, accessed May 15, 2020, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=2426392. 31 See Hovannisian’s pioneering work. 32 Folk songs were prohibited in Soviet Armenia for many years, as they were considered revolutionary and nationalistic. Only in 1965 were folk songs allowed

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 181

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42 43 44

to be circulated, however, with a special narrative that Armenians were slaughtered and unprotected outside the USSR, and the Russians came and saved the Armenian people. After dissolution of the Soviet Union and establishment of the Republic of Armenia, these songs became part of mainstream culture in Armenia. Many folk songs were created by the Armenian diaspora, which explains why the lyrics of these songs are in Western Armenian. The lyrics examined in the chapter are excerpts from the full lyrics and have been chosen to represent the core meaning and the message of the songs. Gregory F. Goekjian, “Diaspora and Denial: The Holocaust and the ‘Question’ of the Armenian Genocide,” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 3. Ruben Adalian, “The Armenian Genocide,” in Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, ed. Samuel Totten and William Spencer Parsons (Routledge, 2013), 132. Debali Mookerjea-Leonard, Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence (Routledge, 2017). Usually these are segments from documentary footage of the recent NagornoKarabakh conflict of 1991–1994 between Armenia and Azerbaijan featuring Armenian military forces who are often referred to as “freedom fighters.” According to experts and historians, at least one and a half million people died during the Armenian genocide. April 24, 1915 is considered the start of the genocide, although it was set in motion earlier. On this date the Ottoman government rounded up, deported, and/ or executed several hundred Armenian cultural and political elites. This date is now recognized as the Genocide Remembrance Day in Armenia and globally. There are different estimates of the total Armenian population worldwide. However, within Armenia, there is a commonly shared belief that roughly three million Armenians live in Armenia and another seven million outside of Armenia. 11.5 million, in this case, also represents those who perished during the genocide. Armenia TV, Կյանք Միլիոն Ու Կես / A Million and a Half Lives, 2015, accessed on May 15, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrOTyxgv3Zk. Boyajian and Grigorian, 178. Henry Theriault, “Genocide, Denial, and Domination: Armenian-Turkish Relations from Conflict Resolution to Just Transformation,” Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies 1, no. 2 (November 28, 2012).

Bibliography Adalian, Ruben. “The Armenian Genocide.” In Centuries of Genocide: Essays and Eyewitness Accounts, edited by Samuel Totten and William Spencer Parsons, 117–156. New York: Routledge, 2013. Alayarian, Aida. Consequences of Denial: The Armenian Genocide. New York: Routledge, 2018. Allen, Vernon L., and David A. Wilder. “Categorization, Belief Similarity, and Intergroup Discrimination.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 32, no. 6 (1975): 971–977. Billig, Michael, and Henri Tajfel. “Social Categorization and Similarity in Intergroup Behaviour.” European Journal of Social Psychology 3, no. 1 (1973): 27–52.

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Boyajian, Levon, and Haigaz Grigorian. “Psychosocial Sequelae of the Armenian Genocide.” In The Armenian Genocide in Perspective, edited by Richard G. Hovannisian, 177–186. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009. Brauer, Juliane. “How Can Music Be Torturous?: Music in Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camps.” Music and Politics 10, no. 1 (Summer 2016): 1–34. Brewer, Marilynn B., and Madelyn Silver. “Ingroup Bias as a Function of Task Characteristics.” European Journal of Social Psychology 8, no. 3 (1978): 393–400. Cunningham, Deborah A. “Musical Meaning in the Lives of Those Affected by the Holocaust: Implications for Music Education.” Update: Applications of Research in Music Education 33, no. 1 (2014): 65–72. Danieli, Yael. “Massive Trauma and the Healing Role of Reparative Justice.” Journal of Traumatic Stress 22, no. 5 (2009): 351–357. Gilbert, Shirli. Music in the Holocaust: Confronting Life in the Nazi Ghettos and Camps. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005. Goekjian, Gregory F. “Diaspora and Denial: The Holocaust and the ‘Question’ of the Armenian Genocide.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 7, no. 1(1998): 3–24. Gordon, Gregory. “Music and Genocide: Harmonizing Coherence, Freedom and Nonviolence in Incitement Law.” Santa Clara Law Review 50, no. 3 (2010): 607. Hovannisian, Richard. “Introduction – The Armenian Genocide: Remembrance and Denial.” In Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide, edited by Richard Hovannisian, 13–21. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998. Kidron, Carol A. “Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity.” Ethos 31, no. 4 (2003): 513–544. Klimczyk, Wojciech. “Foreword.” In Music and Genocide, edited by Wojciech Klimczyk and Agata Swierzowska, 7–21. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang GmbH, 2015. Korostelina, Karina. Social Identity and Conflict: Structures, Dynamics, and Implications. New York: Springer, 2007. Kupelian, Diane, Anie Sanentz Kalayjian, and Alice Kassabian. “The Turkish Genocide of the Armenians.” In International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma, edited by Yael Danieli, 191–210. Boston, MA: Springer US, 1998. Langer, Lawrence L. Holocaust Testimonies: The Ruins of Memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991. Lidskog, Rolf. “The Role of Music in Ethnic Identity Formation in Diaspora: A Research Review.” International Social Science Journal 66, no. 219–220 (2016): 23–38. Mangassarian, Selina L. “100 Years of Trauma: The Armenian Genocide and Intergenerational Cultural Trauma.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma 25, no. 4 (2016): 371–381. Mookerjea-Leonard, Debali. Literature, Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence. New York: Routledge, 2017. Parker, James. The Musicology of Justice: Simon Bikindi and Incitement to Genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, 2013.

Music to combat denial, asserting identity 183 Tajfel, Henri, and John Turner. “An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict.” In The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by William Austin and Stephen Worchel, 33–37. Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1979. Tajfel, Henri, and John Turner. “The Social Identity Theory of Intergroup Behavior.” In Psychology of Intergroup Relations, edited by Stephen Worchel and William Austin, 7–24. Chicago: Nelson Hall, 1986. Tatz, Colin. With Intent to Destroy: Reflecting on Genocide. New York: Verso, 2003. Theriault, Henry. “Genocide, Denial, and Domination: Armenian-Turkish Relations from Conflict Resolution to Just Transformation.” Journal of African Conflicts and Peace Studies 1, no. 2 (2012): 82–96. Tint, Barbara. “History, Memory, and Intractable Conflict.” Conflict Resolution Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2010): 239–256.

Online sources Arango, Tim. “A Century After Armenian Genocide, Turkey’s Denial Only Deepens.” The New York Times, April 16, 2015. Accessed May 15, 2020. https:// www.nytimes.com/2015/04/17/world/europe/turkeys-century-of-denial-about-anarmenian-genocide.html. Armenia TV. 2015. Կյանք Միլիոն Ու Կես / A Million and a Half Lives. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrOTyxgv3Zk. Borgen, Clint. “Eight Stages of Genocide: From Classification to Denial.” The Borgen Project. July 28, 2014. Accessed February 21, 2020. https:// borgenproject.org/eight-stages-of-genocide/. Chilton, Martin. “Imagine: How a Provocative Anthem Became a Hymn for Peace.” UDiscover Music (blog). October 11, 2019. Accessed February 21, 2020. https:// www.udiscovermusic.com/stories/imagine-john-lennons-provocative-anthem-became-hymn-peace/. “Case of Perinçek v. Switzerland.” 27510/08. (European Court of Human Rights. October 15, 2015). Accessed May 15, 2020. https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng#{%22 itemid%22:[%22001-158235%22]}. “Foreign Affairs.” Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://www.mfa.am/en/foreign-policy/. Stevis-Gridneff, Matina, and Patrick Kingsley. “Turkey, Pressing E.U. for Help in Syria, Threatens to Open Borders to Refugees.” The New York Times, February 28, 2020. Accessed May 15, 2020. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/28/world/ europe/turkey-refugees-Geece-erdogan.html.

11 The forgotten murders: Gendercide in the twenty-first century and the destruction of the transgender body Haley Marie Brown

I write this chapter as a white, disabled transgender woman, as well as a survivor of violent transphobic attacks. This chapter therefore reflects a deeply held moral, ethical, and personal obligation to tell the stories of murdered transgender women. While true in all instances of life force atrocity, the acts of violence depicted in this chapter are especially graphic and grisly in nature. Though there is debate surrounding the inclusion of explicit depictions of violence, the study of life force atrocities requires their inclusion so that the truth is revealed and the space for denial is minimized. It is for that reason that I have chosen to discuss the murders of transgender women in a manner that describes them exactly as they have occurred.1 Additionally, the experiences of transgender women are absent from contemporary understandings of genocide. This is largely a consequence of the historical dearth of available research into transgender people within the field of genocide studies. However, it is also the case that (when we have been the subjects of research) transgender people are more often than not treated as niche, somewhat exotic objects of research for social scientists, gender theorists, and psychologists rather than as human beings with complex lives, each possessing unique obstacles to their well-being.

Terminology In this chapter, life force atrocities refers to an influential concept introduced by Elisa von Joeden-Forgey in a 2010 journal article. Von Joeden-Forgey argued that “genocide is a gendered crime intimately associated with institutions of reproduction” often involving “inversion rituals and ritual desecrations” that reveal “a preoccupation with the group’s life force in its physical and symbolic dimensions.” She added that “the presence of life force atrocities during a conflict can therefore function as an early warning sign of a genocidal logic.” Transgender refers specifically to individuals whose gender identity is not congruent with the sex assigned to them at birth. With this definition in mind, a transgender woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth and who lives as a woman regardless of the intelligibility (or lack thereof) of their identity to cisgender individuals. DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-11

Gendercide: Destruction of transgender body 185 Conversely, cisgender refers to any individual who has congruence with both their gender identity and the sex assigned to them at birth. Therefore, a cisgender woman is a woman who was assigned female at birth. Transphobia is an important factor in the murders of transgender women and is at the core of the genocidal rage that is the basis for these crimes. In this chapter, transphobia refers to the hatred and prejudice toward transgender women by cisgender men who either believe or fear that transgender women are visibly contravening traditional gender norms, as well as norms regarding cisgender, heterosexual male sexual behavior, and so on.2 Transphobic violence, then, is defined in this chapter as violence inflicted against transgender people as a regulatory punishment for their deviance from the cisgender norm.

Introduction Sometime around midnight on January 21, 2019, a transgender woman by the name of Quelly da Silva sat by herself at her family’s bar in the Campo Belo, just off of the Miguel Melhado de Campo Highway in Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil.3 Moments later, a man (rumored to have been Quelly’s onetime sexual partner) named Caio Santos de Oliveira entered the bar and proceeded to physically confront her. During the ensuing assault, Caio Santos knocked several bottles from the shelves, which shattered to pieces as they hit the floor. After Caio Santos had subdued Quelly, he grabbed a shard of glass from one of the broken bottles and began to stab her repeatedly until she died.4 Caio then took the glass shard and slowly cut out Quelly’s heart, wrapping it up in a cloth and setting it aside.5 What happened next is as equally disturbing, for it is symbolic of something far more sinister. Caio subsequently attempted to cover up the wounds on Quelly’s body by drawing a portrait of the Nossa Senhora da Conceição Aparecida (Our Lady of Aparecida), one of the more common popular Brazilian Catholic images of the Blessed Virgin Mary.6 Despite the effort to conceal her wounds, Caio was ultimately unsuccessful. After realizing the futility of his endeavor, Caio Santos quickly robbed Quelly of $250.00, grabbed her heart, and proceeded to sneak quietly out through the back of the bar. The following morning, Brazilian military police were patrolling the area when they came across a man exhibiting suspicious behavior.7 Despite repeated attempts to hide his identity during the initial questioning, the man ultimately relented and confirmed his identity as none other than Caio Santos de Oliveira.8 During the subsequent interrogation, the military police noticed the deep defensive wounds on Caio’s face and began pressuring him to tell the truth about their origin. After a few minutes of deflecting the questions, Caio broke down and confessed to Quelly’s murder. He then led the military police to the scene of the crime, later telling the police that “He [Quelly] was a demon, I ripped out his heart, that's it.”9

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When viewed in isolation, it would appear that Quelly’s death is the grotesque and tragic result of a hate crime. However, severe acts of transphobic violence (of which Quelly herself was a victim) are an all-too-familiar reality for transgender women worldwide. This is especially true in Brazil, which saw a global-high of 167 transgender people killed in 2018 alone.10 In many of these murders, the sort of brazen and extreme cruelty inflicted on Quelly’s body is inflicted in similar ways by perpetrators—as highly ritualistic acts of bodily desecration comparable to those found within acts often referred to as life force atrocities. Because the study of life force atrocities relies centrally on the social and biological roles relative to gender, the concept of “life force atrocities” offers us the ability to view the unique way in which the gender-regulative ideology of transphobia intersects with the genocidal process. With this in mind, it becomes clear that the murders of transgender women contain a genocidal logic: These acts of extreme overkill, so often present in transphobic violence, are demonstrative of the eliminationist intent inherent to both life force atrocities and genocide.

Reproduction and transphobic violence In her influential 2010 article “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict,” Elisa von Joeden-Forgey refers to the specific acts of violence directed at individuals on the basis of their biological sex.11 More specifically, perpetrators of genocide “pursue annihilation in different ways that are inextricably linked to deeply held beliefs about social and biological reproduction.”12 Here, von Joeden-Forgey is referring to the ritual violence inflicted upon individuals deemed by perpetrators to be responsible for the continuance of an identity group. However, for the purposes of this chapter, “reproduction” (in one sense) is representative of the ability of the targeted individual(s) to fulfill the expectations and roles of their apparent bodily sex.13 That is to say, the cisgender men (almost exclusively) who murder transgender women14 do so in part because transgender women transgress rather than fulfill the social and biological roles of their perceived bodily sex.15 Take for example the murder of transgender teenager Gwen Araujo. While attending a Newark, California party on October 3, 2002, Gwen (only seventeen at the time) was forcibly dragged into a bathroom by cisgender male partygoers following their discovery that she did not have the expected genitalia.16 Once inside the bathroom, the perpetrators forcefully removed her clothing, displaying her penis in what can only be described as providing public evidence (and public mockery) of her bodily subversion. Following this, Gwen’s killers “kneed her in the face, slapped, kicked, and choked her, beat her with a can and a metal skillet, wrestled her to the ground, tied her wrists and ankles, strangled her with a rope, and hit her over the head with a shovel.”17 Badly beaten, Gwen reportedly said, “I told you I was sorry” before finally succumbing to her wounds.18 Her body was then loaded into

Gendercide: Destruction of transgender body 187 the back of a pickup truck and later dumped some 150 miles away in the Sierra Nevada wilderness.19 Later, attorneys representing Gwen’s killers would use what some refer to as the trans panic defense,20 arguing in court that Gwen was really a man, which upset the killers to the point of murderous rage.21 This is similar to the way perpetrators of genocide, as Forgey notes, “refer to the time of killing as a separate universe, a madness, or a diabolic inspiration.”22 Though not as graphic as the acts of violence typically associated with life force atrocities, Gwen Araujo’s murder provides an important understanding of the role of ritualistic violence in the murders of transgender women. In the words of Laura Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg, “Violence perverts, inverts, or renders unintelligible certain ways of being in the world while endorsing others; in this, violence is perhaps best conceptualized as a specific relation of power that is not necessarily repressive but productive.”23 This ritualistic violence that so often accompanies transphobic murders seeks to produce a manufactured reality that denies the legitimate identity of transgender women as simply another kind of women, thereby constructing the illusion that the only valid womanhood is cisgender womanhood.24

Generative assaults on the transgender body Designed to assault the very institutions which that perpetuate group identity, the acts of ritual mutilation and desecration within life force atrocities focus on the sites and symbols of group generation.25 For instance, one reason that women’s bodies are assaulted during genocides is because they are representative of the ability of the target group to exist in the future.26 An example of this phenomenon can be found during the Bosnian genocide, in which genocidal rape was used by Serbs against Bosnian women with the intention of group eradication and replacement through forced impregnation.27 However, transgender women’s bodies complicate the traditional interpretation of assaults on the (literal) generative powers of gender-based groups. While cisgender women can theoretically produce more members of the target group, transgender women cannot and do not generate more transgender women through biological reproduction. Nor are transgender women “born” transgender.28 Rather, I posit that transgender people are themselves the genesis of transgender identity. Therefore, the generative symbols that produce transgender identity are the organs and symbols responsible for the literal generation of life (and thus identity) itself. That is to say, that which gives life and identity to the transgender woman allows her the possibility to transgress gender norms. Such symbols include: the brain (head), the heart, skin, or any other part of the body that others can use to identify an individual both ante and postmortem. To illustrate: Beheading is one of many methods utilized in the murders of transgender women. The act of decapitation carries various connotations.

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Perhaps most significant is the implication of complete power over the victim, because the head itself “carries our social identity.”29 That is to say, beheading is fundamentally a statement of the control that the perpetrator has over the beheaded individual (and therefore the identities or groups to which they belong).30 For example, on October 24, 2017 a transgender woman was found beheaded in Pakistan on one of the farms near the city of Peshawar.31 Her head was nowhere to be found, and police consequently had extreme difficulty identifying the victim.32 Similarly, on January 9, 2018, Jhoana Hernández was also found decapitated and tortured in Veracruz, Mexico.33 Though both of these murdered transgender women were ultimately identified as such postmortem, the perpetrators nevertheless used decapitation in an attempt to attack the very thing responsible for generating their victim’s trans identity. Following a similar logic, burning is also another action undertaken by perpetrators to attack the identity of transgender women. For instance, Hande Kader, a 22-year-old transgender woman from Istanbul, Turkey was raped, beaten, and burned to death.34 The only reason she was able to be identified was because she had registered prosthetics.35 Likewise, an unidentified transgender woman was burned to death after resisting sexual assault in Sahiwal, Pakistan in September 2018.36 Another transgender woman, 24-year-old Paulett Gonzalez, was burned to death in Celaya, in Guanajuato state in central Mexico.37 Her remains were so badly disfigured that the only way she could be identified was through genetic testing.38 Whether it be through beheading, burning, or some other form of assault on generative symbols, perpetrators of transphobic violence attempt to eliminate, either in whole or in part, any evidence of the person existing altogether. Consequently, the perpetrators eradicate any evidence of the person’s transgender identity. However, in their attempts to erase the identities of the transgender women they kill, perpetrators of these generative assaults are targeting more than just the literal and symbolic displays of gender and sexual transgression. Rather, they are also engaged in combat with the metaphysical “transgender” identity itself.

Conversion rituals Typically, life force atrocities also involve the presence of inversion rituals that “seek to reverse proper hierarchies.”39 Yet, as the examples of transphobic violence mentioned throughout this chapter demonstrate, the aim of genocidal ritual in the murders of transgender women is rather the enforcement of traditional gender hierarchies. The murders of transgender women instead contain a form of ritual that I term conversion rituals. Conversion rituals intertwine with the rituals of desecration and mutilation present in life force atrocities. They seek to “convert” transgender women back into cisgender people through bodily destruction, wherein perpetrators use the mutilation and desecration of transgender women’s

Gendercide: Destruction of transgender body 189 bodies to deny the identity of “transness” both during and after the acts, subsequently upholding traditional gender norms. Moreover, the presence of conversion rituals also has an additional communicative purpose: to serve as a reminder to transgender women of the consequences for their transgression(s). That is to say, other transgender women become aware of these murders (through either the media or word of mouth) and may then seek to stay closeted so as to avoid such violence. When conversion rituals are successful (and in many cases even when they are not), deceased transgender women are often posthumously referred to as unidentified man in official and public documentation, unless their transness is demonstrated after the fact. Similarly, even if the victim is identified as transgender, many news organizations will make pointed reference to the victim’s “former” gender, as if to subtly claim that the individual was engaging in an act of gender subterfuge or masquerade. Perpetrators of transphobic violence, therefore, utilize conversion rituals to weaponize this idea of biological gender essentialism, wherein all nonconformity is treated with marked suspicion. In what is one of the more gruesome cases of transphobic violence, the ruthless killing of transgender teenager Ally Steinfeld clearly illustrates how conversion rituals intertwine with rituals of desecration. In early September 2017, seventeen-year-old Ally Steinfeld went missing from her Cabool, Missouri home.40 A few weeks later, police discovered Steinfeld’s body in a chicken coop close to the home of one of her killers.41 In the report, the sheriff’s office described in detail a brutal scene: Ally Steinfeld’s body had been dismembered, de-boned, and burned; her bones had been placed in a plastic bag beside the charred remains of her body.42 Furthermore, both of Ally’s eyes had been gouged out, and her genitals had been stabbed repeatedly, presumably to the point of unrecognizability.43 The complete and total obliteration of Ally Steinfeld’s body is demonstrative of the ways in which perpetrators of life force atrocities “aim to compress total annihilation… into one moment of ultimate destruction in which a group is destroyed in its past, present, and future tenses.”44 The conversion rituals utilized by perpetrators of the violence committed against transgender women consequently deny the possibility that one can be, is becoming, or has become a different gender. Thus, the genocidal intent in the murders of transgender women is located in how the perpetrators utilize conversion rituals in conjunction with rituals of mutilation and desecration to attack the idea of transness itself.

Conclusion While acts of genocidal violence most certainly involve the hatred of the victim group, fundamentally, as David Moshman argues, genocide is principally a crime of identity.45 That is to say, perpetrators aim to deny the legitimate identity of the victim group. As I have since established, the perpetrators of transphobic murders (much like the perpetrators of

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recognized genocides) seek to deny transgender women their identities in a manner consistent with Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide.46 Though these murders have historically not been treated as genocidal in nature, there has recently been some positive, but limited development at the state level. On December 3, 2018, a Colombian court sentenced Davinson Stiven Erazo Sánchez to twenty years for “aggravated feminicide” after he had shot and killed Anyela Ramos Claros in Garzón, Colombia a year prior.47 Yet, the initial intention behind Colombia’s anti-feminicide legislation was to better address the extraordinarily high rates of violence and murder committed against cisgender women in the country. Despite the incredible significance of treating a transgender woman’s murder as intrinsically gendercidal, at trial Davinson Sánchez argued that his actions were appropriate given Anyela Claros’s “sexual orientation.”48 This testimony stands in direct contention with the language surrounding feminicide, which is roughly defined as violence or murder committed against a woman on the basis of her womanhood.49 Though doing so rightfully recognizes transgender women as women, placing the murders of transgender women within the confines of feminicide ignores the reality that transgender women are murdered because of gender transgression rather than gender conformity, as previous sections of this chapter have made clear. Regardless of the important ruling of the Colombian court, there is no established legal precedence under international law to consider these murders as genocidal. Despite this, the above cases demonstrate how assaults on the generative forces of transgender women indicate that perpetrators “have begun to form a concept of the victim group that has the same logic as those historical group categories identified by the Genocide Convention.”50 While viewing these murders in the context of life force atrocities ultimately allows us to locate the genocidal intention of perpetrators, until current legal understandings change regarding the terms of Article II, it is a matter of empirical reality that the murders of transgender women will never be seen as genocidal by the international community. To rectify this, further research on transgender and gender-variant experiences in the field of genocide studies is needed. However, many scholars, researchers, and those interested in preventing both genocide and genderbased violence have long ignored the violence committed against transgender women, consequently contributing to further marginalization. Moving forward, it is our responsibility to address this. If we do not recognize the impact of transphobic violence on the lives of transgender women, we ourselves risk becoming perpetrators through inaction.51

Notes 1 I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Matthews of California State University San Marcos and my Stockton University colleague Tiara Yahnian-Murta for the

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2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

advice, guidance, encouragement, and support they have provided me throughout my academic career. I would also like to thank Dr. Emek Ergun for her support, as well as Dr. John Cox and the other organizers of the First International Conference of the Center of Holocaust, Genocide & Human Rights Studies at UNC Charlotte for the editorial feedback on the drafts of this chapter. Lastly, I wish to show great appreciation and gratitude to Dr. Elisa von JoedenForgey for her assistance during the planning, writing, and editing of this chapter, as well as for providing an invaluable discursive avenue in which to finally include the narratives of transgender women in the field of genocide studies. Though this chapter is only discussing crimes committed by either cisgender men or unknown assailants presumed to be cisgender men, transphobic violence can be, and often is, perpetrated by cisgender women. There are some varying reports of the actual events prior to Quelly’s murder, but out of discretion I chose Brazilian, rather than American sources due to the country of origin of the crime. See Lauro Sampaio, “Rapaz mata travesti e arranca coração da vítima,” Correio Popular, January 22, 2019, accessed December 12, 2019, http://correio.rac.com.br/_conteudo/2019/01/campinas_e_rmc/634644rapaz-mata-travesti-e-arranca-coracao-da-vitima.html. Sampaio. Ibid. Ibid. Leonardo Oliveira, “Travesti é morta e tem coração arrancado em Campinas,” O Liberal, January 21, 2019, accessed December 12, 2019, https://liberal.com.br/ cidades/regiao/travesti-e-morta-e-tem-coracao-arrancado-em-campinas-946851/. Ibid. Ibid. Transgender Murder Monitoring, a project of Transgender Europe, tracks the reported murders of transgender people worldwide. 2018 reports a total of 369 murders of transgender people, an increase of 44 murders from the previous year, and 74 from 2016. See Berredo, Lukas. 2018. “TMM Update: Trans Day Of Remembrance 2018.” Transgender Murder Monitoring. See also Trans Lives Matter’s site: https://tdor.translivesmatter.info/. Elisa von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict,” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (2010): 3. Ibid., 12. It is also important to note that this is not the position of Elisa von JoedenForgey. Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook, “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality,” Gender and Society 23, no. 4 (2009): 453. Daniela Jauk, “Gender Violence Revisited: Lessons from Violent Victimization of Transgender Identified Individuals,” Sexualities 16, no. 7 (October 1, 2013): 810. Carolyn Marshall, “Two Guilty of Murder in Death of a Transgender Teenager,” The New York Times, September 13, 2005, accessed December 12, 2019, https:// www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/us/two-guilty-of-murder-in-death-of-a-transgender-teenager.html. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22, no. 3 (July 19, 2007): 43.

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18 Kelly St. John, “Hayward / Transgender Teen Did Nothing ‘to Deserve Death’ / But 1 Accused Killer Said He Vomited on Finding She Was Male,” SFGate, July 25, 2005, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ HAYWARD-Transgender-teen-did-nothing-to-2620082.php. 19 Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers,” 43. 20 Gwen’s killers had knowingly engaged in sexual activity with Gwen prior to killing her, meaning that they were at minimum moderately aware of her status as a trans person. See Kelly St. John, “Hayward / Witness Tells How She Learned Transgender Teen Was Male,” SFGate, April 21, 2004, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/HAYWARD-Witness-tells-howshe-learned-2765958.php. 21 “Witness Unable to Testify About Transgender Teen’s Slaying,” Los Angeles Times, April 20, 2004, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.latimes.com/ archives/la-xpm-2004-apr-20-me-gwen20-story.html. 22 Von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details,” 5. 23 Laura J. Shepherd and Laura Sjoberg, “Trans- Bodies in/of War(s): Cisprivilege and Contemporary Security Strategy,” Feminist Review 101, no. 101 (2012): 101. 24 Laurel Westbrook and Kristen Schilt, “Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/ Sexuality System,” Gender and Society 28, no. 1 (2014): 34. 25 Von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details,” 2. 26 Ibid., 10. 27 Patricia A. Weitsman, “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and Rwanda,” Human Rights Quarterly; Baltimore 30, no. 3 (August 2008): 570. 28 We are born as the gender we say we are. “Transgender” simply describes the kind of women we are. If society simply accepted our bodies as female bodies, the label “transgender,” I argue, would not necessarily need to exist under the terms of its contemporary definition. 29 Regina Janes, “Beheadings,” Representations, no. 35 (1991): 29. 30 See Federico Navarrete, “Beheadings and Massacres: Andean and Mesoamerican Representations of the Spanish Conquest,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 53/54 (2008): 59–78. 31 Josh Jackman, “Transgender Woman Tortured and Beheaded in Pakistan,” Pink News, October 24, 2017, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2 017/10/24/transgender-woman-tortured-and-beheaded-in-pakistan/. 32 Ibid. 33 “TDOR 2018 Namelist,” Transgender Europe, accessed April 7, 2019, https:// transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-trans-day-of-remembrance-2018/. 34 Sarah A. Harvard, “Trans Rights Activist Hande Kader Was Raped and Burned to Death in Turkey,” Mic, accessed April 7, 2019, accessed December 12, 2019, https://mic.com/articles/152097/trans-rights-activist-hande-kader-was-raped-andburned-to-death-in-turkey. 35 Rossalyn Warren, “A Transgender Woman Was Raped and Set on Fire and People Are Demanding Justice,” BuzzFeed News, August 19, 2016, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rossalynwarren/atransgender-woman-was-raped-and-set-on-fire-and-people-are. 36 “Transgender in Pakistan Set on Fire for Resisting Sexual Assault,” The Times of India, September 9, 2018, accessed December 12, 2019, https://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/transgender-in-pakistan-set-on-fire-for-resisting-sexualassault/articleshow/65742404.cms. 37 Nick Duffy, “Transgender Beauty Queen’s Burnt Body Found in Suspected Hate Crime Murder,” Pink News, July 27, 2016, accessed December 12, 2019, https://

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38

39 40

41 42 43

44 45 46

47

48 49 50 51

www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/07/27/transgender-beauty-queens-burnt-body-foundin-suspected-hate-crime-murder/. “Hallan Carbonizada a La Joven Transexual Paulett González, Reina de Belleza Gay En 2015 de México,” laSexta, July 24, 2016, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.lasexta.com/noticias/sociedad/hallan-carbonizada-joven-transexualpaulett-gonzalez-reina-belleza-gay-2015-mexico_201607245794894a4beb289894 96a414.html. Von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details,” 2. Kelly Weill, “Texts Show Teens Had ‘Everything Planned Out’ to Murder Trans Girl,” The Daily Beast, September 27, 2017, accessed December 12, 2019, https:// www.thedailybeast.com/texts-show-teens-had-everything-planned-out-to-murdertrans-girl. Jarrett Lyons, “Why Is the Brutal Murder of This Trans Teen Not a Hate Crime?,” Salon, September 28, 2017, accessed December 12, 2019, https:// www.salon.com/2017/09/28/ally-lee-steinfeld/. Weill, “Texts Show Teens Had ‘Everything Planned Out’ to Murder Trans Girl.” John Riley, “Missouri Transgender Teen’s Killing Will Not Be Charged as a Hate Crime,” Metro Weekly (blog), September 29, 2017, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.metroweekly.com/2017/09/missouri-transgender-teens-killingwill-not-be-charged-as-a-hate-crime/. Von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details,” 14. David Moshman, “Us and Them: Identity and Genocide,” Identity 7, no. 2 (May 15, 2007): 115–135, https://doi.org/10.1080/15283480701326034. See United Nations General Assembly, “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948. Available here, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3ac0.html United Nations, Treaty Series vol. 78, p. 277. Christina Caron and Karen Zraick, “Transgender Woman’s Murder Is Prosecuted as ‘Feminicide,’ in First for Colombia,” The New York Times, December 18, 2018, accessed December 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/201 8/12/18/world/americas/transgender-woman-shot-colombia-feminicide.html. Ibid. Claudia Garcia-Moreno, Alessandra Guedes, and Wendy Knerr, “Understanding and Addressing Violence Against Women,” ed. Margarita Quintanilla, Heidi Stöckl, and Sarah Ramsay (United Nations World Health Organization, 2012), 1. Von Joeden-Forgey, “The Devil in the Details,” 14. David Valentine, Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007).

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Janes, Regina. “Beheadings.” Representations, no. 35 (1991): 21–51. Jauk, Daniela. “Gender Violence Revisited: Lessons from Violent Victimization of Transgender Identified Individuals.” Sexualities 16, no. 7 (October 1, 2013): 807–825. Joeden-Forgey, Elisa von. “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ and the Assault on the Family in Times of Conflict.” Genocide Studies and Prevention 5, no. 1 (2010): 1–19. Moshman, David. “Us and Them: Identity and Genocide.” Identity 7, no. 2 (May 15, 2007): 115–135. Navarrete, Federico. “Beheadings and Massacres: Andean and Mesoamerican Representations of the Spanish Conquest.” RES: Anthropology and aesthetics, no. 53/54 (Spring-Autumn 2008): 59–78. Schilt, Kristen and Laurel Westbrook. “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality.” Gender and Society 23, no. 4 (2009): 440–464. Shepherd, Laura J., and Laura Sjoberg. “Trans- Bodies in/of War(s): Cisprivilege and Contemporary Security Strategy.” Feminist Review 101, no. 101 (2012): 5–23. Steinberg, Victoria. “A Heat of Passion Offense: Emotions and Bias in ‘Trans Panic’ Mitigation Claims.” Boston College Third World Law Journal 25, no. 2 (May 1, 2005): 499–524. United Nations General Assembly. “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,” December 9, 1948. Valentine, David. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2007. Weitsman, Patricia A. “The Politics of Identity and Sexual Violence: A Review of Bosnia and Rwanda.” Human Rights Quarterly; Baltimore 30, no. 3 (August 2008): 561–578. Westbrook, Laurel, and Kristen Schilt. “Doing Gender, Determining Gender: Transgender People, Gender Panics, and the Maintenance of the Sex/Gender/ Sexuality System.” Gender and Society 28, no. 1 (2014): 32–57.

Online Sources Caron, Christina, and Karen Zraick. “Transgender Woman’s Murder Is Prosecuted as ‘Feminicide,’ in First for Colombia.” The New York Times. December 18, 2018. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/18/world/americas/ transgender-woman-shot-colombia-feminicide.html. Duffy, Nick. “Transgender Beauty Queen’s Burnt Body Found in Suspected Hate Crime Murder.” Pink News. July 27, 2016. Accessed December 12, 2019. https:// www.pinknews.co.uk/2016/07/27/transgender-beauty-queens-burnt-body-foundin-suspected-hate-crime-murder/. “Hallan Carbonizada a La Joven Transexual Paulett González, Reina de Belleza Gay En 2015 de México.” laSexta. July 24, 2016. Accessed December 12, 2019. https:// www.lasexta.com/noticias/sociedad/hallan-carbonizada-joven-transexual-paulett-gonzalez-reina-belleza-gay-2015-mexico_201607245794894a4beb28989496a414.html. Harvard, Sarah A. “Trans Rights Activist Hande Kader Was Raped and Burned to Death in Turkey.” Mic. Accessed April 7, 2019. https://mic.com/articles/152097/ trans-rights-activist-hande-kader-was-raped-and-burned-to-death-in-turkey.

Gendercide: Destruction of transgender body 195 Jackman, Josh. “Transgender Woman Tortured and Beheaded in Pakistan.” Pink News. October 24, 2017. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/1 0/24/transgender-woman-tortured-and-beheaded-in-pakistan/. Lyons, Jarrett. “Why Is the Brutal Murder of This Trans Teen Not a Hate Crime?” Salon, September 28, 2017. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.salon.com/2 017/09/28/ally-lee-steinfeld/. Marshall, Carolyn. “Two Guilty of Murder in Death of a Transgender Teenager.” The New York Times. September 13, 2005. Accessed December 12, 2019. https:// www.nytimes.com/2005/09/13/us/two-guilty-of-murder-in-death-of-a-transgenderteenager.html. Oliveira, Leonardo. “Travesti é morta e tem coração arrancado em Campinas.” O Liberal. January 21, 2019. Accessed December12, 2019. https://liberal.com.br/ cidades/regiao/travesti-e-morta-e-tem-coracao-arrancado-em-campinas-946851/. Riley, John. “Missouri Transgender Teen’s Killing Will Not Be Charged as a Hate Crime.” Metro Weekly (blog). September 29, 2017. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.metroweekly.com/2017/09/missouri-transgender-teens-killing-willnot-be-charged-as-a-hate-crime/. Sampaio, Lauro. “Rapaz mata travesti e arranca coração da vítima.” Correio Popular. January 22, 2019. Accessed December 12, 2019. http://correio.rac.com.br/_ conteudo/2019/01/campinas_e_rmc/634644-rapaz-mata-travesti-e-arranca-coracaoda-vitima.html. St. John, Kelly. “Hayward / Transgender Teen Did Nothing ‘to Deserve Death’ / But 1 Accused Killer Said He Vomited on Finding She Was Male.” SFGate, July 25, 2005. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/ HAYWARD-Transgender-teen-did-nothing-to-2620082.php. St. John, Kelly. “Hayward / Witness Tells How She Learned Transgender Teen Was Male.” SFGate, April 21, 2004. Accessed December 12, 2019. https:// www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/HAYWARD-Witness-tells-how-she-learned-2765 958.php. “TDOR 2018 Namelist.” Transgender Europe. Accessed April 7, 2019. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://transrespect.org/en/tmm-update-trans-day-ofremembrance-2018/. “Transgender in Pakistan Set on Fire for Resisting Sexual Assault.” The Times of India, September 9, 2018. Accessed December 12, 2019. https:// timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/pakistan/transgender-in-pakistan-set-on-firefor-resisting-sexual-assault/articleshow/65742404.cms. Warren, Rossalyn. “A Transgender Woman Was Raped and Set on Fire and People Are Demanding Justice.” BuzzFeed News. August 19, 2016. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rossalynwarren/a-transgenderwoman-was-raped-and-set-on-fire-and-people-are. Weill, Kelly. “Texts Show Teens Had ‘Everything Planned Out’ to Murder Trans Girl.” The Daily Beast. September 27, 2017. Accessed December 12, 2019. https:// www.thedailybeast.com/texts-show-teens-had-everything-planned-out-to-murdertrans-girl. “Witness Unable to Testify About Transgender Teen’s Slaying.” Los Angeles Times. April 20, 2004. Accessed December 12, 2019. https://www.latimes.com/archives/laxpm-2004-apr-20-me-gwen20-story.html.

12 Collective historical trauma and retelling the past: Toward traumainformed transitional justice praxis Jeremy A. Rinker

“However torturous the trauma process, it can allow collectivities to define new forms of moral responsibility and to redirect the course of political action.”1 “Left unattended and unaddressed in most instances of violent social conflict are the manifold problems of reconciling individual and collective trauma with individual and collective justice.”2

For too long trauma and its emotional consequences have been underappreciated in attempts to manage conflict and to bring about justice in times of social transition. The concept of collective historical trauma, as defined further below, provides a key resource in establishing transitional peace, but is often overlooked or avoided because it is seen as causing or perpetuating violent conflict. Post-genocidal trauma is rarely systematically addressed. While awareness of the intergenerational effects of trauma is understood by scholars,3 the full effects of collective historical trauma on a given society are less well—established. This chapter takes an optimistic view of the utility of past collective trauma and foregrounds trauma’s importance for transitional justice theory and practice. Around the world, past genocides and collective traumas have not only been denied but, indeed, erased from history. This erasure works to perpetuate conflict and to maintain cycles of violence while also denying victims’ voices and experiences. In short, collective historical trauma confounds attempts at reconciliation. In arguing for collective truth-telling, dialogue, and narrative sharing about the past, this chapter aspires to open critical discourse on transitional-justice practices that embrace a trauma-informed framework for societal reconciliation. Rather than sidestep or avoid past collective trauma for fear that it will lead to renewed conflict or cause suffering to linger, the objective here is to proactively re-think the social function of trauma in post-conflict transitional justice. Addressing the manifold problems of collective trauma are inseparable from establishing collective justice and, indeed, part and parcel of all lasting liberation, DOI: 10.4324/9781003010708-12

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sustainable work. Failure to address collective historical trauma leaves open opportunities for denial. Historically, traditional transitional justice mechanisms have focused too heavily on managing past historical traumas and provided only limited space for the processing and transforming of that trauma. This chapter grapples to balance the unsavory social realities of the public sharing of collective historical traumas with the unhealthy personal and social impacts of suppressing the human need to tell the truth about the past. As an attempt to not only reconcile parties post-conflict, but to foreground the role that collective historical traumas play in effective transitional justice and social change during what Sandole (2003) calls “manifest conflict processes and aggressive manifest conflict processes,” this chapter outlines what I term “trauma-informed transitional justice practice.”4 More than an international “justice cascade” is needed to effectively address systemic human-rights abuse in conflict.5 Public acknowledgment of past collective historical trauma, and its often unspoken and hidden suffering, is required to realize societal reconciliation. The author’s hope is that the rough outlines of this study serve to engage further academic application of a transitional justice lens in the many diverse cases that would fall under the broad definition of collective historical trauma. Focusing the transitional justice lens toward the ongoing narration of past social violence acts as an important tool against genocide denial. After outlining some of the parameters of what might be termed traumainformed transitional justice praxis, this chapter analyzes two distinct examples of transitional justice practices, broadly defined. I discuss and compare a testimonial therapy project in India and the post-genocide gacaca courts in Rwanda. Both contexts are engaged to explore the complexities of trauma-informed transitional justice. Following episodes of collective trauma, storytelling is critical to both reconciliation and healing. While the case contexts and cultures of these examples are drastically different, each represents a facet of collective historical trauma’s structurally violent possibilities and transformative growth opportunities. Both the experiences of Indian caste oppression and genocidal mass violence expose the fact that the localization and telling of the trauma experience is central to any transitional justice process, yet woefully under-addressed in the literature of these processes. In connecting these examples in comparative perspective the intent is not to simplify or trivialize these unique trauma experiences and collective sequalae, but rather to explore the central role that collective historical trauma plays in any process of transitional justice, genocide denial, and reconciliation. What we already now know about the epigenetics6 and long-term social effects of trauma7 must draw us to question whether the concept of “postconflict” is even a useful explanatory label for those attempting to work in the broad fields of transitional justice and reconciliation. While relatively little academic work has been done, either socially and psychologically, on the protracted legacies of collective historical trauma and its role in

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destabilizing post-conflict societies, much of our human inability to reconcile can be tied directly to traumatic experiences and deep emotional injuries.8 The failure to reckon with past “chosen traumas” will ensure their revival in the future and provide the social space for denial in the present.9 Often transitional justice mechanisms attempt to manage past trauma without allowing it to transform either the collective historical trauma of conflict parties or the identity-based language that parties use to describe the violent events of the past. Collective traumas require community spaces and structures to process change, re-inscribe the past with new meaning, and can empower communities to locally define justice in ways that move toward a shared future. Such work entails a rethinking and retelling of history—a history that often inconveniently challenges the established power structures and rhetoric of powerful elites. More than disempowering and ostracizing those who deny past harms, trauma-informed transitional justice requires overcoming public apathy for the critical reappraisal of accepted tropes of history. Rebranding our past understandings of historical events is seen as a crucial activity in any process of achieving justice and is critical to countering the voices of denial. History, like justice, is never truly blind or dead. To resist denial, both history and justice must be understood to be alive and active. Justice, as always transitional, must find cultural spaces for discussion. Through memorials, truth commissions, community dialogues, human rights activism, community murals, or any number of other creative transitional justice mechanisms, social collectives can not only reframe the past, but re-shape the future. This chapter points to the need to create shared space for cultural and historical engagement. Unfortunately, such spaces, both globally and locally, are limited and are invariably controlled by the dominant discourses and values of our current world economic order. In discussing the climate change fight, Naomi Klein writes: “a great deal of the work of deep social change involves having debates during which new stories can be told to replace the ones that have failed us.”10 Whether environmental justice or post-genocidal justice, dialogue and storytelling are critical for deep social change. Creative means must be found to elicit such deep narrative sharing. The cases outlined below attempt to do this work of deep narrative sharing. While the work of trauma-informed transitional justice is vast, by providing a glimpse into its potential I hope this chapter will encourage scholars in the fields of genocide studies, transitional justice, and human rights to think strategically about collective historical traumas, their social impacts, and generational legacies. After further defining what I mean by collective historical trauma, the chapter launches into a critique of the label “postconflict” as an effective typology for grounding justice. Next, I develop a definition of transitional justice as seen through a conflict transformation lens. This situating and defining is then briefly explained through two diverse global contexts of transitional justice practice. More than mechanisms,

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transitional justice activities fall within a broader context of peacebuilding initiatives. Trauma as a key emotional access point for social change is also a critical means of building justice after violence.

What is collective historical trauma? Collective historical trauma forms the causal center of protracted social conflict.11 While many disciplines, including Anthropology, Psychotherapy and Counseling, and Social Work have attempted to explore the phenomenon of trauma,12 the field of Peace and Conflict Studies has mostly failed to address this important social-psychological variable as a collective phenomenon.13 There are good reasons for this lack of critical attention to trauma’s social dynamics and outcomes. For one, “over the last 100 years [trauma] has become fully psychologized,” which has, in turn, relegated trauma studies primarily to the study of the individual and his/her behaviors.14 Consequently, an interdisciplinary field like Peace and Conflict Studies has assumed trauma as too interior-facing to be understood as a legitimate explanatory phenomenon for social conflict, despite an understanding of trauma as important for the peacebuilding goals of justice and reconciliation.15 In addition, fears of subjective bias—born of a critique of Freudian psychoanalysis—has pushed the field of Peace and Conflict Studies to compensate for its lack of attention to trauma and psychology by focusing primarily on structural violence and human security.16 By exteriorizing conflict dynamics the field of Peace and Conflict Studies has tried to legitimize itself as more empirical and objective than interior-facing fields like psychology or religious studies. But framing conflict in terms that resonate with international relations rather than psychological reasoning has not only turned Peace and Conflict Studies farther away from the importance of the social psychology of trauma, but also quarantined it from the lived realities of people’s direct experiences of all forms of violence. Whether individual events, or the shared stories of shared events, trauma is a critical vector from which to understand and transform social conflict. Trauma provides a reflexive entry point into the “unfettered wilds of raw experience”—what anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom calls the “bard.”17 More than expressions of needs or interests, social conflict involves attitudes and behaviors that are subjective expressions of experience and emotion.18 Collective historical trauma represents a critical vector for specifically analyzing and transforming parties’ attitudes and behaviors. But, alas, I have still not defined it—what exactly is collective historical trauma? The original meaning of “trauma” comes from the Greek word for wound or injury.19 Within the medical model, of course, wounds can be internal or external, but agreement on the meaning of the broad category of trauma remains vague and ill-defined in common parlance. In vernacular discourse trauma has many meanings and could connote an event, a physical harm, a mental injury, and/or a moral injury.20 Like the term “power” or “culture,”

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trauma’s meaning is highly contextual, contested, and, therefore, political. In large part, defining trauma is dependent on who is writing the history and, therefore, who is able to most freely express their “self-suffering story.”21 When the term “collective” is appended to historical trauma an element of the trans-personal and transgenerational reality of trauma as wound or injury is invoked. But what is meant by “collective historical trauma” remains contested in the literature. As Hartmann, et al., state in their discussion of historical trauma in an important 2019 article: Although malleability of the trauma term may have contributed to the concept’s popularity, it also fed a conceptual haze in which multiple historical trauma concepts emerged within divergent programs of research organized around varying ideas of colonialism, wellness, and indigeneity to pursue distinct anticolonial ambitions.22 This is a terrain that not just Peace and Conflict Studies, but also other fields, like traditional psychology, have studied little due to its complexity, variability, and perceived “subjective” social justice orientation. Yet, increasingly, in attempting to understand social conflict, the role of collective historical trauma is being thrust front and center into public discussions of social change. From Black Lives Matter to Indigenous Studies to certain developments in post-genocide Rwanda, the influence of collective historical trauma informs modern scholarship, rights activism, and attempts at justice and reconciliation. Still, while defining social trauma remains elusive and contextual at best and relatively meaningless at worst, the concept of collective historical trauma, in broad parameters, sets an important agent-focused response to genocide denial and effective transitional justice work. Collective historical trauma signals that we as a collective have had both similar experiences of trauma and shared reaction to this trauma, perpetuated over many years, with little relief. Collective historical trauma signals that despite individual coping mechanisms, we, as a collective, will not forget the impacts of our past experiences. Collective historical trauma is more than a simple categorical device used to create a new typology of trauma—it is an action-focused tool for social change, pointing out marginalization, oppression, and historical domination. Collective historical trauma is the grounds upon which genocide denial can build its foundation, or its grave. How collective historical trauma intersects with the internationalist genealogy of transitional justice mechanisms requires much deeper study than this chapter can provide, but the activist objectives in both concepts cannot be overlooked. As a universal construct, collective historical trauma gives voice to the realities envisioned in the UN’s 2005 acceptance of the Right to Protect (R2P).23 Despite the “unresolved tensions between three distinct engagements with the historical trauma concept as a clinical condition, life stressor, and critical discourse,” the concept does have a praxis-based consistency.24 This is a type of trauma that does not necessarily originate from one single

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event, but rather arises out of a long history of a community’s experience with marginalization, violence, and oppression. Different than the medicalized psychosis described in the DSM-V, this trauma presents in collectives in ways that may not be similar to how trauma presents in that groups’ individuals.25 In describing historical trauma Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses (2014) write: “The concept obtains its rhetorical force by consolidating two preexisting constructs: historical oppression and psychological trauma.”26 This consolidation of constructs, having been first envisioned by indigenous health professionals, has, from its origins, “been a complicated negotiation of ideas and values that appears to vacillate between emancipatory idealism (motivating approaches that re-socialize the medical) and pragmatic realism (defaulting to approaches that medicalize the social).”27 Despite this negotiation of values and ideas, the existence of trauma in collectives has been empirically evidenced.28 What a Post-traumatic stress syndrome patient suffers individually, the traumatized society exhibits as a collective response to on-going events. Following a genocide such traumas are more visibly pronounced, but I would argue that collective historical trauma also appears in what we would consider functional capitalist democracies, not just in post-conflict, or “failed,” states.29 Given that collective historical traumas have undoubtedly occurred throughout human history (e.g., the Holocaust, the slave trade, or the destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures), there is some evidence that recollection of violent trauma in conflict situations may be amplified by the central nervous system as a means of making the recollection more salient to the individual.30 Thus, we could infer that there may also be a biological reason for keeping fresh the memory of collective historical trauma within one’s own identity group. Given this possibility it seems reasonable to assume that there is such a phenomenon known as collective historical trauma and that left unattended it could be a key driver of violent and/or destructive social conflict, a transmitter of trauma experience across generations, and a barrier to establishing equity and justice. Whether this driver is seen, or unseen, does not matter. Through cycles of violence,31 a traumatized society becomes hopeless about its future as anything but conflict-ridden, and although the sequalae of any two collective traumas may appear differently in distinctive geo-cultural spaces, their root cause in traumatic experience is assured.32 Still, arguing for the existence of something called collective historical trauma tells us little about either how it works or how the phenomenon interacts in complex society with other social processes like marginalization or, more to the point, with the processes of collective denial.

“Post-conflict,” overcoming of fear, and grounding transitional justice in the lens of conflict transformation Before proceeding to specific case studies of transitional justice practices that creatively address collective historical trauma, the concept of “post-conflict”

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has to be more closely interrogated. When clinical psychologists counsel patients on trauma, they rarely speak of overcoming or forgetting trauma. Trauma sticks with the individual and with collectives, changing the dynamics of their interactions with others and reinforcing cultural norms about both direct and structural violence. Similarly, conflict alters social dynamics and narrative agency.33 This raises the question: is it even possible to speak of post-conflict environments? Conflict is ubiquitous in human society and, like trauma, it is never completely resolved, but is continually changed or transformed. Further, just like trauma, we cannot think of conflict in instrumental terms. Normative constructions like “good” or “bad” are value judgments that are too simplistic and culturally fraught to ground either the theory or practice of transitional justice. Trauma works much like conflict and justice; it is “a concept in the making,” a constantly evolving, but never resolved dynamic idea. Since we can never say it is fully resolved, just transformed, adding post to any of these terms seems reductive.34 Though there is ample literature on the difficult connection between peacebuilding and transitional justice,35 such critiques always seem to assume a post-conflict environment as the starting place for transitional justice. While the concept of “post-conflict” acts to assuage fears that the work of transitional justice may be overcome by the re-emergence of social conflict and violence, such a frame is not useful for developing a traumainformed approach to transitional justice. Conflict and trauma are always present even if obscured, and at times they need to be managed and at other times need to be active resources for change. Often researchers and scholars’ own perceptions of “post-conflict” is constructed by the epistemologies and practice assumptions they bring with them to a practice context. Sarah Kellar phrased it this way: Despite assertions to the contrary, individual and institutional actors in the cultural terrain of peacebuilding seek to quantify “war-torn societies” or “post-conflict environments” as sites of objective knowledge, reifying and locating them geographically, historically, and culturally, without much consideration for the ways in which our active relations and negotiations with these sites is instrumental in producing that knowledge, as much as our notions of intervention or “rehabilitation” are shaped by the knowledges of those actors who occupy this space.36 In short, no context can truly be called post-conflict, even after the cessation of direct violence. Local actors’ experience and knowledge do not remain static and act to influence our own epistemologies as change agents. The fact is, trauma and conflict are future reaching in ways that we barely grasp and often discount. Relatedly, the subset of the peacebuilding field concerned with justice—i.e., transitional justice—has traditionally been too conflict-management focused and, therefore, largely incapable of designing and implementing justice with

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conflict transformation in mind. Once shed of the fear of emotional overspill, transitional justice practice can and must embrace the emotional resonance and legacies of trauma. Collective historical trauma, when central to one’s identity, must find social outlet. Collective historical trauma can lead to what Rothman (1997) calls reflexive reframing—focusing conflict parties on the “why and how” they are in this together.37 But, this requires public, noncompetitive sharing or storytelling in which my collective historical trauma should not take away from your experience, but, rather, enrich it. A transformation-focused transitional justice praxis aims at listening, and can even embrace a sense of wonder, as opposed to suppression of voice and the fears of re-traumatization. Such a rethinking is rare, but necessary for the realization of a trauma-informed transitional justice.

Case one: Agitating caste transformation in India through trauma-informed transitional justice, storytelling, and public testimony If the “hydra-headed” specter of caste oppression is to be overcome, the collective historical traumas of the past centuries must be publicly addressed.38 Not often described in the language of genocide, India’s byzantine caste system is indeed an attempt to exterminate and subjugate entire ethnic and cultural subsections of the India populace. While India is often imagined as a land of peace and religious harmony, the reality is that religious and cultural difference abounds and the potentials for genocide are real and omnipresent.39 One might classify the structural violence of caste oppression as a slow-moving genocide. In the midst of such conflict and collective historical trauma, local practice spaces for trauma awareness and collective sharing hold important potential for transforming identity-based conflicts. While one could say much the same about race relations in the United States, if peacebuilders are willing to allow for the emotional resonance that such space for collective sharing brings along with it, then justice can truly transition and attempts at denial can be exposed. One human rights organization in rural Uttar Pradesh, India is doing such transitional justice work among low-caste marginalized peoples by helping communities to build prosocial resilience to past traumas. Although this organization may not describe its work as transitional justice work per se, the processes they empower are, indeed, a critical bulwark against genocide and its denial. With the aim of empowering local human rights workers in and around Banaras, Uttar Pradesh, the People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) uses the power of storytelling to challenge the elite discourse about caste, ethnicity, and difference in Indian society. Such work not only challenges the powerful elite, but generates confidence and hones skills in speaking out among those suffering under the traumatizing effects of historical marginalization. Simply put, PVCHR’s work aims to reconstruct the grammar of the marginalized in order to awaken an awareness of privilege

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and inequality. In the context of on-going caste conflict, bonded labor, and communalism, PVCHR, a member-based human rights movement began in 1996, works to both advocate for human rights and heal marginalized communities’ traumatic wounds. In working with women, children, Dalits (former untouchables), Adivasi (tribal communities), and Muslims, PVCHR has developed a unique approach to engaging collective historical trauma and harnessing its change potential. Since 2009, PVCHR has partnered with a Danish organization to create what they call “testimonial therapy,” opening public space for both legal testimony and subjective, emotional, and cathartic release from historical trauma. Testimonial therapy brings injustice narratives into the public sphere and opens an important discursive space for grievance to be heard. This can be like a village-level truth commission and PVCHR activist testimonies provide a rich reservoir of narrative data to develop the connection between not only transitional justice and trauma awareness, but also genocide and genocide denial. First developed in India by Lenin Raghuvanshi and Shabana Khan from the PVCHR,40 in collaboration with Inger Agger of The Rehabilitation and Research Center for Victims of Torture (RCTDenmark), the testimonial therapy process is performed over four sessions with a trained PVCHR outreach worker, who, in various stages, works with a marginalized community member to help them share their story of trauma and past suffering. The culmination of the process is the delivery of the testimony in the form of a public ceremony, called an honor ceremony, in the survivor’s home village.41 This public culmination, during which testimonial narrative is read into a public space, is both emotional and collectively cathartic. During fieldwork in 2013, I was privileged to be invited to some of these long, late-evening honor ceremonies. The ceremony process is a village event in which everyone from the village comes out in support of those sharing their stories of torture, bonded labors, and past trauma. Performances of skits, music, and dance are interspersed with awarenessraising about human rights. A community meal is served at the end of the main event, the testimonial reading. As the culmination of a months-long process of narrative exposure therapy, writing, rewriting, and analytically crafting the torture/trauma survivor’s story, the public testimony becomes a central organizing event for the community. But the story does not end with the conclusion of the public ceremony. The life of the trauma story continues in verbal retelling in the community and through “narrative ellipsis”42 builds resiliency. The celebratory nature of the public ceremony leads to not only fond memories, but acts as a means to memorialize trauma as something invested with positive opportunities for the community. In short, the PVCHR testimonial therapy process works to re-humanize the community, allowing local villagers to reflect and rethink their role in what might be termed broadly by outsiders as a process of transitional justice. The retelling of the stories publicly, as well as in written form, works to recraft a community voice and build community resilience.

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In the words of Kwame Anthony Appiah: “We wouldn’t recognize a community as human if it had no stories.”43 By grounding a peacebuilding practice in education about the interrelationship between both past historical harms and current transitional justice agency, PVCHR activists are reviving the voice of long forgotten and marginalized villagers and developing community resistance to official neglect and denial. Building trust through listening to the stories of the marginalized, PVCHR is agitating for change though developing democratic agency and voice. This also combats the denial of years of forced subjugation and humiliation. As such PVCHR is engaged in the work of transitional justice, however incremental it may seem. The space and structures for narrative sharing and dialogue, if actively developed, create a new vehicle for change and challenge the denial of centuries of past atrocities. Based on the simple idea that public acknowledgment of past collective historical trauma is required for societal reconciliation and peace, PVCHR’s agitation for transformation of the caste system is proactive. Through fostering democratic sharing of traumatic atrocity tales the seeds of denial cannot be sewn. Such work to overcome denial of past wrongs and dehumanization is critical to the work of preventing genocide. Reminiscent of local justice process in post-genocide Rwanda, PVCHR’s honor ceremonies represent a foundational practice in the work of trauma-informed transitional justice and overcoming all stages of genocide, including denial.

Case two: The response to mass violence and the state’s attempts to scale local justice in Rwanda Rwanda’s Gacaca system is often cited as the quintessential example of local transitional justice practice. Following the 1994 genocide, the small African country of Rwanda was faced with a huge, ominous problem. How to dispense justice for the victims while holding accountable the many thousands of perpetrators of the mass genocidal violence? Eight hundred thousand souls had perished in just one hundred days between April and July 1994 in a genocide that, perhaps more than any other any modern history, was committed by “ordinary” killers, murdering their neighbors—how does one reconcile with this fact, much less try and create reconciliation out of it? While the international community’s response had been to create the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) by UN Security Council Resolution 955 (November 8, 1994), local leaders soon realized that the ICTR “worked at an excruciating slow pace and at a relatively high cost.”44 Furthermore, the sheer number of perpetrators returning to communities they had harmed posed an internal security threat and generated intense social and political pressure on the Rwandan government to develop a swift and more decentralized approach to justice. Gacaca, a customary system of justice in traditional Rwanda (the term literally mean “small grass”), was officially adopted by the Transitional

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National Assembly on October 12, 2000.45 The Gacaca courts, which completed their work in June 2012,46 were a compromise between traditional conceptions of the Rwandan Gacaca system of justice and the Western legal system. This hybrid approach was a unique experiment in trauma-informed transitional justice at the local level. Though it should be made clear that such a characterization of the Gacaca system as traumainformed is contested, the unique blend of African and European systems of justice represented a creative response to mass violence and genocide denial. While it took time to establish the Gacaca process, assessments of the Gacaca system’s effectiveness, over its roughly twelve years of existence, vary greatly. While giving the individual communities the ultimate voice in dispensing justice in their respective regions, and in some ways furthering the process of national reconciliation, a lack of training and procedural complaints undermined many communities’ sense of justice.47 The ability for victims and perpetrators to share their stories about what happened cannot be underestimated as a positive first order effect of this transitional justice practice. The question is: how to build on this first order effect to improve a next step in the process of justice and reconciliation? Shared trauma stories certainly slow the spread of denial, but, on such a scale, can they transform collective historical trauma into a resource for transitional growth and reconciliation? Early evaluations of the Gacaca local village justice systems, which were initiated in 2001, concluded that they were positive experiences for in most places. They helped move parties toward local reconciliation and give victims greater control than they possessed in more centralized justice processes. By allowing individual communities to face what genocide looked like in their own community it made the denial of genocide impossible (at least at a local level). Still, following the initial international praise for this grassroots justice process, “human rights experts have raised concerns about the competence of the trial judges, the impartiality and independence of the Gacaca courts, the susceptibility of the courts to government influence … the lack of right to defense counsel and of equality of arms between the prosecution and defense.”48 Despite these legalistic concerns and the obvious difficulties of justice on such a wide scale (Gacaca courts operated in over 12,000 communities and tried over 1.2 million cases), the broadened access of justice at the local level certainly had benefits for the Rwandan nation.49 The importance of the mere appearance that justice was being done cannot be overstated. Following the mass violence of the Rwandan genocide, the need for stability and reassurance from the government in charge was critical and the Gacaca system helped in this regard. At the same time, the raw emotions of traumatic loss was often sidelined in the formalized Gacaca process. Though not fully trauma-informed, the Gacaca process was nevertheless a step in the right direction. The Gacaca process allowed victims to be heard and perpetrators to face some public accountability in allowing shame and humiliation to play a critical mediating role.

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Hicks (2011) argues that “the most pernicious reactions to dignity violations is the response.”50 Gacaca courts allowed the shame of perpetrators to be made public, and, at times, to be at least partially processed by the local community. Taken collectively the Gacaca systems had wide reach and impact. In part this was due to state-level support. Local level support is also critical for effective and sustainable change. How better to gain that local support than to see trauma skills and processes as inseparable from the work of transitional justice. While by no means perfect, the Gacaca system of justice provides a cautionary example of what trauma-informed transitional justice could look like. Both cases reflect the importance of local truth-telling in resisting a history of marginalization and the denial of genocide.51

Conclusions: Ways forward for trauma-informed transitional justice and genocide recognition In this chapter I have touched on key aspects of a trauma-informed transitional justice praxis. Following Paulo Freire’s description of praxis, a transitional justice praxis that is trauma-informed would involve the reflection and action of those most directly affected by trauma.52 While justice itself, which is always transitional, presents a liminality that provides opportunity for broad-based social change and reconciliation, it is the shared expression of collective trauma that opens the critical dialogic space for change. In the words of Paulo Freire, “when the situation calls for action, that action will constitute an authentic praxis only if its consequences become the object of critical reflection.”53 Trauma helps integrate theory and practice (i.e., praxis) in transitional justice work that aims for true liberation. Such praxis is critical to resist the inevitable denials of genocide by powerful elites. Because trauma and trauma response are complex social and psychological phenomena, the public voicing and narrating of trauma experience helps collectives reflect and process their emotions and experiences. The potential growth from such processes outweigh the potential, which is real, of re-traumatization. Of course no particular process is assured of success, but the two examples outlined above provide some of the critical elements that would be necessary to ensure that the denial of genocide and past atrocity are never taken seriously. Trauma is the emotional access point for this liminal space of transitional justice. We must not fear trauma, but embrace it by “reviving the mourning process, which has been suspended as a result of traumatic experience and helping it move toward completion.”54 We do this by listening to others’ stories rather than fearing deep, difficult dialogue that may revive a sense of human suffering. I do not argue that retraumatization is not a concern, but that it should not be our primary concern when attempting to transform the state of justice after mass violence, marginalization, or suffering. As a proactive bulwark against denial, narrating trauma is a primary step. At the individual level psychological professionals are clearly needed, but individual therapy should not limit

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those that want, or need, to share collectively. Although the processes and practices possible to achieve a trauma-informed transitional justice are endless and dependent on local context, all require sharing the human experience of trauma and seeing collective similarities within these experiences. Such sharing provides the most direct route to resisting genocide denial and achieving community healing. When seen as a collective, historical, and local process, trauma really “can allow collectivities to define new forms of moral responsibility.”55 How collectivities choose to do this depends on many social and cultural variables and deserves much further research and practitioner attention. Still, transitional justice requires a level of trust between victims and perpetrators, a sense of accountability, and shared understandings of mercy and peace.56 None of these prerequisites are possible without authentic sharing of collective historical traumas. How can we really know the identity of the “Other” in conflict without understanding the collective trauma they carry with them? How can we overcome marginalization with frank discussion of past traumas? In turn, how can the concept of genocide be resisted, and denials overcome, without some awareness and understanding of collective historical trauma?

Notes 1 Jeffery Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012), 30. 2 Leonard Hawes, A New Philosophy of Social Conflict: Mediating Collective Trauma and Transitional Justice (New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), 5. 3 See Vamik Volkan, Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror (Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2004), 48–49. 4 Dennis Sandole, “Typology,” in Conflict: From Analysis to Intervention, eds. Sandra Cheldelin, Daniel Druckman, and Larissa Fast (New York: Continuum Press, 2003), 40. 5 Ellen Lutz and Kathryn Sikkink, “The Justice Cascade: The Evolution and Impacts of Foreign Human Rights Trials in Latin America,” Chicago Journal of International Law 2, no. 1 (2001): 1. See also Kathryne Sikkink, The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011). 6 See in particular: Bessel van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1, no. 5 (1994): 253–265. 7 As an example the work of Eastern Mennonite University’s Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience program, see Caroline Yoder & Elaine Barge, Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience: The Unfolding Story, 2001–2011 (Harrisonburg, VA: Eastern Mennonite University, 2011). 8 As an exception, see Jeremy Rinker and Jerry Lawler, “Trauma as a Collective Disease and Root Cause of Protracted Social Conflict,” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 24, no. 2 (May 2018): 150–164. Also see Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy Of Enduring Injury and Healing (Portland, OR: Joy DeGruy Publications, 2005) and Edwardo

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13

14 15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22

23 24

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Duran and Bonnie Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997). Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 461. See Rinker and Lawler. A.R. Denham, “Rethinking historical trauma: Narratives of Resilience,” Transcultural Psychiatry 45 (2008): 391–414; T. Evans-Campbell, “Historical Trauma in American Indian/Native Alaska Communities: A Multilevel Framework for Exploring Impacts on Individuals, Families, and Communities.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 23 (2008): 316–338; Caroline Yoder, Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security is Threatened (Intercourse, PA: Good Books), 2005. Exceptions to this statement can be found in reading Vamik Volkan and Joseph Montville’s works on collective trauma, history, and memory. See especially Volkan’s Bloodlines and Montville’s “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History in Political Conflict Resolution,” in Identity, Morality, Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict, eds. Rothbart & Korostelina (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 367–391. Afuape Taiwo. Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma: To Have Our Hearts Broken (New York, NY: Routledge Press, 2011), 42. See Hawes, A New Philosophy, and Elizabeth Porter, Connecting Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015). See Stephen Mitchell and Margaret Black, Beyond Freud: A History of Modern Psychanalytic Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Carolyn Nordstrom, “The Bard” in Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, eds. Allise Waterston and Maria D. Vesperi (Malden, MA: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 36. See Johan Galtung, “Introduction: Peace by Peaceful Conflict Transformation—The TRANSCEND approach,” in Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, eds. Charles Webel and Johan Galtung (Abington, Routledge, 2007), 14–32. Taiwo Afuape, Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma: To Have Our Hearts Broken (New York: Routledge Press, 2011), 42. For more on “moral injury” see Rita Nakashima and Gabriella Lettini, Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012); Robert Emmett, Meagher, and Douglas Pryer, eds., War and Moral Injury: A Reader (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018). People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), “Voice of the Voiceless” 1, no. 1 (November 2010). William Hartmann, Dennis Wendt, Rachel Burrage, Andrew Pomerville, and Joseph Gone, “American Indian Historical Trauma: Anticolonial Prescriptions for Healing, Resilience, and Survivance,” American Psychologist 74, no. 1 (2019): 8–9. U.N. General Assembly, A/60/L.1 – 2005 World Summit Outcome, September 15, 2005, accessed April 12, 2019, http://www.globalr2p.org/media/files/wsod_2 005.pdf. Comas-Diaz, L. Hall, G. & Nevill, H. “Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing: Introduction to the Special Issue,” American Psychologist 74, no.1 (2019): 7.

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25 American Psychiatric Association, A. P., Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5®) (American Psychiatric Pub, 2013). 26 Kirmayer, L., Gone, J., and Moses, J. “Rethinking Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (2014): 300. 27 Ibid., 300. 28 See Vamik Volkan, 1998, op. cit., as well as Vamik Volkan, Immigrants and refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, Prejudice, and Border Psychology (London, UK: Karnac, Books, 2017); Bessel Van der Kolk, “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress,” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1 (2004): 253–265.; Edwardo Duran & Bonnie Duran, Native American Postcolonial Psychology (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995). 29 See Rinker and Lawler, forthcoming (Peter Lang Publishers, 2020). 30 S.M. Southwick, C.A. Morgan, III, A.L. Nicolaou, & D.S. Charney, “Consistency of Memory for Combat-Related Traumatic Events in Veterans of Operation Desert Storm,” The American Journal of Psychiatry 154 (1997): 173–177. 31 See Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, “Strategies for Trauma and Resilience: Resources” page, Eastern Mennonite University, accessed May 14, 2019, https:// emu.edu/cjp/star/images/cycles-of-violence.jpg. 32 For further on this argument see Rinker and Lawyer, 2018, op. cit. 33 For more on narrative agency, see: Sara Cobb. Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). 34 Mark Keck & Patrick Sakdapolrak, “What is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward,” Erdkunde 67, no. 1, (2013): 5–19. 35 See for example: Dustin Sharp, “Beyond the Post-Conflict Checklist: Linking Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice through the Lens of Critique,” Chicago Journal of International Law 14, no. 1, Article 6 (2013). 36 Sarah Kellar, “Peacebuilding: The Performance and Politics of Trauma in Northern Iraq,” in The Post-Conflict Environment: Investigation and Critique, D. Monk & J. Mundy, eds. (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014): 77. 37 Jay Rothman. Resolving Identity-based Conflicts in Nations, Organizations, and Communities. (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1997). 38 Lenin Raghuvanshi, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015, accessed October 8, 2017, http:// differenttruths.com/governance/politics/can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicateemerging-facism-in-india/. 39 See Marth Nussbaum. “Genocide in Gujarat: The International Community Looks Away,” Dissent 50, no. 3 (2003):15–23. As a more recent example see the following, accessed March 20, 2020, https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5834 7d04bebafbb1e66df84c/t/5e20d40576484f23e0fbfc93/1579209734481/OnePager_ WhatisCAA.pdf 40 For more information on the inter-institutional approach of PVCHR, see PVCHR, accessed March 20, 2020, http://pvchr.asia/. 41 Lenin Raghuvanshi, Shabanna Khan, and Inger Agger, Giving Voice: Using Testimonial Therapy Intervention in Psychosocial Community Work for Survivors of Torture and Organized Violence—A Manual for Community Workers and Human Rights Defenders (Uttar Pradesh, India: PVCHR, 2008), 12–16. 42 Francesca Polletta. It was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 39. 43 Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 29.

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44 Timothy Longman, “Justice at the Grassroots? Gacaca Trials in Rwanda,” in Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice, N. Roht-Arriaza, and J. Mariezcurrena, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University press, 2006), 208. 45 Ibid., 2006, 210. 46 See BBC News, “Rwandan Gacaca Genocide Courts Finish Work,” June 18, 2012, accessed May 14, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18490348. 47 See Cori Wielenga, “A Comparison of Reconciliation Barometers in South Africa and Rwanda,” in Rethinking Reconciliation: Evidence from South Africa, Lefko-Everett, K., Govender, R., and Foster, D., eds. (Cape Town, SA: HSRC Press, 2017), 56. 48 Timothy Longman, “Justice at the Grassroots? Gacaca Trials in Rwanda,” 213. 49 Human Rights Watch “Justice Compromised: The Legacy of Rwanda’s Community-Based Gacaca Courts,” May 31, 2011, accessed May 14, 2019, https:// www.hrw.org/report/2011/05/31/justice-compromised/legacy-rwandas-communitybased-gacaca-courts. 50 Donna Hicks, Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 141. 51 For more on this in the Rwandan case see: Phillip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We will Be Killed With Our Families: Stores From Rwanda, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999). 52 Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 30th Anniversary Edition, (New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006), 51. 53 Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 66. 54 Joseph Montville. “Justice and the Burdens of History” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, Abu Nimer, M. ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002), 133. 55 Jeffery Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory, 30. 56 John Paul Lederach, Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies (Washington DC: USIP Press, 1997), 29.

Bibliography Publications Afuape, Taiwo. Power, Resistance and Liberation in Therapy with Survivors of Trauma: To Have Our Hearts Broken. New York, NY: Routledge Press, 2011. Alexander, Jeffery. Trauma: A Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006. Cobb, Sara. Speaking of Violence: The Politics and Poetics of Narrative Dynamics in Conflict Resolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Comas-Diaz, Lillian, Gordon Hall, and Helen Neville. “Racial Trauma: Theory, Research, and Healing: Introduction to the Special Issue.” American Psychologist 74, no. 1 (2019): 1–5. DeGruy, Joy. Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing. Portland, OR: Joy DeGruy Publications, 2005. Denham, Aaron R. “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45, no. 3 (September 2008): 391–414.

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Duran, Eduardo, and Bonnie Duran. Native American Postcolonial Psychology. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995. Evans-Campbell, Teresa. “Historical Trauma in American Indian/Native Alaska Communities: A Multilevel Framework for Exploring Impacts on Individuals, Families, and Communities.” Journal of Interpersonal Violence 23, no. 3 (March 2008): 316–338. Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum International Publishing, 2006. Galtung, Johan. “Introduction: Peace by Peaceful Conflict Transformation - The TRANSEND Approach.” In Handbook of Peace and Conflict Studies, edited by Charles Webel and Johan Galtung, 14–32. New York: Routledge, 2007. Gourevitch, Phillip. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Hartmann, William, Dennis Wendt, Rachel Burrage, Andrew Pomerville, and Joseph Gone, “American Indian Historical Trauma: Anticolonial Prescriptions for Healing, Resilience, and Survivance.” American Psychologist 74, no. 1 (2019): 6–19. Hawes, Leonard, A New Philosophy of Social Conflict: Mediating Collective Trauma and Transitional Justice. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Hicks, Donna. Dignity: Its Essential Role in Resolving Conflict. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Keck, Mark, and Patrick Sakdapolrak. “What is Social Resilience? Lessons Learned and Ways Forward.” Erdkunde 67, no. 1 (January–March 2013): 5–19. Kellar, Sarah. “Peacebuilding: The Performance and Politics of Trauma in Northern Iraq.” In The Post-Conflict Environment: Investigation and Critique, edited by Daniel B. Monk and Jacob Mundy, 68–102. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2014. Kirmayer, Laurence, Joseph Gone, and Joshua Moses. “Rethinking Historical Trauma” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (June 2014): 299–319. Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism Versus the Climate. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014. Lederach, John Paul. Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies. Washington DC: USIP Press, 1997. Longman, Timothy. “Justice at the Grassroots? Gacaca Trials in Rwanda.” In Transitional Justice in the Twenty-First Century: Beyond Truth versus Justice, edited by Naomi Roht-Acrriaza and Javier Mariezcurrena, 206–228. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Lutz, Ellen, and Kathryn Sikkink, “The Justice Cascade: The Evolution and Impacts of Foreign Human Rights Trails in Latin America.” Chicago Journal of International Law 2, no. 1 (2001): 1–35. Meagher, Robert E., and Douglas Pryer. War and Moral Injury: A Reader. Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018. Mitchell, Stephen, and Margaret Black. Beyond Freud: A History of Modern Psychanalytic Thought. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1995. Montville, Joseph. “Justice and the Burdens of History.” In Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, edited by Mohammed Abu Nimer, 129–144 Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2002. Montville, Joseph. “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History in Political Conflict Resolution.” In Identity, Morality, Threat: Studies in Violent

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Conflict, edited by Daniel Rothbart and Karina Korostelina, 367–392. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006. Nakashima, Rita, and Gabriella Lettini. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury After War. Boston: Beacon Press, 2012. Nordstrom, Carolyn. “The Bard.” In Anthropology Off the Shelf: Anthropologists on Writing, edited by Alisse Waterston and Maria Vesperi. 35–45. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. Nussbaum, Martha. “Genocide in Gujarat: The International Community Looks Away.” Dissent, 50, no. 3 (2003): 15–23. People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR), “Voice of the Voiceless” 1, 1 (November 2010). Polletta, Francesca. It was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006. Porter, Elizabeth. Connecting Peace, Justice, and Reconciliation. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2015. Raghuvanshi, Lenin, Shabanna Khan, and Inger Agger, Giving Voice: Using Testimonial Therapy Intervention in Psychosocial Community Work for Survivors of Torture and Organized Violence—A Manual for Community Workers and Human Rights Defenders. Uttar Pradesh, India: PVCHR, 2008. Rinker, Jeremy. “Collective Trauma and Narrative Harmony: Mapping the Legacy of Trauma and Displacement in Post Conflict Peacebuilding.” In Transformative Harmony, edited by Ananta Kumar Giri, 589–614. New Delhi: Studera Press, 2019. Rinker, Jeremy, and Jerry Lawler. “Trauma as a Collective Disease and Root Cause of Protracted Social Conflict.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology 24, no. 2 (May 2018): 150–164. Rothman, Jay. Resolving Identity-based Conflicts in Nations, Organizations, and Communities. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 1997. Sandole, Dennis. “Typology.” In Conflict: From Analysis to Intervention, edited by Sandra Cheldelin, Daniel Druckman, and Larissa Fast, 39–54. New York: Continuum Press, 2003. Sharp, Dustin N. “Beyond the Post-Conflict Checklist: Linking Peacebuilding and Transitional Justice through the Lens of Critique.” Chicago Journal of International Law 14, no. 1 (Summer 2013): 165–196. Sikkink, Kathryne. The Justice Cascade: How Human Rights Prosecutions are Changing World Politics. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2011. Southwick, Steven, Andrew Morgan, Andreas Nicolaou, and Dennis Charney. “Consistency of Memory for Combat-Related Traumatic Events in Veterans of Operation Desert Storm.” The American Journal of Psychiatry 154, no. 2 (February 1997): 173–177. Van der Kolk, Bessel. “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress.” Harvard Review of Psychiatry 1, no. 5 (January/February 2004): 253–265. Volkan, Vamik. Blind Trust: Large Groups and Their Leaders in Times of Crisis and Terror. Charlottesville, VA: Pitchstone Publishing, 2004. Volkan, Vamik. Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997.

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Volkan, Vamik. Immigrants and Refugees: Trauma, Perennial Mourning, Prejudice, and Border Psychology. London, UK: Karnac, Books, 2017. Wielenga, Cori. “A Comparison of Reconciliation Barometers in South Africa and Rwanda.” In Rethinking Reconciliation: Evidence from South Africa, edited by Kate Lefko-Everett, Rajen Govender, and Don Foster, D., 45–61. Cape Town, SA: HSRC Press, 2017. Yoder, Caroline. Little Book of Trauma Healing: When Violence Strikes and Community Security is Threatened. Intercourse, PA.: Good Books, 2005. Yoder, Caroline and Elaine Barge. Strategies for Trauma Awareness and Resilience: The Unfolding Story, 2001–2011. Harrisonburg, VA: Eastern Mennonite University, 2011.

Online Sources Eastern Mennonite University’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding, Strategies for Trauma and Resilience Resources page, “Cycles of Violence.” Accessed May 14, 2019. https://emu.edu/cjp/star/images/cycles-of-violence.jpg “Justice Compromised: The Legacy of Rwanda’s Community-Based Gacaca Courts.” Human Rights Watch, May 31, 2011. Accessed May 14, 2019. https:// www.hrw.org/report/2011/05/31/justice-compromised/legacy-rwandas-community-based-gacaca-courts Raghuvanshi, Lenin, “Can the Neo-Dalit Movement Eradicate Emerging Fascism in India?” Different Truths, November 24, 2015. Accessed October 8, 2017.http:// differenttruths.com/governance/politics/can-the-neo-dalit-movement-eradicateemerging-facism-in-india “Rwandan Gacaca Genocide Courts Finish Work.” BBC News. June 18, 2012. Accessed May 14, 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-18490348 Square Space One Pager on the CAA. Accessed on March 20, 2020. Accessed May 14, 2019. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58347d04bebafbb1e66df84c/t/5e20d405 76484f23e0fbfc93/1579209734481/OnePager_WhatisCAA.pdf U.N. General Assembly, A/60/L.1 – 2005 World Summit Outcome, September 15, 2005. Accessed April 12, 2019.http://www.globalr2p.org/media/files/wsod_2005.pdf

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures; page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

A Adana massacre (in April 1909) 171–172 Adichie, C. 116 Akçam, T. 166 Aleksandrov, G. 64–65 American Indian category 135 American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 138 Andrićgrad 104–105 animism, as behavior 54, 59n34, n36, n38 animistic denials 53–55 animist thinking 54, 59n34, n37 An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States 132 anthropology, in denial study 55–56 anti-Semitism 36, 66, 69; Ukrainian 30, 34, 35, 37; Soviet 74; violence 29 anti-witchcraft violence 54, 59n40 Anzulovic, B. 124 Appiah, K. A. 205 Arad,Y. 67 Ararat (2002) 177 Armenian genocide: Centennial, songs for 174; commemoration in April 2015 164; fight for recognition of 166, 170; German Bundestag 179n11; in headlines, personalities 163–164; identity presentation/construction 165–166; Intelligence Report 4; international, and internal audiences, music for 169, 177–179; Lewis, Bernard 25n9; mass killings in 19151923 165; music reflecting, thematic categories 169–170; Ottoman Empire,

genocidal actions 165–166; Perinçek, denial 163–164; “P.L.U.C.K.” and “Holy Mountains” songs 177; recognition, efforts 164, 166–167, 169, 177–178; songs, to narrate stories 170 (see also folk songs; see also modern songs); state-sponsored, denialist campaign 148; Turkey’s denial of 3–4, 163–164, 166; Turkish narrative of 166; United States, stand 166; Uruguay in 1965, recognized 166; victim blaming strategy 4; “Wake Up the Soul” tour 177; “Yes, It’s Genocide!” song 177 Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute Foundation in 1995 164 art: to educate new generations 168–171, 174 Article 2 of the 1948 Genocide Convention 133, 189 Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust 3 authorization 118–119 Azov Battalion 29, 35–36 B Babi Yar tragedy 68, 73; Evtushenko’s 1961 poem 72 Balakian, P. 166, 179n12 Banda Islands; see also Coen, J. P.: brutal conquest 79, 87–90; Indigenous peoples 85–86, 89–90 Bandera, S. 31, 35–36 Battle of Kosovo 1389, myth 115 Baudrillard, J. 15; dominant view/reality

216

Index

16; epistemic reality, characterization 15; hyperreality state 15–17; image/ representation 15–16; phases of the image 16; representation and reality, relationship 16 Baum, L. F. 16 Bayens, H. 81 Belleau, J.-P. 7 Belorussian Front military committees 71 Benjamin, W. 52–53 Bikindi, S. 168 The Black Book 66, 70 Black Lives Matter 200 Bleich,Yaakov Dov (Chief Rabbi) 37 Blic (Serbian web portal) 102 Bloxham, D. 2 Bosnia: Bosniaks othering, into Turks 1, 109n1; conflict framing, as civil war 115, 118; ethnic cleansing in 117–118; formation of accounts 116; ICTY/ Dayton interventions by 117–118, 120, 123, 125; ideology of dehumanization 115–117; master script, for accounts 115–116; Milosevic role 115; postconflict order in 124 Bosnian genocide 1, 5, 7–8, 99–100, 108, 119; see also Republika Srpska; triumphalism; continuum 113, 124–125 (see also Continuum of Denial ); dehumanization ideology 115; genocidaires, celebrated 108; genocidal rape 187; mass atrocities, triumphalist treatment 100, 108, 113 Bouchereau, M. 50, 58n22 bounded denial 119, 121; arrests, and admissions 120; power influence 119–120 Bousquet, R. 47 Boyajian, L. 165 Bratunac 99, 119 Brooklyn Historical Society 84 Brown, H. M. 8–9 Budak: church, as provocation 106–107; mass grave 107–108 Burns, K. 5 Butler, R. 118 bystanders, refers 46 C California 134 Cambodia 47 Cantorovich, I. 33 Caplan, G. 150, 158n17

Cardinale, C. 170 caste transformation in India 203–205 The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports 138 Central Committee of the Communist Party (USSR) 66 Charny, I. 5, 7, 22, 113 Chomsky, N. 7, 149, 157n4 Churkin,V. I. 105 cisgender, refers to 184, 187 Coen, J. P. 79; see also New Netherland memory culture; conquest of Banda 86; critical view of 87; founding father of the Dutch Empire 79; genocidal campaign 79; in history schoolbooks 86–88; honors, and biographies 87–89; positive memory of 86–87; statues, public unveiling/controversy over 79, 86–87, 89 Cohen, S. 4, 7, 114–115, 121 Colenbrander, H. P. 87 Colijn, H. 87 collective historical trauma 196, 197–198, 203; concept of 196; defined 199–201; human history 201; public acknowledgment 197, 205; PVCHR approach 204–205; reflexive reframing 203; role in transitional justice 196–197; storytelling, critical 197 collective memory cultures 79 Conference, in Charlotte, North Carolina (April 2019) 1 Congolese genocide 154–155 consolidation process 19–21 A Continent for the Taking: The Tragedy and Hope of Africa (2004) 151 Continuum of Denial 8; basic premise 113; bounded 113, 119–121; dehumanization as 113, 114; embedded 113, 122–123; emergent 113, 117; forgetting as 113, 123–124; identifying changing denial strategies 124; interpretive 113, 121–122 “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” 1 Courts of Indian Offenses, 1883 136 critical antidenialism 14 D Dallaire, R. 151 Dancing in the Glory of Monsters (2011) (Stearns’s) 151

Index 217 Danieli, Y. 168 Daredevils of Sasun, poem 173 Das, V. 46 Dayton agreement 120, 123 DDM see Memory’s Duty (Devoir de Mémoire) Death of a City (The Pianist) 6 dehumanization, as denial: atrocities, manipulation of 115; conflict in Bosnia 115; denial account 117; derogatory labels usage 115–116; heroic religious crusade 116; ideology, false master script 114–120, 122, 124; indifference state 117; individual speech acts 114, 116 The Democratic Republic of the Congo 148, 153; Congolese genocide, denial 155; Heart of Darkness 155–156; Map of the First Congo War 153; RPF/ AFDL’s genocide of the camps 153–154, 156, 157n13; U.N. Mapping Report on 150, 154, 157n8; victims, large number 154–155 denialist campaigns 13; leftist scholars, and critics 149, 155–156, 158n22; Rwandan case 148–149; statesponsored/freelance 7–8, 148, 156n1 denials 4–5, 39; anthropology in study 55–56; anticipatory denial 11; bystanders 46; dissociation as form of 53; as function of universal tendencies 14; in general 12; Halilovich’s argument 108–109; history of 3; implications 24; as intimidation 12; of Jewish victimhood 72–74; method to challenge 140; as moral discourse 47–49; music, to tell stories/transfer memories 167–169; by perpetrator groups 11; physical acts of 119; planning to 118; reality 6; rhetorical strategy 19; rhetoric and reality 13–17; rights, explicit 17; self-censorship and 45, 46, 48, 50; survivors, emotional consequences 5–6; verbal strategies 117–118 denier, cognitive structure 113 Descola, P. 53 destruction: aspects of 19; and control 18 “The Devil in the Details: ‘Life Force Atrocities’ (article, JoedenForgey’s) 186

dissociation 52–53 Doctor’s Plot 74 Dodik, M. 101, 105 double-genocide thesis 149 Dunbar-Ortiz, R. 132 Dutch-American relations 81–82 Dutch East India Company 78–79; violent conquest of Banda 79, 88, 89 Dutch Golden Age 78, 87, 88, 90; Dutch-Indigenous relations during 79 Dutch-Indigenous relations 79, 80–81, 82, 83, 84; massacres of Algonquians 78, 83 Dutch memory culture 80; see also New Netherland memory culture Dutch nationalism 80 The Dutch Overseas (TV series) 88 Duvalier, F. 7, 45; crimes of 46 Duvalier, J.-C. 49 Duvalier regime 45–47, 48; Bousquet, Rosalie role 47, 57n12; connections, victims/notorious enforcers 50, 51; DDM 46–50, 53, 56n7; denial, themes and beliefs 47–48; disassociation, victim’s suffering 52–53; evasion, from schools curriculum 47; interviews 45–46; large-scale massacre 50, 58n22; massacres narratives, victims’ guilt 54–55; most brutal in Haitian history 45; perpetrators, lack of public shame 47, 57n11; public interest in 46–47, 57n16; Romain, Franck 47; social ethics, and denial 45, 48–49, 57n18; victims recognition, presidents refusal 47, 57n9; violence and cruelty 46–47 Dyck, K. 6 E Ehrenburg, I. 66, 70 Elements of Indigenous Style 140, 144n57 embedded denial: de-memorialization 122–123; glorification 122; institutionalized 123 emergent denial: bureaucratization, of killing 118; dehumanizing ideology 117; directives 118–119; false record of events 118; physical evidence, destruction 119; tacit encouragement 119; verbal strategies 117 equivalence accounts 121–122 Erdogan, R. T. (President) 12, 25n5, 164, 167

218

Index

Erlinder, P. 149 Esopus War 85 ethnic cleansing: attempted 23, 62; celebration of 7, 100; Coen’s role in 86; mass atrocities, glorification 100; Prijedor and Višegrad, in Bosnia 117, 120; war criminals, rehabilitation 100–101 European Renaissance 105, 110n22 Eurovision song contest, 2015 177–178 Eve Tuck (Unangax) 131 Extraordinary State Commission (USSR) 64–67, 71–73 F Fein, H. 58n27, 118 First Nations Development Institute 131 folk songs 174, 181n33, n34; Adanayi Voghby 172–173; in arevmtdahayern language 170; Dle Yaman 170–171; Hasnink Sasun 173–174, 181n38; prohibition 180n32; Qele Lao 171–172 Forges, A. D. 151, 157n9 forgetting, as denial 123–124 Foucault, M. 18 Fourth Russell Tribunal 80, 91n10 freelance-denialist enterprise 148 Frein, E. 108 Freire, P. 207 French, H. 151 G Gacaca system of justice 205–207 gender-variant individuals 8–9 genealogical tree 50, 51 Genealogy band 177–178 genocide: ability to commit/deny 18; aims at destruction 19; Article II defines 2; authorization, methods 118–119; bureaucratization, killing process of 118; celebrations, through memorials 7, 100, 104 (see also triumphalism consolidation 6, 19–21; crime of identity 189; cultural 136; dehumanization 21–22, 114; de-memorialization 122–123; denials of (see denials); destructive effects of 19; direct acts of 20–21; famine, Stalin’s 6, 11, 30–31; gendered nature of 138; gender-variant people 8–9, 184 (see also transphobic violence); glorification of 122; Indigenous 78, 83,

86; memory 39; MMIWG epidemic 138–139; public memory of 29; scholars prominent 151, 154; social media role 105; societal ethics/morals, preventing 52, 58n27; Stanton’s model 21–24; -themed songs 169 Genocide Convention 1948 118, 133 Genocide Remembrance Day in Armenia 181n40 Geronimo 83 Göçek, F. M. 11, 20 Gourevitch, P. 151 Great Deportation 6 Great Lakes region of Africa 8 Great Patriotic War 62 Great Terror 31 Grigorian, H. 165 Grossman, V. 66, 70 Güler, A. 170 H Haaretz 34–35, 37, 38 Haefeli, E. 83 The Hague 101, 102, 105, 109n4 Haiti: kinship morality, social webs 49, 58n21; postcolonial history 52; social/ public life, aspects 50–52 Halilovich, H. 100, 108, 123 Harkov, L. 33–34 Hartmann, W. 200 the Haudenosaunee 81, 82, 84, 90 Hendrick, the Dutch Indian (Mastenbroek’s) 85 Herman, E. S. 121, 149 Herzfeld, S. 34–35 Hicks, D. 207 Himmler, H. 62 Hirsch, F. 71 Hitler, A. 62–63, 65 Holiday, B. 168 Holocaust 7, 29, 30, 69, 201; see also Nazis; Jewish 133, 148; memory 29–30; proper memorialization 39; Ukrainians’ complex role 29–30; United States and Europe, denial 3, 10n9 Holodomor 11, 29, 30, 39; death by hunger 30–31; denial 32–33, 35; Haaretz, piece from 34–35; Harkov’s article 33–34; importance for Ukrainians 6, 32–33; interrelated, with Holocaust 7; perception of 33; proper memorialization 39; Soviet

Index 219 government role 32; Zuroff’s view 32–33 Holodomor Memorial Museum in Kyiv 32, 34 Holodomor Remembrance Day 33 Hudson, H., celebrations, 2009 79, 82, 83, 90 Hudson River 78, 84 human rights, concept 17–18 hyperreality state 15–17 I I Am Not Your Negro (Baldwin’s and Peck’s) 52 identities: development, positive/ negative 164; national and ethnic 167 Imagine (Lennon’s) 168 Indian Child Welfare Act 138 The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 137 Indigenous genocide denial 131; analysis, as settler-colonial action 141 (see also settler colonialism); cultural appropriation 135–136; cultural genocide 132; issue of intent, to avoid recognition 133; Orange veiw’s 141; refusal to acknowledge, school curricula in 134; selective genocide denial methods 132, 134; settlercolonial criteria 132; tribal nations, forced removal 135 Indigenous peoples 131, 141n1; see also tribal nations; actions enforced against 133; catastrophes characterization, genocide 132; collaboration 140–141; colonial violence against 7; cultural genocide of 136; culture refers to 132; destructions 124; disappearance 134; Dutch society 7; Elements of Indigenous Style (Younging’s) 140, 144n57; European holocaust of 133; external colonial modes 131; forced removal 137; genocide, in U.S. public education 8, 132; history 131, 141n1; internal modes refer to 131–132; invisibility issue 133–134; Kill the Indian, save the man philosophy 136; recognition processes 137; settler state’s genocidal efforts 132, 135–139, 141; tribal warfare accounts 134 Indigenous scholarly works 140 Inger Agger of The Rehabilitation and

Research Center for Victims of Torture (RCT-Denmark) 204 In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (2018)? (Rever’s) 151 institutionalized denial 123 intent 2 International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) 6, 155 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 149, 168, 205 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) 8, 100–101, 113, 120, 123 interpretive denial: equivalence accounts 121–122; relativism 121; revisionist ideas 121 Izetbegović, A. 103 J Jean-Robert, T. 54–55 The Jerusalem Post 32, 33, 38 Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee (JAC) 66, 74 Jewish memory organizations 30 Jewish victimhood, denial of 72–74 Joeden-Forgey, E. von 8, 186 Johnstone, D. 121, 157n4 Jones, A. 8, 133, 150 Journal of Historical Review 10n9 K Kagame, P. (President) 148, 156 Kaiser, C. 117 Karadžić, R. 7, 99, 102, 115 Kellar, S. 202 Khan, S. 204 Kharkov trial 65 Khmelnytsky, B. 29 Khmer Rouge 19 Khrushchev, N. 66, 73 Kiev murder 73 Kill Anything That Moves (Turse’s) 4–5 kinship morality 46, 49, 52 Kirmayer, L. 201 Klein, N. 198 Klokhuis (“Apple-core”) 83 Knindže, B. M. 103 The Komité Pa Bliyé (Never Forget Committee) 46 Korczak, J. 6 Kravchuk, L. 73

220

Index

Kravica warehouse (massacre site, July 13, 1995) 105, 106, 122–123 Kuperman, A. 151 Kusturica, E. 104–105, 110n22 L Lang, J. 114 The Lark Farm (2007) 177 Latour, B. 53 laughter, as dissociation 52–53 Leave None to Tell the Story (Forges’s) 151, 157n9 Lemarchand, R. 151, 154 Lennon, J. 168 life force atrocities: concept 8; conversion rituals 188, 189; explicit depictions of violence 184; genocidal logic 186; inversion rituals 188; Joeden-Forgey’s article 186, 187; murders, in context of 190 (see also transgender women) Literaturnaia gazeta 72 Little, A. 115 Living Marxism 121 Lukić, M. 124 Lyons, O. 80–81, 84 M Madurodam 84–85; see also New Netherland memory culture Mahicanituk 78 The Man by the Shore (Peck’s) 52 Marley, B. 168 Massey, S. 7–8 Mayrig (1991) 170 Mazepa, I. 29 McDonald, J. T. 82 media, and social media 46, 101–102, 103, 105–106, 108 Mehmedović, H. 106 Mein Kampf 63 memorial-triumphalism: Andrićgrad town 104–105; churches and crosses, construction 106–107; concentration camp 104; Eastern Sarajevo, monument in 105; perpetrators memorialization 104; Prijedor town 104; Srebrenica Genocide Memorial 107–108 memorycide 124 memory-identity work 167 Memory’s Duty (Devoir de Mémoire)

46–50, 53, 56n7; see also Duvalier regime Meuwese, M. 7 Mikhoels, S. 66 Mill, J. S. 14 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG) epidemic 8, 132; see also tribal nations; connect to settler-colonial structures 138; gendered colonial violence 139; programs and policies, as genocidal 138–139, 141; reports, in Canada, and U.S. 138–139 Mitterrand, F. (President) 149, 156n3 Mladić, D. 102 Mladić, R. 7, 99, 102, 119 Mladići (sitcom) 102 modern songs 177; Aprelu April (April is for Living) 174, 176–177, 181n40; Kyanq million u Kes (A Million and a Half Lives) 174–175, 181n39, n41 Molotov, V.: atrocities/crimes, of German forces 63–64; diplomatic note 63, 68; Extraordinary State Commissions 64–67; working papers, Jews extermination 68–70 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 72 Momčilo, L. 103 monuments, genocide celebration see memorial-triumphalism Mookerjea-Leonard, D. 173 moral disengagement idea 114 Moses, A. D. 2 Moses, J. 201 Moshman, D. 189 “The Mountain Wreath” (1847) 115 music, and songs: anti-Muslim nationalistic songs 103; in conflict situations 168; Da zna bula 103; to educate generations 168, 179; experiences/stories sharing 167; folk (see folk songs); to forge, collective identity 8, 167–169, 179; modern ( see modern songs ); Ne volim te Alija, zato sto si balija 103; Od Bihaća do Petrova sela 103; Oh, Pazar, New Vukovar, Oh Sjenica, New Srebrenica 104; role in maitaining identities 167; in Rwanda, to spread hatred/ polarization 168; thematic categories 169–170; triumphalism displays through 102–103; war songs 103

Index 221 N Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of 1991–1994 181n38 The National Crime Information Center reports 138 Nazis 19, 34; actions of 62–63; crimes against Soviet Jewry 62, 68, 70; crimes investigation 65–67; heinous transgressions in Russia, evidence 63–64; massacres at Babi Yar 68–69, 73; Soviet awareness, Jews’ extermination 68–69; “working toward the Fuhrer” 68, 75n28 Netherlands Centre for Indigenous Peoples 84 Newmark, Kevin 53 New Netherland memory culture 78, 79–85; before 2009 80–81; from 2009 to 2017 82–85; of Coen and the Banda Islands 85–89; Dutch colonialism, impact on Indigenous peoples 78–79, 81, 89; exhibits and events 80–81, 84–85; Hudson commemorations 79, 82–83, 90; portrayal of Indigenous peoples 83–84; statue of Stuyvesant 81 Nieuw Amsterdam 85 Nikolić, M. 119 Nordstrom, C. 199 North America: Dutch colonies in 79–80; Henry Hudson’s voyage to 78, 82; Indigenous peoples, colonial impact 80, 90; public campaign, Haudenosaunee 84; Western settler colonies of 156n1 Novick, L. 5 Nuremberg trial 64, 71, 73 O Oblast, I.-F. 34 Ogiienko, V. 32, 35, 37 Omarska, concentration camps 104, 117 Orange, T. 141 Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) 73 Oriol, M. 50, 59n40 Osborn, M. R. 34 The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies 2 P Parent, G. 5 pathophobia 45, 52–53, 58n32 Peace and Conflict Studies 199–200

Peck, R. 52, 53, 58n28 People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) 203–205; honor ceremony 204–205; testimonial therapy process 204; transitional justice work 203–205 Perinçek, D. 163 perpetrator groups 11–12, 19–20 Peterson, D. Petrašević, P. 102, 109n13 Pilger, J. 149, 157n4 Plato 17 Plavšić, B. 101 The Politics of Genocide (2010) 149 Poroshenko, P. (President) 37, 73 Porter, T. E. 7 positive identity 164 post-conflict environment 201–202 post-genocidal trauma 196 post-traumatic stress syndrome 201 Potok, M. 4 Pravda 65, 69, 70 Pravyy Sektor/Bandera flag 35, 36 praxis, description 207 Pres, T. D. 14 Prijedor 104, 117 Princeton university 14, 25n9 The Promise (2016) 177 Prunier, G. 151, 154, 157n13 Putin, V. (President) 105 R Račak massacre 149 racial struggle (Rassenkampf ), East 62 Raghuvanshi, L. 204 reality and representation 16 Reclaiming Native Truth, 2018 131, 133 Red Army: committees assigned 67, 75n23; eyewitness testimony, recorded 67–68; liberation of extermination camps 70–72 Redemption Song (Marley’s) 168 Régala, W. 49 Remove Kebab meme 103 Republic of Turkey: 1915 genocide 12, 25n5; Battle of Gallipoli, commemoration 164; denial of Armenian genocide 163–164, 166; geopolitical factors, refugee crisis 166–167 Republika Srpska 99–100; denialist and triumphalist rhetoric 105–106, 113; perpetrators memorialization 104;

222

Index

Plavšić’s celebration 101; The Trnopolje camp 104; war criminals, rehabilitation 100–101 Rever, J. 151–152, 158n16 Reyntjens, F. 151, 154 right of death 18 Right to Protect (R2P) 200 Rinker, J. 9 ritual violence 186 Rohatyn Jewish cemetery, photograph 34 Romain, F. 47, 50 Romein, J. 87 Romein-Verschoor, A. 87 Roosevelt, F. 62, 64 Rothman, J. 203 Rwandan Gacaca system of justice 197, 205–207 Rwandan genocide, 1994 12, 148, 155, 158n21; France’s role in 149, 156n3; Herman’s denialist claims 149; Hutu Power regime 152, 156; leftist, deniers 149–150, 155–156, 158n22; parallels with Bangladesh, killings 152; The Politics of Genocide (2010) 149 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) 148, 156n1; Alison Des Forges’s report 151; campaign, to conceal and deny atrocities 156; genocide in Congo 150, 153–154; Gourevitch’s book 151; Hutu survivor, memoir 151; Kagame regime 150–151; mass atrocities recognition, as genocide 151–153; massive slaughter in, Democratic Republic of the Congo 153–155; Mobutu regime, toppling 151; Rever’s book about 151–152; RPF/AFDL, Hutu refugees slaughter 151, 154–155, 157n13; Shake Hands with the Devil (2003), memoir 151; U.N. Mapping Report, on the DR Congo 150, 153, 154, 157n8; violence and repression 150–151 S Saint-Exupéry, P. de 156n3 Sandole, D. 197 SANU Memorandum of Serb intellectuals of 1986 115 Schulte-Nordholt, J.W. 80 Scorpions unit 109n13, 116 Sektor, P. 36

selective genocide denial methods 132, 134, 140–141 self-censorship 46 Selimovic, J. M. 124 Sells, M. 116 Semberac, M. 103 Service, R. 74 settler colonialism: actions 132; biopolitical authority 131, 137; cultural appropriation 135–136; documented policies of genocide 133; encompasses 131; genocide denial, internal variant of 132; internal modes, refers to 131–132; MMIWG epidemic connection 138; ongoing, policies and practices 138–140; total appropriation 131; tribal nations recognition, refusal to 136–138 Shake Hands with the Devil (2003, memoir) 151 Sharif, O. 170 Shepherd, L. 187 Shostakovich, D. 72 Silber, L. 115 Simon, Sir J. 64 single story (Adichie) 116 Sjoberg, L. 187 Sloterdijk, P. 54 Snijders, E. 86 Snow, K. H. 150 Snyder, T. 5, 30 social contract 114 social identity theories 164 Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report 4 Soviet Jews: Germans’ principal victims, testimonies 65, 67–68, 74; Soviet regime denial 62, 66 Srebrenica, denial analysis 125; authorization 118–119; bureaucratization 118; dememorialization 122; equivalence accounts 121–122; evidential gap 116; forgetting 124; institutionalized denial 123; international media role 120; participation denial 116; physical acts 119; religious crusade 116; revisionist ideas 121; survivors of 115 Srebrenica Genocide Memorial 107–108 Srebrenica massacre 113, 116–117, 120; anniversary 99; Dodik, Milorad 105; equivalence accounts 121–122; Mladić, Ratko role 102; referred

Index 223 as,“fabricated myth” 105; victims dehumanized 114 Srebrenica-Potočari Memorial 99 stage model of genocide 20–22, 24; ten stages of genocide 3, 10n8 stage theory 12, 21–24 Stalin 62, 68, 74 Stanley, M. 8 Stanton, G. 3, 10n8, 11, 19, 99–100, 168; “Stages” model 21–24 States of Denial: Knowing about Atrocities and Suffering (Cohen’s) 4 Stearns, J. 151 Stimson, H. 64 storytelling 197–198, 203 Strange Fruit (Holiday’s) 168 Strathern, M. 54 Struggle for New York (comic book) 83 Stuyvesant, P. 80–81 superhumanization 22 Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (memoir) 151 System of a Down band 177 Szpilman, W. 6 T Tadevosyan, M. 8 Tatz, C. 166 Taylor, T. 72 testimonial therapy project in India 197, 204 Thierault, H. 6 Tint, B. 168 tobacco 135 Tokaca, M. 115 transgender: identity denialism 9; people 184–185, 187, 191n10; refers to 184 transgender women 192n28; Ally Steinfeld’s murder 189; gender transgression 186–188, 190; generative assaults 187–188, 190; genocidal logic/rituals in 186, 188, 190; Gwen Araujo’s murder 186–187, 191n20; Quelly’s murder 185–186, 191n3; refers to 184; rituals of desecration and mutilation 186–189; and violence 184 ( see also transphobic violence ) transitional justice practices 196–198, 201–203; agitating caste transformation in India 203–205; definition of 205–207; localization,

and trauma experience sharing 197–198, 205; peacebuilding initiatives 199; Rwanda’s Gacaca system 205–207 transphobia, refers to 184, 186 transphobic violence 184–185, 191n2; beheading cases, symbolism of 187–188; burning, to erase identities 188; conversion rituals 188–189; eliminationist intent 186; reproduction and 186–187 trauma: artistic expression 168; conflict and 202; emotional access point 199, 207; -informed transitional justice 197–198, 203, 205–208; meaning of 199–200; SAMHSA’s concept 38, 42n33; stories narration 167, 168; systems and marginalization 9 tribal nations 134, 144n57; American Indian, grouping category 135; blood quantum membership policies 138; federally recognized, criteria for 135–137; forced removals 135; ID requirements 138, 141; Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 137; MMIWG epidemic affects 138; petitions rejections 135–136; recognition issues/processes, eliminatory 8, 132, 135–138, 141; state-recognized 135, 136 triumphalism 7; Andrićgrad, construction 104–105; celebration, war criminals ( see war criminals); Frein, Eric case 108; genocidaires, normalization or glorification 101–102; Halilovich’s argument 108–109; hijacking, memories 104–105; monuments and memorials 104; in popular music 102–104; term coined 100 Trnopolje concentration camp 104, 117, 121, 123 Tsitsernakaberd Genocide Memorial, in Yerevan 163 Turner, V. 52 Turse, N. 4 Two Row Wampum Alliance 81, 84 Two-Spirit 139 U Ukraine 29–30; conflicts over genocide memory 32–35; genocide-famine of early 1930s 11, 30–31; information

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warfare from Russia 37; Iron Curtain fall 32; Janowska, the Auschwitz of 34; Jewish heritage sites 34, 38; Nazi and neo-Nazi, symbols 35, 36, 37; Pravyy Sektor/Bandera flag 35–36; survivor groups, cooperation 38–39; twentieth century traumas 30–32 Ukrainian anti-Semitism 30, 34, 35, 37; Herzfeld’s article, photo 34, 35 Ukrainian Institute of National Memory 32 Umutesi, M. B. 151 United Nations Security Council Resolution on Srebrenica 105 United Nations War Crimes Commission (UNWCC) 64, 72 V Vasić, R. 105 Vasiljević, M. 100 Verneuil, H. 170 Vernichtungslager 71 Vian, B. 53 victim-blaming 55 victimhood 53, 54, 56, 62; -competition 6–7 Vidal-Naquet, P. 3 “The Vietnam War” 4–5

Višegrad 117, 120, 124 Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale 45 Vradiy, Y. 3 W “Wake Up the Soul” tour 177 war crimes tribunal 64 war criminals 7, 99; convicted, celebration as heroes 100–101; media role, in normalization 101–102; Plavšić', Biljana, triumph 101; public appearances 100, 102; Trbovc’s role 101 We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (Gourevitch’s) 151 Wiesel, E. 11 The Wizard of Oz 16 Wolfe, P. 131 Wolfsangel 29, 35 Workers and Peasants Red Army (GLAVPURKKA) 67 Y Yang, K. W. 131 Younging, G. 140 Z Zuroff, E. 32–33