Pioneers of genocide studies 9781412809573, 1412809576

Table of contents :
""Contents""
""Introduction""
""Historians""
""1 Finding the Words""
""2 Confronting the Armenian Genocide""
""3 Vita Felix, Via Dolorosa: An Academic Journey Towards Genocide""
""4 Facts and Values: A Personal Intellectual Exploration""
""5 The Questioner""
""Political Scientists""
""6 A German- Born Genocide Scholar""
""7 Studying Genocide to Protect Life""
""8 How I Came to the Study of Genocide""
""9 My Journey in the Study of Genocide""
""10 From the Study of War and Revolution to Democide� Power Kills""
""11 Who is My Neighbor?""
""12 Breaking the Membrane"" ""Sociologists""""13 From Social Action to Social Theory and Back: Paths and Circles""
""14 The Quest for Scholarship in My Pathos for the Armenian Tragedy and Its Victims""
""15 Gauging Genocide: Social Science Dimensions and Dilemmas""
""16 Leo Kuper: A Giant Pioneer""
""17 My Path to Genocide Studies""
""Lawyers and Jurists""
""18 Bearing Witness1""
""19 Totally Unofficial Man1""
""20 The Call""
""Psychologists""
""21 A Passion for Life and Rage at the Wasting of Life"" ""22 The Roots and Prevention of Genocide and Other Collective Violence: A Life�s Work Shaped by a Child�s Experience""""Theologian""
""23 From Holocaust to Genocide: The Journey Continues""
""Independent Scholars""
""24 Confronting Genocide in Cambodia""
""25 A Matter of Conscience""
""Selected Bibliography""
""About the Contributors""
""Index""

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Copyright © 2002 by Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, New Jersey. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Transaction Publishers, Rutgers—The State University, 35 Berrue Circle, Piscataway, New Jersey 08854-8042. This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2001059753 ISBN: 978-1-4128-0957-3 Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pioneers of genocide studies / edited by Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard Jacobs. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-0957-3 (E-Book) 1. Genocide—Study and teaching. I. Totten, Samuel, 1949II. Jacobs, Steven L., 1947HV6322.7 .P55 2002 364.15'1'07—dc21

2001059753

Dedication We dedicate Pioneers of Genocide Studies to: Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), who coined the term “genocide” and was the prime-mover in the development and passage of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), Leo Kuper (1908-1994), a scholar par excellence in the field of genocide studies, and one of the co-founders of International Alert, and Martin Ennals (1927-1991), an indefatigable human rights activist, long-time Secretary General of Amnesty International, and cofounder of International Alert.

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Contents Introduction Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard Jacobs

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Historians 1.

Finding the Words Rouben Paul Adalian

3

2.

Confronting the Armenian Genocide Richard G. Hovannisian

27

3.

Vita Felix, Via Dolorosa: An Academic Journey Towards Genocide Henry R. Huttenbach

47

4.

Facts and Values: A Personal Intellectual Exploration James E. Mace

59

5.

The Questioner Yves Ternon

75

Political Scientists 6.

A German-Born Genocide Scholar Barbara Harff

97

7.

Studying Genocide to Protect Life Herbert Hirsch

113

8.

How I Came to the Study of Genocide Kurt Jonassohn

129

9.

My Journey in the Study of Genocide Robert Melson

139

10. From the Study of War and Revolution to Democide—Power Kills R. J. Rummel

153

11. Who is My Neighbor? Roger W. Smith

179

12. Breaking the Membrane Colin Tatz

195

Sociologists 13. From Social Action to Social Theory and Back: Paths and Circles Helen Fein

219

14. The Quest for Scholarship in My Pathos for the Armenian Tragedy and Its Victims Vahakn N. Dadrian

235

15. Gauging Genocide: Social Science Dimensions and Dilemmas Irving Louis Horowitz

253

16. Leo Kuper: A Giant Pioneer Israel W. Charny

267

17. My Path to Genocide Studies Eric Markusen

295

Lawyers and Jurists 18. Bearing Witness M. Cherif Bassiouni

315

19. Totally Unofficial Man Raphael Lemkin

365

20. The Call Gregory H. Stanton

401

Psychologists 21. A Passion for Life and Rage at the Wasting of Life Israel W. Charny

429

22. The Roots and Prevention of Genocide and Other Collective Violence: A Life’s Work Shaped by a Child’s Experience Ervin Staub

479

Theologian 23. From Holocaust to Genocide: The Journey Continues Steven Leonard Jacobs

507

Independent Scholars 24. Confronting Genocide in Cambodia David Hawk

521

25. A Matter of Conscience Samuel Totten

545

Selected Bibliography

581

About the Contributors

597

Index

603

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Introduction Samuel Totten and Steven Leonard Jacobs The Field of Genocide Studies The field of genocide studies is a relatively new field. The term “genocide” itself was coined only in 1944 by the Polish-émigré jurist Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959). And while various and important books were published in the 1950s and 1960s about various aspects of genocide, it was not until the early 1980s that the study of genocide came into its own as an academic field. Indeed, it was the early 1980s that saw the publication of such significant works as Irving Louis Horowitz’s Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1980); Leo Kuper’s Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981) and The Prevention of Genocide (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 1985); and Israel W. Charny’s How Can We Commit the Unthinkable: Genocide, The Human Cancer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982). It was also in the early 1980s—1982 to be exact—that Israel Charny and colleagues organized and hosted the first International Conference on the Intervention and Prevention of Genocide. From those early efforts the nascent field of genocide studies has grown steadily and impressively over the past twenty plus years. Indicative of such growth are the following facts: there now exist at least five genocide centers across the globe (e.g., Jerusalem, Israel; New York City; Sydney, Australia; Montreal, Canada; and Copenhagen, Denmark); there is a formal organization of such scholars, the Association of Genocide Scholars; a genocide bibliographical series (four volumes to date have been published) exists that include annotations of most of the major works on genocide that were published through the mid-1990s; an Encyclopedia of Genoxi

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cide, the brainchild of Israel W. Charny, was published in 1999 and includes entries by some 160 scholars from across the globe; and a new journal, the Journal of Genocide Research, was inaugurated in 1999 under the editorship of Henry Huttenbach. This is not to mention the hundreds of books that have been published on a wide array of topics germane to the subject of genocide. The Genesis of Pioneers of Genocide Studies In 1995, one of the co-editors (Samuel Totten) of Pioneers of Genocide Studies devised a plan to develop an oral history project of the major figures in the field of genocide studies. Leo Kuper, who Charny has deemed the “doyen of genocide studies,” died two years previously, and Israel Charny himself, who many of us consider to be the co-doyen of the field, suffered a life-threatening disease in the mid-1990s that required major surgery and months of recuperation. Both of these events caused Totten to ponder the fact that many of the individuals who were primarily responsible for the inauguration of the field of genocide studies were moving into their later years and, not only would their collective wisdom and energy be sorely missed in the years to come, but it seemed imperative to gather that collective wisdom, both as a paean to their dedication and scholarship, and as a way to provide future scholars with a “road map” of the formers’ early efforts to develop an interdisciplinary field whose goal was not only exemplary scholarship but a scholarship suffused with the spirit of humanitarianism. With that thought in mind, Totten traveled to Jerusalem in 1998 in order to conduct the first of what was to be a series of twenty to twenty-five oral histories. In Jerusalem, at the home of Dr. Israel Charny, which also happens to be the site of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Totten conducted a nearly three-hour taped oral history of the genesis and evolution of Israel Charny’s work in the field of genocide studies. At the conclusion of that three hour period, Charny had only reached 1982, or the period when he codeveloped and hosted the previously mentioned first International Conference on the Intervention and Prevention of Genocide. Realizing that at least another six hours of taping was required, plus the need to transcribe, edit, check and double check dates and facts, and posit additional questions via email or regular mail, Totten came to the conclusion that a project involving twenty-five individuals living in various parts of the world (e.g., Australia, Canada, France,

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Great Britain, Israel, and numerous locations across the United States), would take a minimum of ten or more years to complete. This was true, for not only did he have a full-time job, but much of his summer was committed to other work at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Still, Totten was committed to the project, and began to plan a sabbatical during which he figured he would be able, at the very least, to conduct a dozen or more of the oral histories, thus, possibly, reducing the projected ten years to five years or less. Fortuitously, Totten requested a review copy of Carol Rittner’s and John Roth’s From the Unthinkable to the Unavoidable: American Christian and Jewish Scholars Encounter the Holocaust (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 1997). Reading the essays by such noted Holocaust scholars as the late Harry James Cargas, Franklin Littell, Alice L. Eckardt, Michael Berenbaum, as well as Rittner and Roth, Totten decided that the most expeditious and effective way of bringing together the collective wisdom of genocide scholars was to ask each one to write his/her own essay regarding the genesis and evolution of his/her thought and work in the field of genocide studies. At that point, having met Steven Jacobs, a rabbi then based in Huntsville, Alabama (and now Aaron Aronov Chair of Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa), at a conference on genocide at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, and having found Jacobs’ presentation on the status of Raphael Lemkin’s papers extremely informative, Totten asked Jacobs if he would be interested in co-editing a volume tentatively entitled Pioneers of Genocide Studies, and Jacobs readily agreed. The Development of the Book Before addressing how and why we selected whom we did to contribute to the book, we wish to comment, in a little more detail, about our rationale for developing such a book. This is important, for some readers may look askance at such a title and such a focus for a book, thinking “What pomposity!” In fact, one contributor commented that he was tentative about contributing to such a book for, to paraphrase him, not only did it seem arrogant to do so, but anything that even suggests that one is attempting to make a name for oneself or realizing some sort of self-aggrandizement on the bodies of millions who have been killed in the most horrific manner is not simply bad taste but unconscionable. As we informed this indi-

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vidual, who, in fact, did contribute an essay to Pioneers of Genocide Studies, we are in total agreement with him. Instead, as we told him, we sincerely believe that the current period of time—when the field is now approximately twenty years old, growing at a tremendous rate, and certain major scholars are either dead (Leo Kuper), tapering off in their work as they reach retirement age (and this includes such individuals as Israel Charny, Curt Jonassohn, and R.J. Rummel), and/or unable to continue their work for personal reasons (Norman Cohn)—is appropriate for a review of the field by many of its major scholars. Over and above that, the fact that the field is interdisciplinary (with major scholars representing such diverse fields as history, political science, psychology, sociology, religious studies, and education) and so many individuals are working on so many different fronts on so many different issues, a book of this nature would allow those new to the field to assess the major foci of the field, the various strands of the field, the types of barriers faced by scholars in the field, successes and failures in the field, efforts to develop the ways and means to intervene and prevent genocide and the efficacy of such ideas/measures, and the gaps in the field. As for the selection of the individuals to contribute to the book, the most difficult task was limiting the number to twenty-five individuals (the maximum number we could allow since we were faced with tight space constraints but wanted to avoid “minimalist”-type essays). Initially, we started by noting those individuals who wrote the earliest and most significant works on genocide theory, and among those individuals were Lemkin, Charny, Kuper, Fein, Horowitz, and Cohn. Those, then, were the first five individuals placed on our list. Israel Charny kindly agreed to write a biographical essay on Kuper, and Steve Jacobs agreed to fashion an essay based on Lemkin’s unpublished autobiography. We then listed those individuals who are noted for their expertise on a specific genocidal incident, and here we noted the following names: Jon Bridgman (the genocide of the Hereros), Richard Hovannisian (the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians), Vahakn Dadrian (the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians), Rouben Adalian (the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians), James Mace (Soviet manmade famine in Ukraine), Robert Cribb (the genocide of suspected communists in Indonesia), David Hawk (the Khmer Rouge genocide of the Cambodians), Ben Kiernan (the Khmer Rouge genocide of the Cambodians), and René Lemarchand (the genocides in Burundi and Rwanda). With the addition of these

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nine individuals, we now had a total of fifteen prospective contributors. We felt that it was imperative to include scholars who were specifically working on the issue of intervention and prevention, and here we listed six individuals, two of whom we had already mentioned previously: Israel Charny, Helen Fein, and M. Cherif Bassiouni, Barbara Harff, Greg Stanton, and Samuel Totten. Thus, our list was up to seventeen potential contributors. We then listed the names of those individuals who headed up a center or institute on genocide, and here we came up with five names, some of whom, again, were already on our list: Israel Charny (the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide), Colin Tatz (the Centre for the Comparative Study of Genocide), Helen Fein (the Institute for the Study of Genocide), and Curt Jonassohn and Frank Chalk (the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies). Thus, we gleaned three more names for a total of twenty. From there, we named individuals who had conducted key research and/or written and/or edited key books and essays in the field. Here we listed another seventeen individuals for a total of 35. As with any such venture, certain individuals who were invited to submit a contribution declined to do so. Among them were: Jon Bridgman, Ted Robert Gurr, René Lemarchand, Alison des Forges, Norman Cohn, Robert Conquest, Robert Cribb, and Frank Chalk. Valuing the insights of Israel Charny, we then asked him to provide us with the names of individuals he believed should definitely be included in the book, and he was gracious in providing numerous names over a period of several months. Among these were Yves Ternon and R.J. Rummel, both of whom we invited to submit essays—and they did. In the end, of course, there were numerous other individuals we wish we could have included as contributors. Among them, and this is just a partial list, are: Howard Adelman (Canada), Yair Auron (Israel), Jennifer Balint (Australia), David Chandler (Australia), Gérard Chaliand (France), Ward Churchill (United States), James Dunn (Australia), Craig Etcheson (United States), Michael Freeman (England), Bill Leadbetter (Australia), Lyman H. Legters (United States), Damir Mirkovic (Canada), Kumar Rupesinghe (England), and Ben Whitaker (England). Note: The nations following each name is the country in which the individual resides. In order to ensure some semblance of consistency, we provided each author with a set of questions that we wished to have him/her consider and address. The questions were as follows: (1) What led

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you to initially begin thinking, writing, and speaking about genocide? (2) What were the fundamental problems and issues that made the issue of genocide an imperative for you to study/address? (3) How do you define genocide, and why? (4) What is your primary aim as a scholar in this field? (5) What individual(s) and/or scholarly work(s) has/have most influenced your in your work, and how? (6) Has there been a persistent and consistent focus in your thinking and writing about genocide? (7) Has your thinking evolved over time, and if so how? (8) What are your perceptions of the newly emerging field of “genocide studies,” where it has been, where it is, and where it appears to be heading? (9) Has your work changed in practical terms as your thinking has evolved? If so, how? (10) What are the major obstacles you have come up against in your work? (11) What are your major contributions to the field? (12) What projects are you currently working on, and what are some future projects you plan to carry out? and (13) What, in your mind, remains to be done? Note: One does not need to address these issues in a lock-step manner. In order to emphasis the fact that we were interested in a personal, versus an academic essay, we informed our contributors that “All authors should approach the questions in a personal way, thus crafting an essay that reveals one’s individual voice, passion(s), writing style, scholarly perspectives, and the most relevant details of one’s life. In doing so, each author should include personal stories that illuminate his/her thinking, experiences, and work. Indeed, each essay should epitomize scholarly autobiographical writing at its best. In addition to contributing an essay to the book, we asked all of the contributors to submit a select list of their ten most important publications on the issue of genocide. Everyone’s select list is located at the back of the volume, located just prior to the index. It was our sense that such an addition would enhance the usefulness of the book for those new to the field, and we hope that that proves to be the case. In a project of this nature, many heart-filled thanks are due to others who graciously gave of their precious time, thought, and energy. First, we wish to thank Israel Charny, a mentor to us both and a kind and greatly loved friend and colleague, for graciously and expeditiously responding to our many queries, and for writing the essay about Leo Kuper’s significant and pioneering contributions to the field of genocide studies. Second, a very special thank you is

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due to Dr. James Winchell of Portland, Oregon, for translating Yves Ternon’s essay from the French. Third, we wish to gratefully thank Dr. Irving Louis Horowitz for his gracious and vital support of this project. Fourth, we sincerely thank Michael Paley, assistant editor at Transaction Publishers, for his meticulous shepherding and sustained enthusiasm for this project. Fifth, we acknowledge with gratitude the support of Dr. Louis Weiner of Huntsville, Alamba, without whose contribution this project would not have seen the light of day. We offer a heartfelt thanks to our spouses—Kathleen Barta and Louanne Clayton Jacobs—who, in their own unique and supportive ways, understand the importance of this work. Finally, we cannot offer enough thanks to all of the contributors to our book. Each is extremely busy with his/her own significant work, and we greatly appreciate the amount of time and effort they put into writing and revising their essays. Conclusion That such a volume remains necessary and such an academic field as genocide studies continues to expand in this, the twenty-first, century remain a sad commentary on the human condition. We remain hopeful, however, that the potential to deter the spread of this plague on humanity will come not only from those seriously engaged in such difficult intellectual work, but in concert with the collective effort of the international community (governments, human rights agencies, religious institutions, grassroots organizations) to thwart future genocide. The creation of both the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), addressing the genocide in both the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda, as well as the International Criminal Court (ICC), give us cause for hope. It is our hope, too, that this volume may serve, in its own way, as a contribution to that agenda, inspiring others to commit themselves to this work.

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Historians

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1 Finding the Words Rouben Paul Adalian Early Encounters In the California community where I grew up, there was a woman whose arms were entirely tattooed. She was an energetic person, active in the ladies’ guild, a regular presence at community events in Los Angeles. Every time I saw her, I was at once intrigued and repulsed, unable to speak to her, courteous though she was with all. No one else I ever knew had tattoos like hers. Then one day I saw her picture in the obituary section of the community paper and curiosity led me for the first time to read a death notice. To this day, her brief necrology remains imprinted in my memory to the same degree that those tattoos had been imprinted on her body. She was a survivor, abducted in her prime during the genocide of the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. To break her will and discourage her from escape, her captors had tattooed all exposed parts of her body, including her face. Many years after her liberation and immigration to America, she had had her facial tattoos surgically removed. I was appalled and outraged at the unspeakable humiliation and dehumanization to which she had been forced to submit against her will. I still become angered when I remember that to which she had been subjected. To think that she was marked in her youth to be enslaved, and to know that she had been imprisoned in her own skin, objectified by a cruelty meant to destroy her individuality, personality, and dignity, remains difficult to fathom. In many ways, that obituary was a beginning. It confronted me with unsettling facts and disturbing events. While it was not the first 3

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time I confronted the Armenian Genocide, it was the first time I confronted it alone, without parental mediation. It may be an overstatement to say that it was also a point of departure for discerning between physical pain and emotional scars. This survivor had restored her visage to herself. Yet that partial recovery had camouflaged her true identity. As it turned out, her tattooed arms told only half the story. From one standpoint, because of her visible markings, the tattooed lady was actually somebody whose once-tortured existence was more externalized than that of most other survivors. From another viewpoint, she had led a life with many levels of reality concealed from the public as the private domain of personal and searing experiences. She was a woman who had lived four distinct lives: an Armenian childhood when her identity was formed; a captivity which had defaced her and sought to rob her of identity; a period of personal freedom, yet still bearing all the marks of her enslavement along with the emotional cost of her uncommon appearance; and a final period of greater freedom, both personal and from her past, once the tattoos were removed. Jarring as that account is of her experience during the years of genocide, she was only one of the many survivors I came to know. Virtually everyone in the Armenian community above a certain age was a survivor. By the time I became aware of the experience of the Armenian people during World War I, the survivors, in relation to those my age, constituted the generation of grandparents. Everyone’s grandparent was a survivor. There was nothing unusual in that information—it was so commonplace. The subject of curiosity most frequently inquired about when families met for the first time was their town of origin in the old country, though already removed from those places by two generations. An attentive person, in the normal course of socialization, could learn the geography of historic Armenia by simply listening to remembrances of places once called home. Undertaking a Study of Armenia and Its Past The above were passive encounters during my formative years. Indeed, I was not yet in high school at the time. I did not seek active encounter with survivors until I was well into graduate school. At that point, my driving interest was the vocabulary of historical knowledge, and, in my mind, the survivors were the final repository of particular information about the country I was spending increasing amounts of time studying. My interest in history did not begin with

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Armenia. Rather it reached Armenia. The more I absorbed the outlines of history, learned the methods of the discipline, studied the broader evolution of human civilization or the narrower course of specific regions and societies, the more questions crystallized in my mind about Armenia. These questions became a growing preoccupation for me since so much of Armenian history did not seem to fit the pattern of much else that one learned through the canons of the historical discipline, whether viewed from the standpoint Western civilization or American, European, and Middle Eastern societies. The historical discipline, on the other hand, teaches that cause without context cannot be explained. The problematics of the apparent disjointedness of the Armenian historical experience presented intriguing questions that prompted the challenges of search, inquiry, and resolution. Against this background of a comparatively long process of historical investigation that looked at many questions, the termination of history or a society became as important a preoccupation as the question of beginnings and of evolution that tends to dominate historical inquiry. End points are always a greater puzzle and more difficult to explain. They also require some reflection on the matter of mortality, something that the social sciences tend to view as the preoccupation of religions and lying on the farther side of objective measurement. Over time I also grew to appreciate the survivors as uprooted and displaced persons bearing memory of a life preceding the catastrophe. They could speak of Armenia. There was no such place to be seen any longer, but it was a place about which could still be heard stories, descriptions, and remembrances. The development of this view—of the survivor as more than mere victim of a singular act of barbarity—had a number of sources. One was my maternal grandmother, who had the keenest memory of that vanished world, a woman with the gift of forceful and compelling eloquence. Another source, I am certain, was my parents, both of whom nurtured the sense that community is the nexus of a shared and inherited culture of identifiable and definable ethos and esthetics. There were also two teachers who played a central role in my education: Avedis Sanjian and Richard Hovannisian. They were, at the time, forging the discipline of Armenian studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. The excellence of the UCLA faculty and the breadth of the topical coverage provided by the history depart-

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ment made for an environment of constant learning and continuous inquiry. The vast resources of the university research library also meant that a student could pursue further reading on any topic that piqued his curiosity in class. The world of ideas and published sources were vital to establishing points of comparison. These were among the reason I spent all my college years at UCLA majoring in history. Understanding the problem of genocide constituted an unavoidable part of studying modern Armenian history. There were two ways one could approach the problem: as a single episode in the long, yet persisting, history of a people; or as a transformative event which disassembled the structure of an historic society and reconfigured the character of its people. Both methods already had its exponents. The environment I grew up in persuaded me of the latter proposition, which, in turn, absorbed more and more of my attention. Additionally, the lasting and continuing consequences of the Armenian Genocide were still tangible and visible, requiring the constant consideration of their effect on the life of a people viewed from the standpoint of the historical discipline. At UCLA, I also learned the difference between honest and dishonest scholarship. The denialist literature on the Armenian genocide produced by a lone faculty member reminded one of the difficulties and challenges surrounding the study of genocide, and especially the Armenian Genocide. When one of his publications provoked a public demonstration, I went to witness it. The gathering consisted mostly of college students and others from the Armenian community. I spotted, though, an elderly gentleman among the protesters, and he was noticeably tiring under the warm California sun. When I went up to him to suggest that he rest under the shade of a tree, he responded with a single line: “I walked the desert to Der Zor.” It was the kind of arresting remark that only a survivor could make, one who had walked the trail of death to its final station in the heart of the Syrian desert, and somehow lived. There was not one thing more for him to say, and there was not a thing for me to do. So I pulled out my camera. He started crying when I snapped his picture. Applying One’s Learning Among Survivors Active encounters with the witnesses of the Armenian Genocide coincided with the years when, finally, one might say, I was a historian-in-training, having decided to pursue a doctorate by that point.

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It was the survivors’ knowledge of the terrain of Armenia that interested me as much as their desire to preserve the story of the demise of their homeland. The contrast between the immemorial country, as they recalled everything about it, and its sudden, apocalyptic, and catastrophic termination, constantly drew my attention. In this context, the immediate causes, the commonplace explanations of ethnic conflict, war, and brutality seemed secondary. Rather, it was the question that many historians would regard as lying beyond the measure and capacity of the discipline—whither the destiny of a people—that interested me, a question prompted by the survivors themselves. Some may claim that this is a question more appropriate for philosophical inquiry than historical investigation, but I have always thought that such a rationale was always a convenient excuse to avoid asking some fundamental questions. My grounding in Armenian history provided me with valuable techniques during my interviews with survivors. Ignorance of their world offended them. The basic knowledge of the history associated with their specific fate created an environment of trust for sharing difficult and often unspoken memories. Informed questions elicited whole panoramas of persons, places, and experiences. The generation of survivors had a wonderful word for their concept of home. They called it “yergir.” In Armenian it meant “the land,” an expression approximating altogether the many connotations that the word “country” has in English. Quite often it was meant even more literally as many, if not most, of the survivors came from a rustic background, their families having lived in the pre-genocide days in the many rural towns and villages of Armenia, Cilicia, and Asia Minor. Many survivors attested to the close bond of the Armenian people to their land. Growing up my entire life in urban settings, it was not easy to comprehend that connection. Yevnig Adrouni, who was one of the very first survivors I formally interviewed when I finally turned to studying the Armenian Genocide, helped me cross that distance and therein acquire insight and understanding of the survivor’s stoic longing for the remembered beauty of the native land. She was from the village of Hoghe whose very name meant “of the soil” or “made of the earth.” It was electrifying to learn that there once was an Armenian place with such a name and which, with such elegant simplicity, captured the organic bond of a people with its land.

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Yevnig Adrouni also imparted that a catholicos, an Armenian patriarch, emanated from her village. When I searched out a reference to such a figure and found Hovsep Hoghotsmetsi, she led me across a threshold. It was not so much the fact there might have been some truth to the claim that a church leader originated in this specific village still in existence in 1915, it was the enormity of the time-span that she unknowingly embraced with her remark that was the source of amazement. The patriarch she referred to lived in the fifth century. She had highlighted an important lesson of history on how place, person, and time are all connected together. In linking herself and her village with a historical figure, she meant to reassure me that there was indeed once a place called Hoghe. I suspect that she was the last person ever to speak of Hoghe. The realization that time was not on the side of the Armenian survivors—those who speak with the authority of experience—was another turning point. It added urgency to the quest to collect the evidence, and thus propelled me and others to preserve on tape as many oral history interviews as possible. With the closing of the murderous twentieth century, time has finally run out. Over the years, I have interviewed more than one hundred survivors of the Armenian Genocide. Many patiently and with great sadness related their personal tales. They mustered the courage to speak of the agonies endured along the road of deportation, the atrocities witnessed, the misery of the concentration camps, the gradual decimation of their families, the disappearances, the abductions, the dehydration and starvation, the cruelties seen and inflicted upon them, and of the loneliness of survival. Yevnig Adrouni’s life and survival seemed to epitomize it all. Among the legends told from the time of the Genocide was that of mothers teaching their young the Armenian language by writing in the desert sand. It seemed a piece of mythology invented to retrieve some dubious sense of hope and defiance as death gazed upon its next victims. Yevnig Adrouni testified how she alone in the wild as an orphan child taken by nomads held on to her sense of identity by secretly writing in the dirt her name and the name of her friends that she might remember who she was. Like the tattooed lady, she, too, had been taken captive. Spared abuse because she was so young at the time of her involuntary adoption, she escaped when her captor told her that she was nearing marriageable age. With no sense of where in the world she had been

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living, she wandered through the desert to be seized again until some years later fate placed her in Aleppo and a rescue was arranged from her final captor’s home. To secure her rescue she had to undergo a test, to prove that she indeed was Armenian, as an attempted rescue was not without risk for her rescuers. So she wrote again in her mother tongue as proof of her identity and sent her plea to her would-be rescuers. Even after the tape recorder had been turned off and the interview ended, Yevnig Adrouni kept on repeating: “The Armenian language saved me, the Armenian language saved me.” The underlying message with all survivor accounts was the same: the stories may seem unbelievable, but they were true, true as the person recounting them. The occasional linkages with known events and figures added real excitement to listening to survivors. In the course of his description of the neighborhood in which his family resided in the city of Van, one survivor casually mentioned that the Servantztiants lived across the street. I stopped him to verify if he was speaking of the family of Garegin Servantztiants, bishop and ethnographer who first put in writing in the 1870s the tales of the region of Sasun, celebrated now as the author of the premier folk epic of the Armenians. Another survivor from the Van region recalled the arrival of Andranik to his small village. When asked to be shown what remained, the young boy walked him to the cemetery, the only distinguishing, and, by that time, undisturbed feature of the village, strangely located in a dense forest, which, as he described, would be so full of birds in springtime that it was impossible to bear the sound of their chirping. The survivor reported that Andranik, a man of action not given to making speeches, said, upon seeing the cemetery, how fortunate the dead were to be lying in such a beautiful place: “Tell them to rise and make way that we may rest our tired bodies.” Andranik was universally recognized as a dauntless defender of Armenians against Ottoman oppression. He had earned his reputation in the 1890s as a fearless guerrilla fighter when Armenians were threatened with massacre, and later as a field commander of volunteer forces seeking to rescue beleaguered Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Stories from witnesses not only made him a believable figure, but also constantly reminded one that the horrors occurred in real time, in real places, to real people; that it was not a tale of woes from some imaginary netherworld of hatred and brutality.

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Not every survivor would agree to be recorded. Word of mouth delivered news that there was another survivor who had known Andranik, and I located him. His information was direct and not of a passing incident, but he steadfastly refused to speak to any mechanical device. Yet, he grabbed my arm to tell me his tale and did not let go until he was done with the recitation of his bitter adventures. He, too, had been rescued by Andranik, and had lived by hiding in a tree as he witnessed the complete slaughter of his village. With no one else living when Andranik arrived, he had joined the men banded about Andranik. By the time he let go of my arm, it was aching. Most survivors gracefully endured their interviews. This fellow would have none of it. He was still raging, and his refusal to be recorded seemed a final act of defiance of a world in which he had known only travail, horror, and hardship. I realized, too, that there would be limits to the evidence that could be recorded. Another survivor, who as a young boy had been abducted by Kurds and eventually passed for one, mentioned that the Kurds pointed out the spot to him where Krikor Zohrab was executed by the Turkish gendarmerie. Zohrab was respected among Armenians and Turks alike, an attorney of repute, an ardent advocate of democracy, a parliamentarian with immunity, and a famed author in Armenian, he represented the finest tradition of liberalism. His demise was meant to be a powerful blow both to the leadership of the Armenian community and to the voices of opposition to chauvinism and tyranny. When I tried to elicit a description of the locale, it proved an effort in futility. The survivor was unable to recall a picture of the desolate spots he visualized from the rest of the barren land. The Concept of Genocide Mass slaughter in the twentieth century has manifested in so many variations that it remains difficult to find a common definition of genocide among specialists. For this and other reasons, I have long felt that the definition of genocide as provided in the United Nations’ Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide should remain central to the discourse on the subject. Given the contesting of the application of the label of genocide by parties interested in avoiding accountability and responsibility, adherence to the Convention and its definition carry value in communicating the criminality of the conception and implementation of genocide beyond attenuating political considerations. The legal procedures introduced

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for the prosecution of the accused in the commission of atrocities in Bosnia and Rwanda are finally doing so. Having said this, without constructing a dictionary definition, there are five elements that I find necessary to identify a specific atrocity as genocide: the commissioning party is the state, or any institution acting as the instrument of the state, proceeding in the avowed interest of the state; the objects of the policy, the victims, are civilians incapable of mounting an organized defense of their lives, families, and properties; the atrocity is on a scale such as to indicate a scheme by its architects for the wholesale extermination of a sizable segment of a population, if not an entire people, defined or self-defined as a distinct social community; that the objective is a permanent alteration of the demographic characteristics and composition of a defined geographic space; and that all of the above occur or are implemented over, historically-speaking, a short period of time. The above outline is restrictive because it strives for bounds that allow for forging a definition. However, the exercise of seeking definition cannot be allowed to couch purposes of exclusion. At the same time, by tossing any crime into the docket and calling it genocide does not do victims justice. Every term describing criminal conduct toward human beings deserves to be treated with equal respect. Genocide is a certain kind of mass crime. In the absence of the word “genocide,” the term “massacre” was widely used to describe the atrocities committed against the Armenians over the course of the last three decades of the Ottoman period. The same linguistic content applies to “wholesale deportations” or “mass starvation” induced by state policy. These are not lesser crimes. They are only different types of mass crimes. It would be much more valuable to understand each of these horrors for what it really is, even if one were to dismiss as vain idealism that in obtaining accurate definition lies the hope of developing appropriate methods of response, assistance, or prevention. From a disciplinary standpoint, there are practical considerations for identifying destructive events properly. Under the generic rubric of “devastation,” the historian runs the risk of missing the exact character and purpose of a policy and its effect. In the course of a history like that of the Armenians, a people periodically visited by deliberately inflicted ruin, the failure to exercise caution and precision can easily lead to generalizations that begin to fail the purpose of analy-

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sis. The central aim of my inquiries, therefore, remains the broad question of interpretation: how does one measure the full meaning of an event classed as “genocide” and properly locate it within a continuum? Given that it also represents a severance, an existential termination, how, then, are continuity and discontinuity to be reconciled within a single narrative? The existential irreversibility introduced by the nature of genocide redefines the historical process. At least in part, genocide results in the extinction of a historic society by forceful, intentional, and systematic violence, therein rendering it “historic,” by which is meant its cessation as a living entity at a certain time and place. Thus the study of the aftermath of genocide is not merely one of reconciling past and present via a comprehensible continuum. After all, the point of genocide is to disrupt the natural human assumption of continuum. The Armenian cultural preoccupation with this consequence is so prevalent that in an early article entitled “A Conceptual Method for Examining the Consequences of the Armenian Genocide,” I suggested the need to conceive the genocide of the Armenians as the moment of genesis of the current Armenian culture and people. The past is so thoroughly obliterated that this end becomes a beginning, and in so becoming, in linear temporality, it also locates a center. It was gratifying to come across essays (Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought) by someone of Hannah Arendt’s stature on the larger question of historical time which paralleled some of my own ruminations on the subject to the extent that the single case I was examining could be viewed as an example consonant with Arendt’s more vaunted line of reasoning. Working in the Field of Genocide Studies If anything has encouraged me through the years to continue working on this difficult subject, it has been my interactions with colleagues. The historical discipline is such that one can almost produce a work of scholarship in isolation if one has sufficient data at one’s disposal, but the study of genocide requires and depends upon the interaction and communication with other students of the subject. This may be a function of the stage at which I found the discipline when I first peered into it. It was at best nascent at the time, and, to this day, remains in its formative phase. In that respect I have also had the privilege of getting to know the true pioneers along whose trail I might imagine that I have taken a few small steps.

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I had probably read everything that was available in English on the Armenian Genocide before encountering the works of Leo Kuper and Helen Fein, two noted genocide scholars. Both Kuper and Fein introduced me to the realization that what seemed sheer anarchy could be studied methodically, and that the information about genocide could be organized reasonably and logically, violent and brutal as the facts might have been. Each also provided a sociological analysis of genocide, and the cross-disciplinary methods that helped me to see the Armenian experience in context. Possibly their most instructive approach was the basic universality to which both adhered, one that permitted for the bridging of a cultural and intellectual gulf that the hard empiricism of historical methodology, inadvertently, at times imposes. The thorniest barrier was confronted through my examination of Israel Charny’s works, which demonstrated for me that the problem of denial was central to the concept of genocide and therein could be challenged on the basis of its inherent irrationality. If Kuper, Fein, and Charny, and, later, Roger Smith and Robert Melson, through their scholarship invited one to keep thinking about the problem of genocide, William Parsons and Samuel Totten raised the challenge of figuring out the basics of educating about genocide, in general, and the Armenian Genocide, in particular. They laid down the proposition that the teaching and study of genocide required its own attention and methods. That’s the subject I had started writing about first, but only in terms of generalities. Parsons and Totten guided me into thinking more categorically in order to begin to extract the central historical and ethical lessons. Finally, I cannot continue without saying that the constant nourishment, if such may be allowed, from Holocaust specialists (e.g., and particularly, Ervin Staub, Sybil Milton, Michael Dobkowski, Robert Jay Lifton) who have so carefully created a massive library of literature and charted so many pathways for examining the problem of genocide has been indispensable. One regularly turns to learn from their methods when stranded, and finds applications and reasoning to consider the problems upon which one is focused. Their contributions have been more than indirect. Irving Louis Horowitz, Henry Huttenbach, Yair Auron, Frank Chalk, Kurt Jonassohn, and Mark Levene, among others, have made invaluable additions via insights that often result from a comparative approach. I imagine that from the perspective of those of us predisposed to more com-

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partmentalized methods, they are the ones at the cutting edge of the emerging field. Ben Kiernan’s work on the Cambodian Genocide has been no less compelling and is a source of instruction. If I learned historical methodology from Richard Hovannisian, and learned to be less perplexed by the immense complexities of modern Armenian history thanks to his tutelage, I learned the very structure and nature of the Armenian Genocide from Vahakn Dadrian, whose intrepid scholarship has resulted in the mapping of the history of the sum total of the acts and decisions that make up the genocide. By demonstrating that these events were part of a vast undertaking, he reinforced the understanding that genocides are not accidents. They require enormous planning, and, as such, are calculated policy. Dadrian’s other major contribution has been his identification of new sources, often obscure ones, holding extraordinarily revealing information. To the historian, the sources of information are as interesting as the arguments constructed by fellow scholars. In this respect, Dadrian and I learned about the vast possibilities of documentation from a predecessor, Father Krikor Guerguerian, who may possibly be regarded as the first to have attempted a methodical study of the Armenian Genocide. Father Guerguerian was an orphan survivor of the Genocide, a Catholic priest, and a self-taught scholar. He carried an innate understanding of the catastrophe and through his research had developed a forceful view of the criminal organization involved in perpetrating the Genocide. More importantly, through chance encounter and dogged curiosity he had uncovered evidence and a range of documentation that fundamentally began to alter the thinking about the possibilities of studying the Armenian Genocide. He was the first person to examine archival documentation contemporaneous to the events and also to appreciate the evidentiary importance of the post-war tribunals that prosecuted the Young Turk criminals. Assuming that documentation precedes argumentation, then the challenge is quite fundamental. That said, the special complication in the documentation of the Armenian Genocide, therefore, does not arise from the paucity of documents, but quite the opposite, from the actual abundance of evidence. This evidence, however, does not reside in the domestic archives of the state in which the genocide was committed. Rather, it is scattered across archives ranging from the United States to Russia, with almost every country in between holding a piece of the puzzle.

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The Ottoman and Turkish archives may yet yield corroborative evidence. However, given the policy of the modern Turkish state to deny the occurrence of genocide, based at times on the claimed absence of confirmatory records in its own holdings, it is probably safe to assume that the central body of documents that would have implicated the state no longer exists. If inculpatory Ottoman documents exist, they are not likely to see the light of day any time soon. The constant denial of the Armenian Genocide has made it all the more imperative that the documentation on the subject be thorough. However, as denial is less an intellectual position and more of a political service, it cannot be taken as the beginning point of a scholarly enterprise. While I can understand the urgency felt at times to respond to denial and the inclination to dip into the accumulating body of documents as proof of certainty, doing so, I think, runs the risk of constructing a counter-narrative to the fallacies of denial, and therein unintentionally accept the pseudo-intellectual and anti-human arguments as legitimate points of debate. The vicious illogic of denial can deny everything, and, in so doing, contest anything it chooses at its convenience, and thereby obliterate reason, fact, logic, and all concepts by which understanding is achieved. The research initiated by Guerguerian and pursued subsequently by Dadrian demonstrates that there are multiple complimentary sources of contemporary evidence. Father Guerguerian’s contribution—and this is based on my close collaboration with him in the last two years of his life—was the demonstration that the accounts written by eyewitnesses and survivors, all of which would have been authored after the events, can be buttressed with this contemporary evidence, and, significantly, a portion of that evidence was produced by the Ottomans themselves. Ultimately it required the skills of a trained specialist, namely Dadrian, to confirm and expand upon Guerguerian’s discoveries, because the latter wrote only in Armenian and much of his work remains incomplete and in manuscript form. In some ways the tremendous skills he had developed in authenticating primary evidence on the Armenian Genocide had become an obsession that distracted him from writing. I personally learned and realized all this as he finally confided in one whom he found prepared to listen to him, as he himself sensed that the eternal sundial would soon be casting its final shadow upon him. In the process Guerguerian allowed me to organize his papers, his mass of archival documents, and his invaluable library, catalogue

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them, and microfilm the collection end to end for safekeeping and future study. The weeks spent with him working out of his New York apartment in a high rise that lacked air conditioning were a period of intensive learning. Guerguerian had been a vigorous individual who had traveled to any point of the map where he believed he could uncover evidence. He had even returned to his birthplace, and with the assistance of locals who still remembered his family, he had identified his parents’ house and photographed its ruins. Armenians rarely traveled to Turkey for many decades after the genocide, and they certainly avoided being conspicuous about locating homesteads as popular suspicion among Turks still entertained concern over Armenians returning and reclaiming their former homes. As he recalled, after word had gotten out about his true identity, he had one absolutely frightening moment when a large rough-looking man walked up to him in the middle of town, and, in front of a crowd, threw down a basket of fruit and vegetables at his feet hollering at him to take them while in the same breath confessing that he was the one who had slaughtered Guerguerian’s parents and seized their property. I cannot imagine that any other Armenian confronted such a moment. When the man asked for forgiveness, Guerguerian replied that he could not dispense it, as forgiveness must be asked of God. Guerguerian had chosen the priesthood because of the example of another Armenian clergyman who had given him tender care during the time he was a sick child in an orphanage and restored him to health. He followed that example with equal modesty, and when an occasion arose for him to intercede on behalf of people who needed assistance, he did not hesitate. He did not want it revealed in his lifetime—and I hope enough time has passed to record it at least thusly—that when a period of virulent nationalism swept the Middle Eastern country in which he ministered, he issued false baptismal certificates to a number of Jews to help them escape to safety. There was one more important lesson to be learned from Guerguerian. Documentation held a key to achieving greater objectivity on the trying subject of genocide, and it had to do with size and scope. Since the subject was a crime, a criminal investigation was required. Such an investigation could not afford to overlook any piece of evidence. Moreover it necessitated the discovery of evidence attesting to the entire case, from the hatching of the conspiracy against the Armenian people to details of the methods for

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carrying out the crime. Having spent a lifetime researching, he had an idea about both, but on this I am certain: he could not have imagined the true size and scope of the documentation that began to be uncovered about the Armenian Genocide after his death. Recovering the American Records Like many who have studied the modern period on the basis of archival sources, Father Guerguerian sensed that there was much of value in the central files on the Armenian atrocities in the U.S. National Archives. However, the extent as to what existed that might shed light on the genocide years could only be guessed at, and preliminary research by Christopher Simpson, who had canvassed the National Archives and the Library of Congress, indicated that there was plenty to uncover. Ultimately, as director of research at the Armenian Assembly of America in Washington, D.C., I received the assignment of sifting through much of it over the course of a number of years in the early 1990s. The result was a compilation of some 37,000 pages issued on microfiche, the only method of reproduction at the time that could hold so many images in a compact format. The demonstration that there existed sizable contemporaneous documentation on the Armenian Genocide created by observers, witnesses, and others, and who were not identified with either the victim or victimizing party, was testament to the importance of the event. The vast number of pages had the attribute of concretizing the data, at least to the extent that ink on paper continues to propel historical investigation. Even more significant than the vast quantity of the documentation is the quality of the evidence found in the archives. In this, the American-generated evidence has some remarkable features that will continue to make the documents a mountain that can be, and hopefully will be, mined for a wide variety of purposes, including the effort to answer a wide range of questions. There are two characteristics that remain striking and as yet have not duplicated themselves to the same extent in other large archival holdings on the Armenian Genocide: the continuity of the record and the detail of the information. For a country that did not start out as a “Great Power” in the beginning of World War I and had limited interests in the Ottoman Empire, and, for that matter, in the Armenians, the level of communication between the parties, and therein information conveyed about the Armenians, is considerable. The Armenian Question had been a

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European concern and the United States was only remotely connected to the issues. This is not the place to explore and explain the transformation, but something about the shock value of the documents provides sufficient reason to make the case that the very nature of the atrocities and the scope of the genocidal policy represented a novel experience to behold and therein by itself induced a geometric increase in the amount of reporting in official dispatches on the condition of the Armenians. For purposes of historical reconstruction, there are few things more valuable than a continuous record. More than anything else, and specially in the absence of explicit policy statements, the sustained process of action, or the carrying through of a series of actions, provides strong proof of decision-making, planning, and scheming, because continuous action indicates a conscious campaign and a sustained policy. I always thought this was powerful proof of both intention and deliberation, and far too elaborate to be regarded merely as contingent behavior. As for the reported details in the archival documents, their consistency with the survivor accounts and the body of memoirs added another valuable dimension to the record. Indeed, they provide more specifics regarding various aspects of the genocide and corroborate statements in the personal accounts. With few gaps, the U.S. documents—the larger part of them either generated or processed by the Department of State and its representatives abroad—run serially from the start of World War I in 1914 to the 1920s, regularly reporting on the fragile condition of the Armenian population in the Turkish state at various stages of its political evolution from a multi-confessional empire to a national republic. If accessing the objective facts was critical at first in my undertaking of the archival research, the subjective content, the choice of words and their intended meanings, increasingly has moved toward the center of my current inquiries. As much as the tabulations, the geographic trails, the statistics, and the rest of what is frequently called the factual evidence, the language of the presentation and the invention and use of phraseology to convey the dawning of the age of genocide has become a preoccupation. The profession of the authors of most of these reports that currently reside in state archives makes the study of these documents specially compelling from the standpoint of the usage of language, because virtually all were persons in the diplomatic service of their country. It did not seem as vital a part of the archival heritage on the Armenian Genocide when

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I was collecting the documents. What was said, rather than how it was said, stood at the center of my attention then. The recurrence of genocidal acts at the end of the century, and the debate on the usages of terminology to describe them, however, has cast a different light on the earlier, now archival, texts on Armenian Genocide. As latter-day reporters and writers on more recent atrocities grappled with language, the restrained lexicon of the diplomatic exchanges during the Armenian Genocide has contributed to a new depth of understanding for me. The statements therein no longer appeared the broad generalizations that historians and the public have tended to rely upon. Rather, a closer reading hinted at the careful choice of words, and for those prone to officious understatement as licensed representatives of their government in a foreign country, their stark portraiture of the events spoke of the desire of the diplomats to attest convincingly and persuasively about the depth of the calamity visited upon the Armenian people. As professionals averse to running the risk of seeming to exaggerate, the trained diplomats in the instance of reporting on the rapidly deteriorating condition of the Armenians became the authors of the earliest literature on twentieth-century genocide. From the nature and the length of the communications they wrote, one detects the desire to say more than one usually would in just fulfilling one’s formal responsibility by filing a report. The Emerging Field of Genocide Studies When all is said and done, the emergence of a field called genocide studies represents a sea change in the academy and in the intellectual community—both of which long ignored the topic or frowned on the subject as a facet of the preoccupation of historicaly-persecuted minorities whose representatives were thought to be engaged in self-interested exercises of historical interpretation. Those who study genocide derive no satisfaction from the knowledge that the problem of genocide, just when it seemed to be receding in the annals of humanity, returned with unforeseen and unpredictable consequences. In this regard I am reminded of Leo Kuper’s work on Central Africa that now resonates with its predictive significance about a part of the world that once seemed so remote to me. For years now, I have grappled with the useful instruments and discomforting limitations of the discipline of history in order to understand an aspect of the historical experience that casts such a nega-

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tive light on humankind. Indeed, at times, it is not difficult at all to create a despairing paradigm or imagine civilization as brutal and deceptive pretense to a higher order based on the graveyard of prior exterminations. Still, the tug of wanting to register one’s voice of protest and discouragement with the outcome of the twentieth century has become a re-enforcing mechanism to stay the course of doing one’s best in a specialization wherein one might make a contribution. It is no surprise, therefore, that the following questions regularly emerge and beg an answer: Is genocide a product of civilization? What is civilization if it produces genocide? If the modern state is the highest form of human organization, why is it also such a deadly instrument? Why is the community of men accepting of mass destruction when the prize of civilized existence is peace and progress? Is it out of historical habit? The presumed necessity of war? The ever-increasing lethality of weapons conceivably invented for defense and yet so devastating in effect regardless of the purpose for which it is used? Or, is there a whole different line of questioning that should be pursued? One senses that those in the field of psychology hold some advantage. For example: Is genocide the ultimate aberration that confirms the essence of civilization? Or, does it confirm that other nature of man? The argument holds that certain societies may be predisposed to sliding into conditions generative of genocide, while others have built safeguards that prevent such decline. Yet, we are increasingly challenged to think of the treatment of the native populations of the American continent and the excruciating conditions to which they were subjected, and wonder how close was it to genocide? It can be baffling. Was it conquest? Was this conquest carried out so violently that it was tantamount to genocide? Are conquests by purpose, if not by nature, genocidal? And then, what of the Roman Empire? Such questions just might help arrest some of the escapism prevalent in various quarters of the historical discipline. On another level, they have left us with the worrisome question of what to make of history. Scholars or scholarship alone are not the sources of these provocative and difficult queries. Before I located them within the bounds of my intellectual preoccupations, the survivors, I am convinced, were the ones first to pose such arresting questions. Though the historian eventually relies on notional distinctions that segregate ethnic groupings in order to explain conflict, violence, and genocide, for

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the survivors, and I expect even more so for the silenced victims, their suffering and their anger had to do more with the violation of their distinct humanity. Fatalism, however, hardly dismissed the unsettling matter of selection on the basis of identity. That process of selection, and the annihilatory intent of that selection, inflamed a cosmic duality that shred the fabric of humanity and civilization. If the Armenian survivors struggled with any concept, it remained that of evil let loose upon the world and triumphant in the end. In the view of this writer, this mortifying conclusion remains the most compelling and disturbing legacy of the Armenian Genocide. The distance yet to be traveled in order to complete even the first tier of the research is not only a question of the work yet to be done, but also how it is going to be done. The progress registered to date in documenting and studying the Armenian Genocide has been the result of the combined efforts of a few individual scholars and of a handful of organizations that have dedicated resources and manpower to that end. The Zoryan Institute for Contemporary Armenian Research and Documentation, under the leadership of Gerard Libaridian and Greg K. Sarkissian, organized the oral history project for which I carried out interviews with survivors in the early 1980s. That project constituted part of the first systematic undertaking to document the Armenian Genocide by interviewing survivors across the United States. The teams assembled—consisting of a coordinator, a videographer, and an interviewer—fanned out across various states. In the past, fiddling with a tape recorder and its interruptions was a nuisance. The teamwork was so much more efficient, with each member concentrating on the portion of the task he or she was best equipped to handle and, unlike the tape-recorder which had to be positioned between the interviewer and interviewee, the fact that the video camera could be positioned at a distance which permitted me to sit unimpeded face to face with the survivor allowed for more focused discussion. In this regard, the professionalism with which Salpi Ghazarian as the team coordinator, and Raffi Zinzalian as the videographer, conducted themselves and facilitated the interview process was an incentive to carry forth with the project. An uncounted number of weekends was spent, each of us meeting from a different point of the Los Angeles basin at the residence of a survivor. Working as a team also made it easier to cope with the waves of emotion we expected to be deluged by as we listened to one agonizing story

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after another. One survivor, in twenty minutes time, drove all three of us from the room in which we were gathered, so graphic was his description of the death of his mother and the arrival of the crows that began to peck at the corpse, while he, now suddenly a solitary child, wanted to lament over her dead body as the convoy of deportees crept further and further into the desert away from him. His final submission to cannibalism after inexplicably surviving in the depth of a cave in which the convoy was eventually driven and torched exceeded our capacity to listen without reacting. We just fled the room. We abandoned him to his tears as the three of us attempted in the adjoining room to cope with the terror of his story. I noticed that Salpi began carrying a box of tissue paper to subsequent interviews. At the end of an interview with two blind survivors married to each other, when the old man said, turn out the lights on your way out, Raffi, whose job it was to make certain there was proper lighting during the tapings, nearly went to pieces. The darkness in which we left them seized us with its symbolism. Just as importantly, the Zoryan Institute also created a center and a framework for interested scholars to begin discussing aspects of the Genocide on the basis of a broadening scope of understanding. Those discussions sparked new interests, ongoing exploration of the collected evidence, and invited a diverse group of people from an array of disciplines to engage the topic that up to then had defied critical analysis as the widely dispersed Armenian diaspora remained consumed with the emotional legacy of grief, defeat, and dislocation. Among them were the philosopher Garbis Kortian, the sociologists Levon Chorbajian and Anny Bakalian, the political scientist Hratch Zadoyan, the anthropologist Susan Pattie, the specialists in literature Khachig Tololyan and Lorne Shirinian, and his brother, librarian and bibliographer, George Shirinian. The previously mentioned documentation project at the U.S. National Archives was carried out under the auspices of the Armenian Assembly of America. I joined the organization in 1987 for the purpose of organizing its research program. The archival collection project of the abundant American record of diplomatic provenance was in part a function of the convenience of being in Washington, D.C., and having daily access to the U.S. Government’s repository of its valued documents. The project was also one answer to the questioning within certain circles of the American government about the veracity of the events now recognized as the Armenian Geno-

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cide. The passage of time, the silence that descended on the subject, and the expanded interests of the United States as a major world power had erased any recollection of the time when the American public and U.S. officials were well informed of the condition of the Armenian people in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. The coincidence of the growing appreciation of the need for scholarly documentation and a political environment of official equivocation made the research in the U.S. archives a requirement for expanding the base of reliability in the study of the Armenian Genocide. In 1997 the Armenian National Institute (ANI) was founded by the Armenian Assembly of America to bring added focus to the Armenian Genocide. The acronym of the Institute, ANI, invokes the name of the medieval capital of Armenia, the symbol of a once homeland and a demolished civilization. My appointment as the director of the Armenian National Institute has been an opportunity to become even more intensively involved in carrying out projects that one hopes will yield a stronger analytical framework for understanding the problem of genocide in general and that of the Armenian Genocide in specific. It is difficult to summarize in a phrase or two the numerous projects under way at the Institute. Noting the difference ANI is making perhaps may be easier by citing some uncommon examples. For one, the end of the Cold War has significantly altered the political and intellectual environment in which the Armenian Genocide is discussed. The most visible of those changes has been the capacity to communicate freely with the academic community and the people in the new Republic of Armenia. Important sources of information that for so long had been locked up are now accessible and ANI is working with repositories in Armenia to investigate the record that may have been salvaged before the Soviet regime imposed its restrictions on documenting the Armenian Genocide. ANI collects records from sources and archives around the world. Sometimes it also receives material from unexpected quarters. For me, the most serendipitous was the donation of Haigazn Kazarian’s personal papers. Like Guerguerian, Kazarian was one of the earliest documenters of the Armenian Genocide. He, too, wrote mostly in Armenian and left behind a pile of raw material to plow through. Out of that pile I retrieved an extensive chronology of the Armenian Genocide that only a contemporary could have compiled. After editing, updating, annotating, and verifying as much as was feasible, I

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published it on the ANI website. Twenty-five years after his death, Kazarian’s chronology has become one the most frequently consulted sections of a publication whose medium was not even imagined in his lifetime—an unexpected achievement in the information age for a deceased survivor. The Web site created by ANI (www.armenian-genocide.org), intended to provide basic and useful data about the Armenian Genocide, within a matter of months of its posting became the central electronic reference point on the subject. What was initially designed as a service for interested individuals turned into a venue for education. There were several questions to be answered on the proper forms of representing the Armenian Genocide in the new medium. Offering the facts rather than explaining in detail a complex event seemed the best solution. More importantly, considering that the point of “genocide denial” is also to undermine the right of the victimized population to have a say publicly about its fate, the World Wide Web has altered the landscape of information and made the remote accessible and the forgotten recoverable. ANI developed such momentum that, by the beginning of the fourth year of its existence, creating a permanent museum dedicated to the Armenian Genocide had become a viable project as major donors stepped forward to build upon the Institute’s early successes. The scope of this new challenge makes all the previous work seem preliminary to the task presently of assembling and organizing the evidence in a manner that will communicate the instructive value of a piece of history that leaves us pondering so many difficult questions. Lastly, ANI has also built institutional relations with many organizations similarly dedicated to relating to the public the lessons of genocide. At one end of the spectrum, in terms of its size and mission, and close to home, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum needs to be mentioned. At the other end of the spectrum, the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem may be placed. An invitation in 1998 by Israel Charny, director of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, to participate in the development of the Encyclopedia of Genocide, both as a contributor and associate editor, brought to one point of culmination my combined efforts at research and instruction. It was one thing to write a series of entries that explained the main features and characteristics of the Armenian Genocide. It was altogether a different assignment to read and think

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through the entire encyclopedia, and advise the editor-in-chief on methods of improving the whole. At first I was stunned by the immense size of the manuscript. Then I was completely absorbed by the care and concern with which each contributor had written. The sheer number of specialists Charny had persuaded to participate as contributors, about one hundred, and the commitment of my fellow associate editors, Steven Jacobs, Eric Markusen, and Samuel Totten, to create the finest product possible that finally delivered to the public the cumulative knowledge about the subject of genocide, told me that the discipline was about to cross another threshold. I felt honored that I had been asked to join in this monumental effort. Conclusion I am frequently asked if, through the course of my research, I have come across the names of members of my family. Dreadfully I have had to admit that I have encountered their names. Those mentions are unimpressive, insufficient on their own to verify any certain eventuality without the oral knowledge passed down through one’s family. On rare occasion, however, the evidence is unambiguous. There must have been many lists compiled by the Ottoman Turks to prepare the arrest of Armenian men and to organize their early deportation or execution in order to forestall any resistance to the mass deportations to follow. To my knowledge, only one document has turned up containing three such lists. As if foreshadowing the more systematic murder of another people a generation later, eerily they are written in German and found in the Austrian archives. The longest list, dated July 19, 1916, is headed Liste der aus der Stadt Adana Verbannten Armenischen Kaufleute und Handler (List of Shopkeepers and Merchants Exiled from the Province of Adana). In it are named three of my father’s uncles, including his namesake, the one who did not return. My father was an educated man, well read, a proficient writer, conversant in many subjects, but he never found the words to talk about the Genocide. As I reflect back on the few things he said, he communicated mostly through riddles and parables. Only after discerning his methods could one proceed to an understanding of his metaphors. One story based on true events that he recounted had to do with the animal control policy introduced by the Young Turks when they first seized power in Constantinople. They ordered all the stray dogs to be rounded up and placed on a desert island. The weaker

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dogs soon began to starve. The stronger canines turned into cannibals. It took a very long time to understand the layers upon layers of meaning as my father told and retold this story. When I finally became conversant with the subject of the Armenian Genocide, he stopped relating it. It had been his way of obligating filial understanding of anguish beyond words. References Adalian, Rouben P. (1999). “A Conceptual Method for Examining the Consequences of the Armenian Genocide,” pp. 47-59. In Levon Chorbajian and George Shirinian (Eds.) Studies in Comparative Genocide. New York: St. Martin’s Press Inc. Arendt, Hannah (1968). Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York Penguin Books. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1999). Encyclopedia of Genocide. 2 Volumes. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC CLIO Press.

2 Confronting the Armenian Genocide Richard G. Hovannisian Tulare, a small farming community in the San Joaquin Valley of California during the 1930s—the Great Depression, which was followed by the great conflagration, World War II—was where, on a twenty-acre farm, I spent my childhood. The farmer’s year of backbreaking labor culminated in transforming green Thomson seedless grapes into browned raisins—that is, if the September rains held off long enough for the sun-drying process to be completed and the bundles of raisins safely transferred to large 200-pound-capacity wooden boxes. Each season had its smells, but it is the distinct pungent aroma of drying grapes spread out on paper trays that I best remember—together with the fear of coming upon black widow spiders or wasp nests in the thick clusters of grape bunches while picking the fruit with a hooked knife. I also remember the itinerant laborers, mostly Mexicans and newly-arrived indigents called “Okies” from the great dust bowl of Oklahoma, who worked in the fields as entire families, sleeping in the barn or in their own trailers, then moving on to the next harvesting job up and down the Valley. There were in Tulare a dozen or so Armenian families, almost all farmers on small vineyards and nearly all from the same village in historic Armenia, which the Turkish government had swept clean of its Armenian population in 1915. Some of the men had come to the United States before World War I in order to save up enough money to return home and purchase a plot of land and thereby secure their economic freedom. When the war broke out in 1914, however, they were left stranded and could only imagine what dreadful things were 27

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happening to their wives and children in the homeland. And as it happened, the news gradually filtered down that nearly all had perished in the death marches, many having been subjected to unspeakable humiliation and torment before meeting their end. On occasion, a wife was discovered to have survived, although surely all the children, unable to endure the hardships or else carried away by tribesmen, were gone. The rescue and arrival of a survivor was cause for great celebration in the small community. I recall how I was always terrified by the blue tattoos on their hands and faces, painfully implanted as beauty marks by Bedouin or Kurdish tribesmen with whom they had lived for two, three, or four years. For weeks, months, and years, these survivors were a source of information for acquaintances in the United States about when and at what location loved ones were last seen and any other bits of news—a desperate effort to learn something of the final days and demise of the vanished. For those whose fate could not be stated with certainty, there was always a faint hope—held out for decades—that a child or wife may have survived and might someday be found. These experiences were a part of the backdrop of my childhood, yet they did not seem to relate to me directly. I knew that the Armenian women, who toiled along with their husbands in the fields of our great valley, or else supplemented the meager family income by working in fruit canneries and packing houses, would gather together in the late afternoon under the umbrella of shade trees that surrounded each modest farmhouse to gossip and exchange stories. Along with day-to-day mundane topics, they went back to their personal ordeals, what they had seen, how they had survived, whom they had lost, how terrible the Turks had been, or what compassion a Muslim notable had shown, and in what way they had been rescued. Strangely, there was often laughter with the tears. I did not realize at the time, as I played near where my grandmother sat with the other women, sipping “Turkish” coffee, that they were indeed engaging in the only therapy that was then available to the victims. The world was trying to forget about the “starving Armenians,” just as it had turned away from its pledges to bring the perpetrators to justice and to restore and rehabilitate the remaining Armenians. Geopolitical and economic factors took precedence over humanitarian considerations, and thus the survivors were left to talk to one another, to laugh and to weep over their tribulations, and to

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move on in eking out an existence in a new country that had little tolerance for “old-world” issues or “hyphenated” Americans. I was certain that I was not a hyphenated American. In fact, like most others of my generation, even though we were the children of survivors or of first-generation immigrants, the misfortunes of our elder generation seemed to have little bearing on our lives. It was something that had occurred far away and a very long time ago (all of ten to twenty years). We knew that the Turks were cruel and evil, and that there had been indescribable suffering, but on the other hand we were content having been born Americans, attending public schools and doing what all the other children were doing, whether they were Portuguese, Italians, Okies, or “real Americans” of AngloGermanic stock. We did not rebel against the elder generation or their memories; we simply tuned them out. Even if they spoke of the past—and some never did—we were adept at not listening, not registering, not personalizing that which we were hearing. We enjoyed the Armenian Sunday picnics at the Kings River, a gathering place of 5,000 or more Armenians from throughout the San Joaquin Valley, with the tantalizing aroma of skewered “shish kebab” filling the air, the sounds of oriental music drifting over the grounds, and friends intermingling. But once again, the youth quickly separated from their seniors and went off toward the river for an afternoon relatively free of parental control—since they considered us to be on safe grounds with safe people. Despite my Americanization, I was still conscious of my Armenian background. My fascination with geography, history, and politics often left me disappointed: I knew that the Armenians were an ancient people, that for centuries they had lived on a world crossroad, that they had a separate national church and a rich culture, but I could not find these in any textbook. There was no Armenian flag or Armenian stamp displayed on the corresponding pages in dictionaries and encyclopedias. So my people—the Armenian people—were actually not important, perhaps even non-existent from the point of view of the world that really counts. But, of course, how could they have been significant if they had been massacred and driven out of the biblical land of Ararat? It was this sense of deprivation, even as I attended a Baptist church and was accepted as an equal in our small community—unlike the ugly prejudice and discrimination against Armenians forty-five miles

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up Highway 99 in Fresno—that drew me to romantic notions. I imagined an independent Armenian state, with its own flag and stamps and representatives in international organizations. It was this idealism that later propelled me to Beirut, Lebanon, after I had received a B.A. in history and a teaching credential at the University of California, Berkeley, so that I could learn to read the Armenian language with its strange-looking, fifth-century script. An academic year in Beirut (1955-56) was a turning point, for I discovered that Armenian was something more than a dead or disappearing language spoken in various dialectical forms by an older generation of immigrants, understood partially by their children, and virtually unknown to their grandchildren. Here, in the Middle East, it was a thriving language of everyday life, of commerce and of education, and of social discourse among children and adults alike. Yes, this was an Arab country, but the large Armenian minority community lived largely apart with much freedom and cultural autonomy. When I returned to the United States a few months later, I not only had a very enriched cultural experience, including visits to Jerusalem and other major Middle Eastern cities and a trip home through fifteen Asian countries, but I was now fortified with a reading knowledge of Armenian. That ability allowed me to pursue advanced degrees by conducting research on the history of the first independent Armenian state in modern times, the republic that was created shortly after the genocide in the waning months of World War I when the victorious Allied Powers were all pledged to a separate national existence for the Armenian people. Such lofty declarations turned into a trail of broken promises, and the small Armenian state did not endure, nor were the refugees scattered around the world ever allowed to return to their homes in what became the Republic of Turkey. Only the easternmost periphery of historic Armenia continued to exist, but just as a dependent Soviet state on 11,500 square miles of mountainous terrain. Still, the ideal of independence captured my imagination, motivating me to make the history of the short-lived Armenian republic the subject of my M.A. thesis (University of California, Berkeley, 1958) and Ph.D. dissertation (University of California, Los Angeles, 1966). The genocide was ever present in that history, but it was not central to my research and writing. I now realize that I came upon the academic scene at a very propitious moment, when, for the first time, a few American universities decided to introduce courses in Armenian language, literature,

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and history. It was a period of growth of area studies centers, and at UCLA, the founder of the Center for Near Eastern Studies, Gustave von Grunebaum, wanted to make his program all the more distinctive by including at least one Eastern Christian culture. Hence, beginning in 1960, solitary courses in Armenian language and history were offered at UCLA. The next year, while I was teaching social studies and English in the Fresno City Schools with an M.A. degree, Professor von Grunebaum asked me to organize UCLA extension classes in Armenian history and civilization as an outreach program to the San Joaquin Valley. Then, in 1962, he invited me to Los Angeles to serve as a lecturer in Armenian Studies at UCLA itself. That was my entry into Armenian academic life and, as it happened, it became permanent, even though I had never taken a formal course in the field. After a year I enrolled in the Ph.D. program while continuing to teach at UCLA. There was still no graduate program in Armenian history in the United States, so I chose as my major fields Near Eastern and Russian/Soviet history, writing my dissertation nonetheless on the establishment of the Armenian republic in 1918. I was sufficiently focused to complete within three years all the Ph.D. coursework and a lengthy dissertation based largely on hitherto unused archival sources. I continued to serve as an instructor of Armenian history at UCLA through the 1960s, but concurrently accepted my first full-time college academic position at Mount Saint Mary’s College, only a few miles away. There, I truly learned history by joining a four-member department that required me to prepare and teach some sixteen courses in a three-year cycle. It was a marvelous experience, and it was with sadness, but nonetheless excitement, that I returned fulltime to UCLA in 1969 as an associate professor of Armenian and Near Eastern History, followed by promotion to a full professorship in 1972, and appointment, in 1986, as the first holder of the Armenian Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Armenian History. Meanwhile, I pursued my main field of study, that is, the history of the Armenian republic, a project completed only after thirty years with the publication in 1996 of the final two volumes of a five-volume study. These years earned me some prominence in Near Eastern studies, making me a frequent participant in national and international conferences and symposia, radio, and television programs, and community forums on subjects related to modern Armenian history, including the Armenian Genocide.

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In 1965 I was active in a community-wide effort to erect a memorial monument on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the genocide. The dedication of the monument in a municipal park in Montebello, California, was a significant event, not only because it drew many high-ranking officials and thousands of survivors and their extended families but also because it was the first time that such a monument had been constructed on public property. The United States Marine Corps Band played, and many federal and state officials attended. Governor Ronald Reagan spoke at the monument the next year, but then things suddenly changed. The band was no longer present at the annual commemoration held on April 24, the day marking the onset of the genocide, and federal officials were uneasy with the event. There had been protests to the U.S. Department of State by the Turkish government regarding both the commemoration and the seemingly official approval implied by the presence of the Marine Corps Band. That was enough for all such military bands thereafter to have “previous engagements” when it came to Armenian remembrance. Still, it was not until the 1970s that I was drawn directly into the contest between remembrance and denial. This was sparked by what may be considered an innocuous report by the rapporteur of the United Nations Subcommission on the Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities (United Nations, 1973). In presenting a historical overview of human rights violations and past instances of man’s inhumanity to man, the rapporteur included one sentence as paragraph 30 of his report: Passing to the modern era, one may note the existence of relatively full documentation dealing with the massacres of Armenians, which have been described as “the first case of genocide in the twentieth century.” (p. 10)

There was no identification of the perpetrator or even the location of the massacres, yet the mere mention of an Armenian genocide was sufficient for the Turkish government and its agencies to begin an all-out effort to excise the paragraph from the report. As was to happen repeatedly thereafter, Turkey protested to its NATO partners against any and all such inferences, playing upon its key geopolitical position and role as a bulwark against communism and the Soviet Union, as well as its importance in international trade and commerce. When, after a lengthy process, the rapporteur presented his final report in 1978, the historical section had been abridged to be-

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gin with the Hitler era (United Nations, 1978; Kuper, 1981, pp. 219220). The intensive maneuvers to delete a brief reference to a past instance of mass killing without placing blame on any existing state or people compounded the frustration and sense of helplessness of the Armenian diasporan communities. I remember attending a meeting of interested individuals in Los Angeles shortly thereafter, in which there was speech after speech but no clear strategy or plan of action. Exasperated with such meetings, of which this was not the first, I decided that I would try to do something on my own. Using the library card catalogs (pre-computer age) and other sources, I put together a bibliography of books in Western languages relating to the Armenian Genocide: memoirs; eye-witness accounts, especially by non-Armenians; general studies; and archival materials. It was a time-consuming labor, resulting in the compilation of several hundred titles that were published in a forty-page booklet as The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography Relating to the Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 1915-1923 (Hovannisian, 1978). In retrospect, I would not today use the word “holocaust,” as it has taken on a specific meaning. In fact, however, this very term, along with “inferno” and other synonyms denoting incineration, was used in 1915-16 to describe the fate of the Armenian deportees in the consuming deserts of inner Syria and Mesopotamia. As for the United Nations, fortunately a new, committed rapporteur, Benjamin Whitaker, taking advantage of a temporary softening of U.S. policy during the Carter administration, ultimately succeeded in reinserting reference to the Armenian Genocide in a revised and updated report submitted to the Commission on Human Rights (United Nations, 1985). It was the Turkish government’s campaign of denial that pushed me into the arena of Armenian Genocide studies through what may be called the back door. I had not chosen this depressing subject. It was the reprehensible action of a government to wipe clean the slate of history, just as its predecessor had wiped clean an entire people, that aroused in me a sense of moral indignation and a commitment to engage in the struggle of memory against forgetting despite the highly unfavorable odds. Thereafter, issues relating to the Armenian Genocide were always present although not foremost in my endeavors. As I continued to research and draft my multivolume series on the Republic

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of Armenia, I made time to speak and to pen brief articles on the genocide and to seek ways to restore this shattering event to world consciousness, much as was occurring with the Holocaust. It was disconcerting that a number of American scholars were lending themselves to the work of denial. Certain academics who viewed history primarily from the perspective of centers of power and had lived and studied in Turkey, who felt emotional or personal bonds with the country, and who wished to rectify unjust Western stereotypes, went to the opposite extreme by rationalizing or relativizing the treatment of subject nationalities and especially the persecution of the Armenian people. One study in particular, the two-volume History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey written by Stanford Shaw (1977), with the second volume co-authored with his wife, Ezel Kural Shaw, drew together all previous denial arguments under a seemingly scholarly facade, including footnotes and bibliographic references. The Armenian Genocide was turned into a general wartime misfortune, with the blame laid primarily on the victims themselves and the scope of the calamity relativized as being not disproportional to the losses suffered by other elements of the population. There were in this and subsequent publications by Shaw and his adherents (especially Heath Lowry and Justin McCarthy) striking similarities to the arguments used in denial of the Holocaust: labeling the alleged genocide as a myth created for wartime propaganda, portraying the presumed victims as having been real security threats, emphasizing the absence of intent to harm the affected group, discounting eye-witness accounts and survivor testimony, asserting that whatever deaths occurred were from the same causes that carried away all peoples living in the region, minimizing the number of victims, and accusing those demanding recognition of the crime as being motivated by the prospect of political and economic gain. Such disinformation caused me to engage the deniers, in spoken word and writing, but I soon found that deniers are shameless and, in the face of overwhelming evidence disproving their thesis, find excuses for everything. They are skilled in committing acts of omission and commission. For example, the two-volume work by Shaw cites certain laws and decrees by the Turkish government arranging for the safe “transport” of the Armenians to “relocation centers” and even for making an inventory of goods and properties so that income from their rental or sale might be held in trust for the

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Armenians until they were able to return “after the crisis had passed.” What the author does not tell the reader, of course, is that these are contrived documents and that what actually took place was the exact opposite—mass murder and absolute dispossession. It is as if he had never heard of code words or dual orders—one official and public and the other unwritten and executed. What I found most disturbing was that on university campuses, most ardent champions of academic freedom fail to show commensurate concern about academic integrity. It is as if scholars should be allowed to lie so long as they claim that they believe what they say to be the truth. Rationalization and relativization of the Armenian Genocide has reached such proportions that often producers of radio or television programs, reporters, and publishers feel that it is a professional obligation to present “the other side” of a “controversy.” They are reticent to air programs touching on the Armenian calamity because of the organized complaints and protests that follow. When such programming is allowed, there is usually a disclaimer and/or time made available for a rebuttal. While Holocaust scholars may look with contempt upon deniers, ignore denial literature in their studies, and are usually spared from the outrageous situation of having to appear on programs with antisemitic rationalizers, relativizers, and trivializers, the same cannot be said of anyone who deals with the Armenian Genocide. I am sometimes invited to take part in a program to debate with deniers. It has happened that I had not even been informed in advance, and find that “the other side” is brought in unannounced as a fait accompli, or else has been asked to speak just after my segment has concluded. A dilemma is posed whether to appear in such venues if this is the price required for discussing the subject at all. I have come to the position that the actuality of the Armenian Genocide is not debatable, no more so than the reality of World War I. I am willing to discuss causes, effects, and means of resolution but not whether there was intentional, organized mass killing. Then, again, are not the deniers successful if producers or executives scratch a program because of the resolute unwillingness to share the podium with negationists? Some of my colleagues think it better to take any opportunity and to rely on the massive, multifaceted evidence to expose the deception. But deniers have learned their craft well and, as classical historian and human rights activist Pierre Vidal-Naquet rightly observes, have an explanation for anything and everything

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that puts the lie to their arguments. They revel at achieving even a modicum of recognition and legitimacy. The first book that I edited on the Armenian Genocide was the outgrowth once again of attempts to suppress discussion of the subject. In 1982 Professors Israel Charny and Shamai Davidson organized an international conference on genocide in Tel Aviv. Of the more than 200 scheduled papers, fewer than ten dealt with the Armenian experience, and these focused mainly on literature, religion, and ethics. Yet the mere appearance of the words “Armenian genocide” in a pre-conference news story was sufficient for the Turkish government to initiate varied forms of pressure to have the Armenian-related papers deleted from the program, ultimately engaging in blackmail that reportedly compromised the safety of Jews living in Turkey, and especially of Iranian Jews, by threatening to close the frontier to those trying to escape overland through Turkey to other destinations. The weeks of wrangling between the Turkish and Israeli governments and between Israeli officials and the conference organizers culminated in withdrawal of Elie Wiesel as honorary chairman and of state and university support for the gathering (Charny, 1983). The Israeli Consulate in New York even contacted some Jewish American participants to urge them to cancel their trip. The situation was scandalous and humiliating, ironically turning the Armenians, who were victims, into the spoilers of a long-planned and eagerly-awaited international conference. The Tel Aviv conference took place without official sponsorship and without nearly half of the scheduled speakers, yet it was extremely valuable both in content and as a learning experience about the lengths to which perpetrator regimes and their successors are willing to go in order to avoid facing up to their deeds and their history. It was in the aftermath of that disgraceful episode that I solicited the papers pertaining to the Armenian Genocide and, adding several new contributions, submitted the collection for publication to Transaction Publishers, headed by Irving Louis Horowitz, at Rutgers University. That there is growing interest in this “forgotten genocide” seems to have been demonstrated by the fact that The Armenian Genocide in Perspective (Hovannisian, 1986) rapidly went through five successive printings. The proceedings of a subsequent conference I organized at UCLA and California State University, Sacramento in 1990, were published

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by St. Martin’s Press as The Armenian Genocide: History, Politics, Ethics (Hovannisian, 1992), and a third volume was released by Wayne State University Press as Remembrance and Denial: The Case of the Armenian Genocide (Hovannisian, 1998). During the years that these volumes were being produced, I was also engaged in collecting survivor testimony. Armenian oral history began very late, at a time when most adult survivors of the 1915 catastrophe had already passed from the scene, taking with them the rich detail of life in all its aspects before, during, and after the genocide. By the 1970s and 1980s when the majority of these interviews were conducted, we were dealing with the youth of 1915, whose grasp of minutia regarding social, economic, and cultural issues was far less complete than that of the bygone generation, but who nonetheless retained vivid personal memories of their own experiences during the deportations and massacres. I undertook the interviews as an individual endeavor, starting with a heavy reel-to-reel tape recorder, and as technology advanced, ending up with a very light cassette recorder. I was able to expand the project by initiating an academic course on Armenian Oral History and bringing UCLA students into the program. The class gave the student interviewers an intense and personal learning experience while furthering my objective of gathering as much eye-witness testimony as possible before the last of the survivors was gone. In view of the current technological revolution, I now can only regret that the more than 800 interviews were not done with video equipment. At the time, however, the audio interview was both simple and practical, as students went into the homes of the survivors in order to record in a natural environment with the least possible distraction. Hence, while much can be learned from the tones and fluctuations of voice, the visual aspect is absent. The emphasis has been on the urgency of the gathering process; there now remains the task of transcribing and translating the interviews and of transferring the magnetic tapes to a newer and safer medium for long-term preservation. Most of the interviews last about two hours, with a significant number three to four hours and a few as long as eight. Although the progression of the interview was planned so that the survivor would first speak about family and community and about life before the genocide, few had the patience to be questioned in depth about these aspects. For them, the defining moment was 1915 and all the trauma associated with the total disruption of the lives they had known.

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Brushing aside the general questions with terse answers, they rushed to the year 1915 as if to unburden themselves of a crippling experience, which, with rare exception, they had not recorded anywhere but was ever present. The several hundred interviews serve to reinforce the evidence that the genocidal process was carefully planned and coordinated. Survivors originating in towns and villages hundreds of miles apart were subjected to the same sequence of events: the orders and preparations for deportation, the separation and slaughter of the adult male population, the ambushes in mountain passes and the killing fields at river crossings, and the death marches of the women and children toward the deserts of Syria and Mesopotamia. There are also some stories of intervention by a “good” Turk, Kurd, or nomadic tribesman that allowed the individual to escape death. The survivor testimony alone demonstrates the intent and scope of the genocide but becomes all the more powerful when used in conjunction with primary documentation and non-Armenian eyewitness accounts. The universal lessons of the Armenian Genocide have been little utilized. For years my students have told me that they had never heard of the calamity, even in classes relating to modern European and Near Eastern history, including World War I. The need to reach out to teachers and students has long been an abiding concern. I was therefore gratified that the Facing History and Ourselves Foundation (FHAO), which tries to promote tolerance and moral and ethical values through encouraging students to face history and themselves, began by using as case studies the Holocaust and to a lesser measure the Armenian Genocide. I was involved with co-directors of FHAO Margot Strom and Bill Parsons at the central office in Brookline, Massachusetts in preparing the chapter on the Armenians, which was included in the first resource book Facing History and Ourselves: Holocaust and Human Behavior (1982). The chapter was omitted in the revised edition, although some of the material has been integrated into other sections of the book. Facing History and Ourselves, now a national organization with several regional offices, reaches thousands of students. Its summer institutes are directed toward training teachers and strengthening their commitment to use the historical experience to help students face the issues of prejudice, conformity, obedience, and judgment. An Armenian leitmotiv is still present. Most teachers, like most students, have little or no exposure to the Armenian Genocide. The erasure of

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memory has been so thorough that I often find teachers in the institutes wondering why they had never known of the issue. This sentiment may encourage some to investigate the genocide more deeply, but there is also the negative factor of information overload and a reluctance of many instructors to broach a subject about which they are not well versed and about which they may be challenged by deniers. Hopefully, the directors of Facing History and Ourselves will find ways of enhancing the Armenian component in the vital consciousness-raising objectives of the organization. This said, it should also be noted that probably more teachers and students are today made aware of the Armenian Genocide through Facing History than through any other existing educational program. Subtle, actually sometimes acute, tension exists among scholars engaged in the study of genocide regarding definitions and comparisons. Some who feel that the uniqueness or special position of the Holocaust may be compromised by comparisons with other genocides make a clear distinction between the Armenian experience in World War I and the Jewish experience in War II. They withhold the label of genocide from the Armenian extirpation, substituting words such as “tragedy” or “calamity,” taking care at the same time to deplore the actions of the perpetrators and to empathize with the victims. Steven Katz (1994, p. 22) represents the extreme among such scholars, but others, too, such as Michael Marrus (1987, pp. 20-23), take pains to differentiate between the totality of the Jewish persecutions and what they perceive as the less than complete or intended destruction of the Armenian people. I find this position troubling, for while antisemitism may be a unique phenomenon, racial or religious prejudice and victimization are not, nor is the objective of total eradication a singular occurrence. Deniers do their utmost to create and broaden chasms by attesting to the truth and reality of the one case while denouncing as fraud the other case and feigning great concern about the commingling of an actual instance with a mythical invention of genocide. It is therefore all the more gratifying that the staunchest advocates of inclusion of the Armenian Genocide in various teaching programs are themselves Holocaust scholars, among others Yair Auron, Frank Chalk, Israel Charny, Helen Fein, Stephen Feinstein, Kurt Jonassohn, Robert Melson, Ervin Staub, and the editors of this volume, Samuel Totten and Steven Jacobs.

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Equivocation about labeling the Armenian deportations and massacres as genocide is not limited to certain Holocaust scholars. It has become widespread among specialists in Middle Eastern studies, many of whom seem to feel a need to explain the present by rationalizing the past. Hence, in a recently-published handbook, The Middle East, in the Dushkin/McGraw-Hill Global Studies series, William Spencer (1998) acknowledges that the great majority of Armenians were forced to “leave” their homeland and that many thousands died during the “emigration” but rationalizes that the Turkish government suspected them of aiding the invading Russian armies. He complains that, although the Republic of Turkey “has consistently disclaimed responsibility for all wartime actions of its Ottoman predecessor,” Armenian terrorist groups nonetheless targeted a number of Turkish diplomats in the 1970s and 1980s (pp. 144-145). Spencer (1998) makes no mention of the anguish of the survivors or the many years of organized state denial by the Turkish government. Rather, he appends an article on Islam by Ali Mazrui (1997) of SUNY, Binghamton, which appeared in Foreign Affairs, emphasizing the tolerance of Islam. Though conceding that during the deportations hundreds of thousands of Armenians, perhaps as many as a million, “died of starvation or were murdered on the way” (p. 129), Mazrui (1997) mitigates the enormity of the crime by characterizing it as an aberration caused in part by the fact that the Armenians had provoked Turkey. He further argues: “Nor is the expulsion of a people from a territory, however disastrous its consequences, equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust” (Mazrui, 1997, p. 129). He reminds the reader that, after all, thousands of lives were lost during the “movement of people” between India and Pakistan following partition in 1947, but this was not systematic killing (Mazrui, 1997, p. 129). So, Armenian deaths are not comparable to Jewish deaths; rather, they are akin to intercommunal riots or an unfortunate consequence of “the movement of people.” And this example is far from being the worst case of a scholar, either through ignorance, misinformation, or predisposition, seeking to rationalize an unfortunate “incident” as being the result of “provocation.” Tellingly, the bibliography in The Middle East intended for broad classroom application includes not a single source relating to Armenian history or the Armenian Genocide but does list the works of deniers. The past is conveniently shaped to fit a contemporary agenda.

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In considering how to define genocide and to explain the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, I cannot say that I was strongly influenced by any single school of thought, if such exists. It is clear that most genocides are multi-causal and that even in ideologically-driven genocides there are complex social, economic, and political factors. Nonetheless, I discovered that my own fundamental findings on the subject were succinctly captured in Helen Fein’s (1979) Accounting for Genocide: The victims of twentieth-century premeditated genocide—the Jews, the Gypsies, the Armenians—were murdered in order to fulfill the state’s design for a new order... War was used in both cases…to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite’s formula by eliminating the groups conceived of as alien, enemies by definition (pp. 2930).

Here is a critical statement—a powerful underlying motive for attempts to do away with “the other.” Despite the dangers and risks involved in making simplified comparisons, it is possible to teach about genocide by historical linkages. In making a bridge between the plight of the Armenians and certain aspects of United States history, one may use slavery or the civil rights movement to demonstrate that those seeking equality or enforcement of laws granting equal rights are in traditional societies often regarded as troublemakers or even insurgents, calling down upon themselves righteous wrath and punishment. In such societies the fear of losing the old way of life may spawn violence in a desperate effort to preserve the status quo, and when this sense of extreme crisis is shared by the government the result may be organized pogroms or massacres. Hence, Abdul-Hamid II, the last significant sultan of the Ottoman Empire, unleashed a series of massacres against his Armenian subjects in 1894-96, resulting in the death of more than 100,000 persons, the economic ruin of many more, the forced religious conversion of entire villages, and the progression of ethnic cleansing through the flight of countless townspeople and villagers. The vulnerability of the Armenians had been tested and proved, for the worldwide reaction was one of vocal outrage without any firm measures to deal with the root cause of the problem. On the basis of the definition adopted by the United Nations in its Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the massacres of 1894-96 qualify as genocide, yet I tend to adhere to a more rigid definition, that is, the large-scale systematic destruction of the group. Although Abdul-Hamid may have resolved

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to kill a part of the Armenians, drive another part from the empire, and terrify the remainder into abject submission, he did not, I believe, intend to expunge all Armenians from his realm. In that way he fits the stereotype of a traditional ruler resorting to radical measures in a frantic and failing effort to keep afloat his floundering ship of state. The Young Turks who overthrew Abdul-Hamid in 1908 on the platform of liberty, equality, and justice would become the actual instruments of upgrading pogrom to genocide. The Young Turk revolution soon went sour, and in 1913 the extreme chauvinistic wing of the party seized power in a coup d’état. Having embraced the exclusivist ideology of Turkism or Turanism, this dictatorial clique waited for the opportunity to resolve the Armenian Question. World War I provided the Young Turks the desired cover under which to launch an internal war against the Armenian citizens of the empire while joining the German Empire in the external war against the Allied powers. It was their goal to supplant the multiracial, multi-religious Ottoman Empire with a Turkic empire based on one people and one religion. Those who fell outside this new definition were to be extruded. Ideology enhanced with long-standing racial and religious prejudices and the additional enticement of great economic gain facilitated the genocidal process, in which a large segment of the civilian population participated. How appropriate Helen Fein’s (1979) simple conclusion: “War was used in both cases to transform the nation to correspond to the ruling elite’s formula by eliminating the groups conceived of as alien, enemies by definition” (pp. 29-30). My introduction to the comparative study of genocide was at the urging of my late colleague at UCLA, Leo Kuper. Here was an idealist, altruist, and gentle man in the purest sense of the words. Softspoken, courteous, and thoughtful, he was also passionate in his struggle against prejudice, injustice, and especially the scourge of genocide. It was at his behest that in the 1980s we submitted a proposal to teach in UCLA’s “Experimental College” an innovative course on genocides from antiquity to the present, with emphasis on the colonial and post-colonial periods. During three years of participation in the project, I was impressed by the fact that the students, though having no previous academic exposure to the subject, became highly motivated and engaged. Through their anonymous evaluations they testified that the course had provided one of the

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most valuable learning experiences that they would take with them as they moved beyond the university. In recent years I have offered the comparative study of genocide as a colloquium through the Division of Honors at UCLA. As the course is limited to forty students, there is a scramble to enroll and a very long wait list. By word of mouth, students pass on their impressions about the importance and value of the colloquium, even though it requires extensive reading, an essay on Franz Werfel’s (1934) The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, and a substantial research paper on one of the particular or comparative aspects of genocides. The students’ reaction year after year is one of questioning why none of this material, save perhaps for the Holocaust, has been included in their preuniversity education or even in other university courses in the social sciences. Sometimes they voice frustration over the failure of the world community to prevent new instances of mass killing and wonder how individuals can make a difference, but they leave the colloquium with heightened consciousness and often a volunteered declaration that what they have gained has helped to raise their sensitivity to the dark side of human activity and to the need for personal involvement and collective preventive measures. There still remains the challenge of introducing this difficult subject to middle school and high school students. Facing History and Ourselves is gradually expanding, and units on the Holocaust have been adopted in a significant number of school districts and private educational institutions. By and large, however, the issue is still avoided or absent. This is especially the case when it comes to the Armenian Genocide. Several state boards of education, namely California, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, have authorized inclusion of the topic in human rights and genocide curriculum guidelines, yet implementation has been haphazard at best and most social studies teachers still do not touch the subject. In the Armenian case, this is complicated further, because a foreign government and its lobbying arms in the United States use various forms of coercion to delete or dilute the Armenian portion from the model curricula. These tactics, including the unleashing of a barrage of denial literature and threats of lawsuits, regretfully coupled sometimes with the reluctance of adherents of the uniqueness viewpoint to consider the victimization of other peoples, have contributed to diminution or neglect of the Armenian component. But even more problematic is the inadequate preparation of teachers to introduce

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the new material and yet another unit in what already is a crowded curriculum. This situation makes in-service training programs all the more vital. Teachers must also learn how to deal with deniers and denial literature and to secure the firm support of their administration to rebuff attempts at intimidation. It takes determination and conviction. And what of legal remedies for recognition and against denial of genocide? In France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and Canada legislation has been adopted prohibiting the denial of the Holocaust. Individuals have actually been convicted on the charge, and the trend is likely to continue in other countries despite the complaints of civil libertarians that such restrictive legislation infringes on the freedom of speech. The suggestion to broaden these regulations or to pass new laws to include the Armenian case runs the risk of evoking a backlash. When in 1994 Armenian organizations and a human rights league in France brought suit against historian Bernard Lewis, who, in an interview with Le Monde on November 16, 1993 (p. 1), and again, on January 1, 1994 (p. 2), denied and rationalized the Armenian Genocide, insisting there is no hard evidence of the Turkish government’s intent to destroy the Armenian population, a complex legal situation evolved. A criminal court allowed expert witnesses to testify about the genocide before ruling that it had no jurisdiction to act in the matter, because the Gayssot law making it punishable to deny crimes against humanity committed during World War II could not be applied to earlier periods. Thereafter, in mid-1995, a civil tribunal did hear the case and accorded Armenians solace and satisfaction by slapping Lewis on the wrist with a token fine for failure to adhere to the professional responsibility to give due consideration to the large corpus of evidence contrary to his views, thereby causing severe mental anguish to Armenian survivors and their descendants (Tribunal, 1995; Le Monde, 1995, p. 11). When the verdict was published, a chorus of protest sounded from certain quarters within the French intellectual community, and from as far away as the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal (August 28, 1995)—in the first instance because of the principle of freedom of speech, and in the second because of the unacceptability of punishing an eminent scholar for expressing an opinion about a “bona fide controversy” (p. A-11). Armenians stand in awe and envy each time a Holocaust denier is reprimanded or convicted and when, even after a half century, restitution is demanded and received by Holo-

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caust survivors and/or the state of Israel. Similar claims by the Armenians are deemed non-germane and outdated, and even the call for worldwide recognition of the crime and acts of contrition by the successor to the perpetrator regime seems to be asking too much. Yet the attraction of legal action remains strong, and this avenue will surely continue to be pursued by Armenian advocacy groups. In fact, at the beginning of this new century there has been a little forward motion both in gaining international reaffirmation of the Armenian genocide and prompting—through class-action law suits— at least one life insurance company to seek an out-of-court settlement relative to Armenian policy holders who perished as a result of the deportations and massacres. It may be appropriate to conclude this personal essay with the caveats of Ervin Staub. In his study of perpetrators and survivors, Staub (1989) notes that genocide shapes not only the outlook of the immediate victims but also of subsequent generations. Victim groups, rather than viewing the world as a good place with a sense of order, are filled with mistrust, with fear, and with foreboding. It becomes essential, therefore, for victims to understand that the terrible events are not normal but rather are cruel aberrations of an otherwise positive world order. But continued denial makes this impossible and reinforces feelings of insecurity, abandonment, and betrayal. To overcome these obstacles, the victim group needs to share its sense of pain and sorrow, to articulate its outrage, and especially to receive expressions of regret and apology from the perpetrator side. Only then can a sense of justice and correctness be restored. Until then, the rage continues and the healing process is stymied. For the descendants of the perpetrators, it is equally important to engage in introspection, to confront and learn from their history, to question how such crimes could have occurred, and to attain redemption through appropriate actions, the first of which is facing and admitting the truth. If they are unable or unwilling to do this and instead try to propagate a self-righteous image, then they may again be placed on the path toward the victimization of other groups. Milan Kundera (1981) has written that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting (p. 10). And the late Terrence Des Pres (1986) has added that national catastrophes can be survived only if those to whom disaster happens can recover themselves through knowing the truth of their suffering. He concludes: “Kundera is right; against historical crimes we fight as best

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we can, and a cardinal part of this engagement is the struggle of memory against forgetting” (pp. 10-11). I can only humbly add my voice to those of such eminent writers and humanists.

3 Vita Felix, Via Dolorosa: An Academic Journey Towards Genocide Henry R. Huttenbach The personal and the professional are always intimately though not always visibly intertwined. That is not the case with my odyssey towards the study of genocide as a primary academic involvement, despite interest, training, and full commitment to other fields. The path was not a subtle one; each step can easily be retraced with a minimum of probing into that psychological realm, the nexus where basic thought and primary emotions mingle. Retrospectively, it all began very suddenly and searingly, simultaneously in the form of a lasting shock and a deeply ingrained memory. An Anecdote by Way of Introduction It was Fastnacht (the Catholic pre-Lenten Carnival). The place was Mannheim, Germany, and the time was 1936, year four of the Third Reich. The little boy was five and a half. He was dressed as a pink rabbit, a costume lovingly sewn by his mother, and he was standing on the sidewalk of No. 17 Feuerbach Street expecting to play with his neighborhood friends. It was a cool sunny and slightly windy day. A few minutes later, three boys, one slightly older, jubilantly spilled out of the apartment house, dressed as Cowboys and Indians. “Catch the rabbit!” they squealed. They grabbed him, and while the cowboy tied him to a lamppost, the Indians crumpled newspaper at his feet, lit a match and set the paper aflame. It all happened so fast, he had had no time to flee or react as they danced around him, chanting 47

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gleefully, “Brenn! Judebub, brenn!” (Burn! Jew-boy, burn!) At that very moment, his mother rushed out. I was that little boy, and the macabre experience left a permanent residue of fear and puzzlement. At first, in childhood, it was a deep fear of children and inchoate confusion over the behavior of those “friends.” Later, in adulthood, it became a general fear and suspicion of anyone with an accompanying haunting question, “Who had taught those children to hate and harm Jews?” Was it solely their idea? Or did they learn it from their parents? How did they know I was Jewish for I scarcely knew it myself? (So much for assimilation!) Did they really hate me? And why? Did they truly wish to cause me serious harm? It has been sixty-five years; yet the anxiety and the questions remain as fresh as then. This was my first encounter with racist hatred and potentially lethal violence, the stuff—a handful of years later—of what became fully-fledged Nazi-inspired genocide. Though I did not realize it then, I had looked, uncomprehending, into the abyss. There had been and would be, of course, other such experiences, all of them to become indelible, lifetime companions; but the one narrated above remains the most potent and symbolic. I still “see” that late winter scene in 1936 whenever I hear young children yelp with delight. As for my mother’s desperate rescue of her only child, I think back on my parents’ sole, obsessive, raison d’être from 1933 to war’s end in 1945—to bring their son to safety, anywhere, anyhow, like so many tens of thousands of others then, and sadly, now. Whether Croats fleeing from Serbs or Serbs from Croats, the face of genocide is the same. Under the Damoclean sword of extermination, all helpless, frantic parents look alike, all tormented, innocent children are like that little boy in Mannheim in 1936. “It should not happen again” goes the refrain; and still it does, again and again, politicians looking on, piously inactive; academics writing from afar, impotent. The Early Years, 1930-1945 Despite the emerging tragedy that ultimately engulfed all of Europe, mine was, nevertheless, a fulfilled childhood, a cornucopia of enriching experiences. Home-life, wherever, was that of a typical, assimilated, middle-class German Jewish family: much reading, daily chamber music, and endless multi-lingual conversations, no matter where—whether in Hitler’s Germany (1930-1936); in Mussolini’s

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Italy (1936-1939); or wartime England (1939-1945). We Central European émigrés lived vital lives in exile, despite, or perhaps because of, being uprooted, especially in World War II London. Throughout those years, the Angel of Death was never far away. It was ever present in Nazi Germany, of course, but also in Fascist Italy in the form of Gestapo agents ferreting out German Jews to be forcibly returned to Germany after the signing of the Axis Pact: several friends were arrested and disappeared at the German-Swiss border. We survived, living underground until a British ship, the Llangyby Castle, from India made a stop in Genoa. Thereafter the Angel of Wrath came in the form of bombs, V1s and V2 missiles. With war’s end, my family had been spared—miraculously?—and then came the wrenching photographs, the newsreels, and the reports of incalculable mass death—no genocide then in our vocabulary. But there were other words picked up over the darkening years: SA, SS, Boycott, Kristallnacht, Dachau, Buchenwald, Theresienstadt, Aryan, stateless, Mischling, German quota, visa, affidavit, enemy alien, refugee, internment, and, everywhere, ubiquitous antisemitism, like a permanent traveling companion warning not to abandon fear and the oppressive questions of a once five and a half year old. Intellectual Awakening 1945-1970 After the war, the U.S. beckoned, hospitably, though, inexplicably: it had made itself unreachable before the war when it was a matter of collective life or death. Life in the Pacific Northwest at Gonzaga University, a Jesuit university (1947-1951), was seductively “normal.” To forget among those who knew nothing was tantamount to a sensual temptation. It was bliss for four undergraduate years, except for one constant stabbing suspicion: where had the Jesuits been in Europe during the war? The question persisted. Politely, I posed oblique questions and received evasive answers even as the Korean War raged. Were they prevarications? Suspicion fanned the old fears and queries returned with a painful vengeance. Then one day everything erupted. It was in the midst of a senior seminar on Thomistic ethics. “And what about Auschwitz?” I heard myself cry out quietly in unfamiliar anguish. “Why was Hitler never excommunicated? Can G-d forgive the gas chamber?” The icy silence that followed offered an opening. “And what about the Jews?” I asked reproachfully. The Jesuits had steeped us in a European culture devoid of Jews. Yet they (the Jews) were there, in Chaucer, in

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Shakespeare, in Goethe, in Voltaire, in Wagner, in the French and Russian Revolutions, and finally in Auschwitz. I concluded that their Europe was not mine. I felt rage, a rage born of fruitless fear and accumulating, unanswered (some unanswerable) questions. There followed two graduate years (1951-1953) in pursuit of an (ultimately unwanted and unfinished) Ph.D. in romance literature at Fordham University in New York (very much wanted). Early 50s post-war New York was a mecca for an angry young graduate student. There, through friends and acquaintances, I met the “silent ones,” survivors from a Darkness I had undeservedly been spared, a darkness no one in academe wanted to acknowledge. “It” simply was a non-subject. Survivors were told to forget and look to the future. And none of the survivors were willing to respond to my self-serving interest (self-serving, because I was thinking of myself and not of them). More specifically, I was in my early twenties, uninterested in the psychology of Holocaust survivors. I wanted, for example, to share my guilt for having survived. In their eyes I was not a survivor; I was one of “them,” an intruder. Herein lies an emotional contradiction prevalent at the time: the survivors’ intense desire to be heard but, at the same time, deeply suspicious of those— especially academics—who might profit professionally from their suffering. (As for the issue of who is a survivor, that still reverberates today as conflicting criteria are used to determine survivor status.) Two years in the army (1953-1955), as part of the U.S. occupation force in West Germany, brought me face to face with that past. My hometown lay in ruins; my home—two-thirds destroyed; the Wilhelmine family store miraculously standing. And the people? There was Eva Griess, the devout Catholic and devoted family cook, “Dedda” my turned Nazi nanny, Stuhlmüller—my father’s loyal chauffeur—and Hans Deboben my father’s naive high school music teacher. Ghosts, living ghosts. All greeted me as if nothing serious had transpired, except many years of “unfortunate” separation, years during which they had suffered; they had been bombed; they had lost cities and loved ones. It was a Judenrein version of that past. To remind myself of reality I paid a quick visit to a certain lamppost in Mannheim. It was still there and I distinctly heard “Brenn! Judebub, brenn!” even as children played in the same street. Were they ready to burn other children? This time I asked in anger and not from fear. I knew the answer: if given the opportunity, Yes!

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The late 50s were spent in Eisenhower’s quiescent USA obtaining a Ph.D. in East European and Russian history at the University of Washington. That interest was a by-product of spending three years in post-war Germany where the Iron Curtain loomed large, leading to a year studying Russia and Russian at Heidelberg University. Once again it was a course of studies devoid of Jews, despite protests lodged by me and another young German Jew. Gerhard Sinzheimer and I had similar upbringings, part continental, though largely English. But our temperaments differed. His anger had hardened into abject frustration that led to his dropping out and, tragically, committing suicide soon thereafter in Australia. “We are non-existent,” he mumbled bitterly during our last conversation. And then came the turbulent 1960s spent in the Deep South at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, a state university opened as an integrated institution by order of the Supreme Court. A combination of Eichmann’s Trial (1961), Hannah Arendt’s willfully misunderstood, brilliant reportage on the trial (see Arendt, 1963), Raul Hilberg’s Holocaust masterpiece (The Destruction of the European Jews), daily doses of the multi-evils of segregation, and the exhilarating intensifying civil rights movement, all helped crystallize what so far had remained unclear. It had been, remained, and would continue to be a century of unprecedented mass cruelty and mass human destruction perpetrated by state authorities. It was not just the Jews who were the exclusive genocidal targets, not even during World War II. What was by then known as the Holocaust loomed large, but to me not exclusively: there was also a present danger. For behind anti-Black racism lurked the antisemitism of white supremacists and of Christian Conservatives (whether Catholic or Protestant). Jews were the neo-carpetbaggers of integration, the cardinal sin of the mid-1960s. My history department, for example, wanted to hire a new colleague, only to turn down one meritorious applicant, George Iggers, a German Jew. “Two German Jews are enough,” I and a fellow historian, Henry Friedlander, an Auschwitz survivor, were brazenly told. It was time to leave. A Brief Excursus, 1964-1965 I reached New York after an interlude year in the Soviet Union. Other than garnering reams of footnotes from the archives, I had two sets of experiences in the USSR germane to this search or selfexamination. One was the width and depth of antisemitism, embed-

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ded both in the Soviet system as well as in the general Slavic population. The combined Marxist ideological and traditional Russian animus for Jews included both a total denial of a distinct Jewish suffering during the German invasion and occupation and an allpervasive stereotyping of “the Jew” reminiscent of the pathological phobia in the Protocol of the Elders of Zion. Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were murdered in two days of shooting by the Einsatzgrupppen in September 1941, became a monument to unidentified Soviet deaths. Even more important to me then was the discovery of Stalinist genocides: the lethal mass, forced expulsion of over a dozen ethnic minorities into the deserts of Soviet central Asia during World War II. Hours and days (nights!) spent talking to Chechen survivors in their mountain villages and to ethnic Germans in Tashkent originally from the lower Volga region introduced me to an evil contemporary with Auschwitz. Theirs was a woeful tale of wholescale deportations, of entire villages, in the middle of the night, at gun-point, in sealed freight cars; of being literally dumped in the wastelands of Kazakstan; of over 50 percent deaths by exposure, etc.; of struggle to survive as a cultural group; of the return home of the remnant to whom I was talking. From then on, I found it morally offensive and intellectually dishonest to refer exclusively to the Holocaust. Even before teaching the Jewish tragedy, I was intellectually and emotionally bound to genocide. Teaching the Holocaust (1971-1979) In the late 1960s at The City College of New York, student unrest came hand-in-hand with the clamor for ethnic studies. The history department heatedly debated whether the Holocaust “belonged” to German history or warranted a separate course in Jewish Studies. The dispute, as I learned, was less over academic “turf” than about keeping the Holocaust entirely out of the discipline of history altogether. One can only guess the motives. I suspect it was a combination of not wishing to highlight Jews as a historically central theme and unfamiliarity with the subject. On the other hand, the proethnicists, with the active and interventionist support of the New York Jewish Community, bullied the course into Jewish Studies territory. To bolster their campaign, Elie Wiesel was invited to teach the Holocaust. This proved an aborted public relations stunt. Literally

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hundreds of Jewish students (many in search of “identity”) registered for the course, only to drop out as quickly in response to the “soft” academic material dished out to them. The about-to-be-famous author of Night offered impressions and finely-honed phrases, lots of moralizing but little social science substance. Wiesel was lionized briefly at CCNY like another, “ethnic” visiting professor, Ravi Shankar and his multi-stringed sitar. Adoring Flower Children sat at his bare feet until he started to teach in detail the complexities of dozens of ragae. It was all a fad. After Wiesel’s departure, the Holocaust, briefly taught by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, faded into the catalogue. Neither Wiesel nor Greenberg left a lasting legacy. The task fell briefly, for two or three years, to Henry Friedlander before he left for Brooklyn College, and the responsibility, by default, shifted to me. By then I had taught a summer class in 1971 on the Holocaust at Brooklyn College, largely to children of survivors—among them Dov Hikind, a prominent Brooklyn politician today—whose parents had shielded them from their hellish experiences in that dark past. To my chagrin, they misused their knowledge to beef up their Jewishness, to justify their joining Rabbi Mair Kahane’s vigilantelike Jewish Defense League, and to becoming uncritically and vociferously pro-Israel as “the Answer” to the Holocaust. This is not what I had intended the course to be. A Sabbatical year (1972-1973) in Israel researching the fate of my Jewish community in Germany—the oldest north of the Alps— put me in touch with the first generation of self-taught scholars of the Holocaust at Hebrew University and Yad Vashem. In the former, Yehuda Bauer reigned supreme, at once guiding his students to focus almost exclusively on Jewish Resistance and Rescue (a strictly Israeli agenda) and, simultaneously, preaching the doctrine of uniqueness, literally vetoing all discussion of other genocidal incidents. The fates of the Roma (Gypsies), of the Armenians, and of the Aché Indians in Paraguay were relegated outside the parameters of serious discussion. Stalin’s crimes were also brusquely pushed aside in favor of a strictly parochial Holocaust paramountcy that elevated the mid-century historic event beyond the reach of standard academic comparison—an essential tool for any intellectual comprehension—and that surrounded it with an unsustainable aura of mystery and mystique, depicting the Holocaust as, at once, incomprehensible and unique.

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I returned to New York to teach the Holocaust course with a syllabus that openly ignored and even contradicted the original course description in the catalogue. The syllabus unabashedly contextualized the Holocaust with previous and contemporary genocides; the catalogue on the other hand stressed that the Holocaust was the sole topic. Truth-in-advertising aside, from 1973 I taught the Holocaust increasingly contextualized—contemporaneously and chronologically—that is, in the context of World War II, which included the genocidal crimes of the Soviet Union, and framed by prior (the Herero and Armenian) genocides and subsequent genocides (the Aché Indians in Paraguay and the overseas Chinese in Indonesia). During an undramatic Sabbatical leave (1979-1980) spent in New York, I completely rethought and redesigned the course, partially in the light of Cambodia, entitling it “The Theory and Practice of Genocide in the 20th Century.” The primary tool would be comparison according to specific criteria and detailed case studies. One product of this reorientation was an article in the then new journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, entitled “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum” (Huttenbach, 1988, pp. 287-303). Predictably, it was not well received by the Holocaust establishment: it went against the grain of the Israeli Holocaust circles who wished to safeguard the “integrity” (read isolation) of the Holocaust. Any whiff of comparison was automatically dubbed and condemned as a form of denial, of revisionism, of relativization, of trivialization, etc. Any one of these epithets was enough to relegate one beyond the pale of respectable scholarship. Simply put, genocide studies that included the Holocaust qua genocide and not as something distinctly separate and more than genocide was suspect. The unfortunate consequence, until most recently, of this “Holocaust only” mindset has been the virtual bifurcation of the scholarly community into two sets—the Holocaust specialists and the researchers of “other” genocides—leading to a minimum of intellectual (theoretical/conceptual and methodological) cross-fertilization. Attempts to open the ranks and minds of Holocaust scholars to genocide specialists have been modest and discouragingly slow. As part of the program committee of the Robert Maxwell-sponsored mega-conference assembled in Oxford in July 1988, I was able to squeeze in one non-Holocaust panel. Helen Fein, author of the pioneering Accounting for Genocide (1979) participated in the panel but, unfortunately, Robert Conquest who had just published his brilliant Harvest of Sor-

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row (1986) on Stalin’s systematic destruction of national minorities was not invited. (Nor would he have attended judging from subsequent conversations with him, in which he expressed his views on the “parochial” approach to the phenomenon of the Holocaust.) It took another Sabbatical leave (1993-4) to resolve all doubts about the professional course to be taken. That year I enjoyed the luxury of the incumbency of a Distinguished Visiting Professorship of Holocaust Studies at Richard Stockton State College in New Jersey. My teaching responsibilities were twofold: a required course on the Holocaust (ninety-nine students) and a small seminar on comparative genocide (including the Holocaust). The pedagogical and conceptual flaws of the former—such as the total absence of a requirement of twentieth-century European history, in particular of German history, not to mention the lack of substantive reference to other genocides—forced me to contemplate a project: The Genocide Forum (now in its sixth year). Its conceptual thrust was to integrate Holocaust and Genocide Studies that, as noted, had institutionalized into parallel endeavors, including separate conferences. The publication was to be aimed principally at colleagues and secondary school teachers, introducing them to major issues and unresolved controversies common to all those involved in the understanding of genocides, among them the Holocaust. The bi-monthly publication has been of sufficient success that its articles, one of them melodramatically entitled “J’accuse,” have persuaded, however reluctantly, the convenors of the Annual Scholars Conference on the Holocaust and the Churches to relent and schedule more prominently the phenomenon of genocide. It began minimally enough with a single panel three years ago in Tampa; then, the next year, as a major segment of the program in Seattle; and, finally, in the title of the 30th Year program in Philadelphia in March 2000, “The Holocaust in an Age of Genocide.” Whether this trend will become structural, a true commitment, remains to be seen. There are still too many who regard the wedding of the Holocaust to Genocide as the first step on a slippery path towards amalgamation. All too many see it as a division of loyalties, as a betrayal of the deeply-ingrained Holocaust-first syndrome, still a powerful influence. Behind this agonized decision lies an insecurity and a fear. The war against Holocaust denial—often resulting in bitter court cases— has nurtured an unnecessary but understandable fear of a day when

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these liars and their lies may actually win. Equally important is the intellectual uncertainty about upholding a stubborn siege mentality “protecting” the Holocaust from “competing” genocides. A case-inpoint was the much-heralded conference held in Stockholm in January 2000. Around thirty governments promised to dedicate a day of Holocaust remembrance and to make room in secondary-school curricula for the teaching of the Holocaust. A single, isolated “workshop” on other genocides was overshadowed by Holocaust-only speeches; its lengthy report was conveniently “lost.” The voices of those trying to represent the Roma and Armenians went all but unheeded. Tokenism left its abiding resentment and bitterness. Presently it is hoped that a new publication that I founded and edited, a byproduct of the 1994 Sabbatical seminar—Journal of Genocide Research (1999- )—will help promote greater scholarly communication and collaboration with a minimum of rancor, and lead to an end of the artificial division between Holocaust Studies and Genocide Studies. This will take time. At the 2000 Annual Scholars Conference, Yehuda Bauer at long last seemed to disclaim the Uniqueness theory, but not without a rash of substantive “howevers” which caused more smoke than light, in fact, turning back the clock once again, almost to square one. At the same time, there is the “Holocaust and Genocide” dichotomy to contend with. It is what I call the “Apple and Fruit” syndrome and fallacy. After all, an apple is fruit (or, is it more than fruit?). Dozens of centers, off and on campuses, named “Holocaust and Genocide” center or institute have proliferated throughout the United States, thereby perpetuating the tendency to keep the Holocaust distinct and, by inference—and more overt ways by means of Holocaust-centric lecture series and exhibits—an event that supposedly is, by its nature, trans-genocide. The purpose is not to emphasize the Holocaust but to diminish the “others.” The road to reason in things genocide is no primrose path, but it is now somewhat less crooked, above all in Germany and France, whose younger generation of scholars (Gunnar Heinsohn, Leonie Wagner, Alexandra Goujon, and Jacques Semelin) have risen above the intellectual and emotional parochialism of their predecessors and self-taught founding fathers. They are pioneering imaginative studies of genocide in terms of a state crime, a violation of civil rights, in terms of reconciliation in post-genocide societies, and exploring new sub-genres such as gendercide and infanticide. These new scholars

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are far less inhibited than were their predecessors. The time will come, one hopes, when more non-Jews than Jews will study the Holocaust; and more non-Armenians will examine the genocidal crimes of the Turks. It is time to de-ethnocize genocide research, expunging from it the distortive element of personal involvement and partisan interpretation. There is still too much of the condemnatory in genocide studies in lieu of well-informed disinterested intellectual exploration and conclusion making. The discipline of genocide scholarship must still acquire the ability of complete disassociation, to be less engagé than is presently still the case. All too many scholars of one genocide are part beholden to an ethnic constituency who lionize them socially, and financially subsidize (and, therefore, compromise) their scholarship. Nor is it a healthy match if Town (ethnic contacts) and Gown (the Academy) are too close. Examples of this corrupting collaboration between community “soft” money and individual professors abound. Genocide scholars, above all, must enjoy undisturbed independence of thought. The dearth of scholars equi-versed in two or more genocides needs to be addressed. Genocide scholarship cannot advance conceptually unless the methodology of comparative analysis can be professionally applied. The “specialist” in one genocide only is only a specialist in name. Such multi-genocide experts will have to be trained; but academic institutions are still ill-prepared to perform this task. So far, at least, in the near future, the ranks of competent genocide comparativists will necessarily be thin. There is at present no university with a viable cluster of genocide experts to justify a reputable master’s let alone a doctoral program. The most serious lacuna is the as yet absence of fully developed methodology of comparative genocide studies. Without it, there can be no meaningful theoretical work and in-depth analysis. On Looking Back 2000-1936 It is a long way back to that little Jewish boy in Germany about to be drowned by the genocidal tidal wave of Nazi hatred and violence. Sixty-five years is a lifetime, over half of which was at first inadvertently and, later, purposely devoted to an understanding of what befell that boy and his tormentors. They were bittersweet years, enriched by being privy to and playing an active part in a central chapter of this century’s intellectual evolution. Genocide was and

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remains a cutting-edge topic for all, whether artists or scientists, lawyers or surgeons, politicians or moralists. The questions it raises are never fully answered; they remain with us perennially. That is why each and every act of genocide must remain on the table for further study. There is no such thing as having exhausted the queries raised by any single genocide; nor is there one genocide that is exempt from being ranked alongside others for purposes of clearer understanding. Why would parents want to teach their children to kill Armenians at the start of this century, or Jews (at mid-century) or Tutsis (at century’s end)? Germans deporting Jews, Russians deporting Chechens, Hutus capturing Tutsi children, and Serbs holding Bosnian boys captive, all of them killed children before the eyes of their parents. How? We know—with bayonets, with machetes, by skull bashing, with lethal gas, etc. Why? No answer is wholly satisfactory. It continues to be a Via Dolorosa, but Vita Felix as one beholds children, children’s children and beyond, none of whom would be had that little boy not lived. References Arendt, Hannah (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. Conquest, Robert (1986). The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the TerrorFamine. New York: Oxford University Press. Helen Fein (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. Hilberg, Raul (1985). The Destruction of the European Jews. Three Volumes. New York: Holmes & Meier. Huttenbach, Henry (1988). “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum: Toward a Methodology of Categorization.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 3(3):287-303. Wiesel, Elie (1982). Night. New York: Bantam.

4 Facts and Values: A Personal Intellectual Exploration James E. Mace Chance has largely driven my life to the study of genocide. Growing up in Oklahoma, in a small city with only a handful of Jewish families, I knew that my Indian neighbors had experienced their Trail of Tears. When I was little, one George Guess, my father’s fishing buddy and coworker on the railroad, even made me a bow and arrow (without arrowheads). His direct ancestor of the same English name but better known by his Indian appellation of Sequoia had created the Cherokee Syllabery that gave written form to the language of that people who had walked its Trail of Tears under conditions little different from those the Armenians would later experience. It would be long before I even knew the world genocide, but indirectly it had already touched me. I was a precocious student, ambitious, but with no thought of scholarship when I entered Oklahoma State University during the Vietnam War. As my radicalism, like that of so many of my generation grew, my original ambition of law school seemed somehow immoral: what was I to do, defend some corporation from a little old lady it had victimized? I had been recruited for the debate team, and debating is a skill that teaches one how to critically analyze for oneself, do research, think on one’s feet, and quickly find the words to express oneself. Flirting with radicalism and Marxism, as so many of us did, I decided to learn Russian and apply for graduate study in Russian history. After all, I thought, graduate school just might extend my student deferment from the draft, and I liked the university environment so much that I could think of nothing I would rather be 59

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than a college professor. Armed with this and little else, in 1973 I set off for the University of Michigan, attracted in all honesty more by its reputation as birthplace of the radical Students for a Democratic Society and the fact that Ann Arbor had decriminalized marijuana than by its indisputable intellectual prestige. Michigan opened a world completely different from anything sleepy Stillwater, Oklahoma could offer. I suddenly found myself at a top ten university completely unprepared. For the first time in my life I felt the danger that I might not make it academically. The first couple of years were hard, but I survived, thanks largely to the fact that Roman Szporluk, then professor of East Central European history and now Hrushevsky professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, took an interest in me. Roman and I shared an interest in early Soviet historiography, which even then I could see was completely different and far more interesting than anything to follow it. At least in the 1920s historians could search for answers and discuss issues. Stalin ended that, and it was never allowed to reappear until a time when the historians themselves were largely unprepared to engage in historical interpretation. Roman was a patient and gifted mentor who knew when to demand and when to let things pass. It was he who introduced me to the history of his native Ukraine, and it was thanks to him that I sat with a dictionary and a grammar, learned to read the language, and gradually to understand. When it came time to choose a dissertation topic, I chose Ukrainian national Communism, a movement that attracted me for it began by experimenting with an amalgam of Marxism and nationalism with a quest for national liberation that then seemed so common in the Third World. A dissertation is always a great adventure, especially in history. Since I had chosen a topic then forbidden in the Soviet Union, there was no question of my being allowed to go there. In official Soviet historiography the figures I was studying (Vasyl Shakhrai, who first tried to reconcile Communist ideals with aspirations for national liberation; the brilliant writer Mykola Khvyliovyi, who sought a separate national road for the development of Ukrainian culture and even thought Ukraine as a former colony but located in Europe could play a unique role in passing on the eternal values of European civilization to “the rising colonial peoples of the East”; Mykola Skrypnyk, who tried with temporary success to become a Ukrainian Gomulka; historians; economists; and others who were Communists concerned

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above all with the fate of their land and people) had either officially ceased to ever have existed or been branded as enemies. What rehabilitations there were depended on distorting a given historical figure’s life and actions in order to fit them into the Communist orthodoxy of Brezhnev’s day. Although I had saved money working as a unionized janitor ($5.00 an hour seemed like great wealth to a poor graduate student in those days), my funds were limited, but when I exhausted the resources of the University of Michigan library system (where among other things I was able to read a virtually complete ten-year run of News of the All-Ukrainian Congress Executive Committee of Soviets [Visti VUTsVK], the official state newspaper of the period), the University of Illinois, with perhaps the best collection of Ucrainica in the United States and a summer program that allowed scholars free housing to use its Slavic collection free of charge, provided the bulk of my source material. Without archival access, one has little choice but to use the press. The earliest official histories of the Communist Party of Ukraine and historical journals were also very helpful. Most of the official Soviet publications of the 1920s were kept under lock and key in the USSR almost up to the very fall of the Soviet regime. Many people think the press of a totalitarian regime useless as a historical source, because they think it is all lies. The reality is quite different, for no matter how much a given regime lies, it still has to communicate with people through the media it controls. It has to enunciate what it expects people to do and threaten them for doing what it forbids. This, in itself, is a form of truth, and some truth inevitably slips through about the real state of things, allowing one to read between the lines. Much later, when I was able to consult the archives and post-Soviet colleagues, I confirmed that, while the published accounts of Party congresses, conferences, and plenums were always sanitized, especially in the monthly Bolshevik of Ukraine (Bilshovyk Ukra–ny), the newspaper accounts were much less so for want of time, and what was left was usually reasonably accurate. In addition, by telling people what they were supposed to think, the press provided a sort of code to the official mythology: defining in exaggerated terms what the regime was against made it possible to read backward in order to discover what it actually wanted. And this remained true to the end. After all, a 1983 Soviet monograph on the psychology of the peasantry will not really tell one much about those

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who till the soil, but it tells a great deal about what the Soviet regime officially thought about them. As the topic unfolded before me, I shared the idealism that shone through the writings of the young Ukrainian Communists. I traced how a sociologically underdeveloped, overwhelmingly rural people began to organize itself, form cooperatives, illicit political groups, and demand their political rights. The Czech student of national movements Miroslav Hroch divided such movements into those of “large” peoples with their elites intact and “small” ones like his own, which had lost traditional elites and had to build their nations from the ground up. According to his schematic classification, Ukrainians, for all their numerical superiority to such “large” nations as, say, Poles or Hungarians, could be considered the largest “small” nation in Europe, which may be one reason why in the Communist period Professor Hroch was told in no uncertain terms not to touch on the Ukrainian question. Like so many other peoples in the traditional empires of Eastern and Central Europe, the collapse of the old regimes at the end of World War I impelled the Ukrainians to make a bid for independence. Perhaps they were simply sociologically and organizationally unprepared; in any case it failed. In the early 1920s the Soviet system made a series of compromises with forces it could temporarily suppress but not eliminate: the countryside, the marketplace, and the nationalities, the largest and most articulate of which were the Ukrainians, who received almost a surrogate for independence under a local, more or less permanent, Bolshevik elite, only a few members of whom were actually Ukrainian. Still, the relative liberalization and state financial sponsorship during the period of officially proclaimed Ukrainization allowed a cultural and intellectual revival unprecedented in that nation’s history, a revival that came to an end with the repression and Manmade Famine of 1933. Among those participating in that revival were people who clearly believed in Communist ideals, while simultaneously expressing a deep commitment and love for their own nation, its language, and its culture. We are all accustomed to thinking in categories. It is even necessary, if we are to divide the infinite complexity of reality into bits small enough for us to understand. However, we tend to stick to familiar categories even when they hinder rather than aid our understanding. After all, no one lives in a bubble uninfluenced by any-

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thing outside his own social stratum: writers might have brothers who farm or fix plumbing, and political leaders can have cousins working as the proverbial butchers, bakers, or candlestick makers. Still, we tend to give the categories themselves a concreteness they cannot justify in themselves. Marx called this reification (Verdinglichung), turning abstract constructs into concrete things (the English term comes from res, Latin for thing), and this time he was right. Nowhere has this been more true than in the field of Soviet studies. As I read the official publications of the period, I could see how the young Communists’ idealistic hopes were transformed into cynicism, fear, and an unending official search for enemies. I had paid little attention to the countryside up to that time; what interested me had been happening in the cities, not the villages. But it was clear that what I had been studying came to its definitive end in 1932-33. Then, as I was ending my research, Professor Szporluk introduced me to some published eyewitness accounts of the 1933 famine and early attempt of émigré scholars to understand it. The great historical fact about Stalin’s transformation of the Soviet Union was that everything was subordinated—one is tempted even to say consumed—by the state. When this happened, agriculture, the economy, culture, and even politics tended to disappear as discrete entities. All became parts of the same thing, in this case of the Leviathan Party-state Stalin was building. Western Marxists use the term “totality” in explaining their analyses, and as I saw the Stalinist system unfold, such an approach to it made perfect sense. Actually, the Bolsheviks, with their reductionist Marxist-Leninist fundamentalism, always had a tendency to think in such terms with their insistence on reducing everything to “class analysis.” The nationality question, they believed, was only an aspect of the peasant question, and they saw allowing Ukrainian intellectuals a measure of freedom in exchange for loyalty as a way of winning over (and gradually taking over) the social group that had earlier provided leadership for the Ukrainian peasantry—the national cultural intelligentsia. What was happening in the cities and countryside seemed clearly linked. As early as 1928 the Shakhty trial of “bourgeois specialist” mine engineers accused of deliberate “wrecking” gave rise to a permanent orchestrated hysteria about omnipresent enemies, thereby heralding in the birth of full-blooded totalitarianism; and 1932-1933, when the regime made an about-face and suppressed everything

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connected with its previous nationality policy. The connection with the famine, obviously brought about by the requisitions of foodstuffs, was accompanied by a campaign blaming the failure of Ukraine’s Communists to collect the amount of grain, linking this with their having been infiltrated by “nationalist” elements. The connection seemed more than a coincidence to me. It turned out that most others in the field of Soviet studies did not (and many still do not) agree. My dissertation, dealing only in passing with the Famine in its final chapter, appeared in print in 1983 to generally favorable reviews in the scholarly press, although there was a certain coterie that considered anything Ukrainian somehow tainted. The trouble came as a result of my decision in 1981 to accept an invitation to work specifically on the Famine within the framework of a project at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. My early articles on the topic in the Sovietological press were denounced, for example, by such figures as Stephen Wheatcroft, who accused me of “lowering the standards of the field.” Wheatcroft, who is now professor of Soviet history of the Australian National University in Canberra, was then at the Soviet Studies Center at the University of Birmingham, at that time notorious for trying to figure out how to write in order to best ensure their next Soviet visa. The director was R. W. Davies, whose sympathy toward the Soviet Union under Stalin knew no bounds. Later, in the mid-1980s, the Communist Party of Canada even published a whole book denouncing me and those who had argued similarly: Famine, Fraud and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard, by one Douglas Tottle. I answered, I think appropriately, that policies adopted toward some geographical areas and not others ought to take into account how those areas differ from one another in terms of context and in the way the decisionmakers of the period most likely understood them. I was also denounced for citing (more as background than as bottom-line evidence) reminiscences of “Nazi collaborators.” (After all, who but a Nazi collaborator would have fled in advance of the Soviet Army? Could Ukrainians have actually had something else to fear from the Stalinist regime?) In 1982, Stepan Chemych of the Ukrainian Studies Fund, the fundraising branch of the Harvard Institute, learned from the press about the upcoming International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide to take place in Tel-Aviv. He said he wanted me to go and

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would pay my expenses. I agreed. We contacted the organizers and despite its being late, they agreed to put me on the program. That conference eighteen years ago was a milestone in the field of genocide studies, and I was overwhelmed by impressions: Holocaust survivors with tattoos sharing what they had suffered and often showing an eagerness to learn about other tragedies, which, for all the uniqueness of the Shoah, had points in common with the tragedy of European Jewry. I met colleagues who have become lasting friends and their published works my mentors. Perhaps the most lasting personal impression was meeting Phuntsog Wangyal, a former Tibetan monk then working with the Dalai Lama to publicize the ongoing destruction of Tibetan culture by the Chinese Communists. We were about the same age and spent our free time exploring Tel Aviv together. What impressed me so deeply was how he could combine childlike playfulness with ageless wisdom without the least contradiction. But in intellectual terms, the conference firmly convinced me of the need to understand precisely what genocide is. Upon returning, I read everything I could get my hands on by the late Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide,” authored Security Council Resolution I:96 of 1946, wrote the Genocide Treaty, and got it passed. As Lemkin’s brief notice on genocide in The International Journal of Criminal Law made clear, what he had in mind really went back to his 1933 proposals concerning vandalism and barbarism, the gist of which is that nation, religious communities, etc. and their cultures should be protected under international law as an unchanging principle (loi and not droit, to use the French distinction; English is one of the few languages that has only one word to designate both unchanging law and changing legislation). It reminded me of the late eighteenth-century German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, one of the first and most humane apologists for national identity. He held that, while people were divided into nations, no nation had a right to dominate or feel superior to any other. Nations, which he understood exclusively in cultural and linguistic terms, might well be more or less developed in terms of literacy rates, their number of Nobel laureates, or some other objective measure, but they remained in principle equally valid with an equal right to existence. Who can say that someday a writer from a small Third World nation will not surpass Shakespeare in talent? At least, believed Herder, no such difference in development could warrant the rule of culturally more highly developed Europeans over,

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say, the Hottentots. Nor should the latter be compelled to become counterfeit and thus second-rate Europeans; they would do far better to become first rate Hottentots (his term) and contribute to universal culture through their own language, which, like all languages, contained its own particular genius different from all others and thus special. I have always discerned in Herder’s superficially offensive statement to the effect that he had never met a human being, only Frenchmen, Germans, Slavs, etc., the uniquely humanistic subtext that humanity is not and should not attempt to become homogeneous but is an aggregate of various different and unique national cultures. From this it would seem to follow that the wealth of humanity as a whole is precisely in the diversity of its components and that destroying or crippling one of these constituent parts of the human race diminishes and impoverishes humankind as such. Why else should genocide be a crime not against the victimized group but against humanity as a whole? Precisely because diversity enriches humanity as such, and thus humanity is the ultimate victim whenever one element of that diversity is crippled or destroyed. Raphael Lemkin, in his 1944 Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, clearly did not mean to limit genocide to an attempt to kill off all the members of a group, but to forcibly change by a variety of means the national character of a given territory. He even offered the word ethnocide as a possible substitute term for what he had in mind, indicating that those who make a distinction between genocide and ethnocide—while being free to define their terms however they like, as long as they make clear they are doing so—are redefining the notion completely out of keeping with the way in which those who defined the term in international law thought they were doing. Of course, all genocides are not equal, just as there are different degrees of homicide. The virtually complete destruction of the vibrant Yiddish and Ladino cultures of East Central Europe is irreversible, while the crippling of, say, Ukrainian culture is not, even though the raw mortality estimates are quantitatively in about the same league. There are still plenty of Ukrainians to recover and rebuild what they have lost, although it will take a great deal of time and effort for them to do so, but the couple of thousands of Jews left in, say, Poland will never be able to rebuild the vibrant Yiddish cultural life they enjoyed before the Holocaust, for there are simply too few of them left. This is perhaps the best answer to those who see Ukrainians’ need to document and disseminate information as a way of trying to bring

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the Holocaust “down” to their level, to diminish the uniqueness of the Shoah. There have been genocides at least since the times of ancient Israel, but there was only one unique Holocaust. Later, when I was staff director of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine and I sent a copy of our Report to Congress to Simon Wiesenthal, I was particularly grateful for his letter to me that, while much had been done to document the Holocaust, much also had to be done to document what other hands had done to other groups, including the Ukrainians. My Harvard years (1981-1986) gave me time to read, think, publish, and interact with many prominent scholars (among the latter being the late Ivan Lysiak-Rudnytsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Lev Kopelev, and Adam Ulam). Since the project with which I was involved depended upon donations by the Ukrainian Diaspora, I was often called upon to lecture to various local Ukrainian emigrant groups about our work. I began to meet and understand those who had lived through what I was studying as a historian. When, in 1984, a Ukrainian-American professional and business group suggested I design an oral history project with their support, I eagerly accepted. I was fortunate to have Leonid Heretz, then a Ukrainian-American graduate student at Harvard, available to actually conduct the interviews. We designed a project not so much to collect anonymous accounts of a specific event as to reconstruct the life experience of each individual up to the moment he or she emigrated to the West. Later (in the 1990s), in Ukraine, I was able to confirm that people there had the same sorts of experiences described by their former compatriots in the West. Oral history is a complex field. After all, memory can be a distorting mirror, as anyone who has ever worked with memoir literature knows very well. Few historians, however, would completely eschew memoirs as a historical source. They may be imperfect, and, at times, inaccurate as the narrator tries to cast himself in the most favorable light, but all sources are imperfect. Even an archival document reflects how the person who drafted it understood (or was supposed to understand) something and remains something less than the unvarnished truth. The historian’s task is to sift all the available sources in order to reconstruct what he considers most likely to be closest to what actually took place. Oral history is one such invaluable source, a sort of talking memoir left by the kind of people who do not otherwise leave memoirs.

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My goal in the oral history project was to treat each witness as a unique historical source with enough background information so that future scholars could evaluate each account for themselves just as they might evaluate the memoirs of some well-known historical figure. In any case, Leonid’s over fifty in-depth interviews helped us get a feel for the period. At the time, there were no resources to finance the laborious work of transcription (each hour of tape as a rule takes ten hours to transcribe, and we already had over 100 hours of tape), but I felt confident that we could return to this later. The immediate priority was to tape the steadily declining number of witnesses to an event over half a century earlier. For the moment, transcription could wait. In 1983, the Ukrainian-American community held numerous events to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Ukrainian Famine. A group called Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine, founded and led by the late Ihor Olshaniwsky, began to circulate petitions to Congress for the creation of a hybrid (with representatives of both Congress and the Administration) commission to investigate the event. Thousands of signatures were collected. Democrats sponsored the relevant legislation, which ultimately passed as an amendment to an appropriations bill in order to prevent a presidential veto. The issue, as always in Congress, was political. 1984 was a presidential election year, and white ethnic groups were seen as the critical swing vote. The Ukrainian-American community, three quarters of a million strong, were asking $200,000 over two years with the ability to collect supplemental private donations (later extended for another two years and $200,000), unbelievably small change in a budget process where items are usually rounded off to the nearest ten million. Democrats saw it simply as a bid for the support of UkrainianAmericans. The Reagan Administration, on the other hand, opposed hybrid commissions on the grounds that they might violate the Constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, and the State Department certainly did not want something that might become a loose cannon in U.S.-Soviet relations. The American Jewish Committee, out of solidarity with a nation with which the Jews share so much history, also supported the item. It passed, and the Administration decided it was not worth vetoing the whole omnibus appropriations bill for the smallest item in the federal budget. The Commission did not actually begin work until early 1986, when I was appointed executive director and public members were

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selected (basically by each Congressional member). The three presidential appointees were relatively inactive. This is also typical of hybrid commissions, which are basically the equivalent of Congressional committees with supplementary presidential participation. Explaining to American politicians the completely different political spectrum of an ethnic subculture was a challenge, but the Congressmen and Senators who were my superiors were understanding and agreed that we should make our own investigation based on the available sources rather than rely on professional experts. After all, every chairman and ranking member of a Capitol Hill subcommittee knows that one can always find “experts” to say anything one wants, and relying upon experts usually means winding up with the prevailing academic conventional wisdom. We wanted to do something else. Commission hearings in and out of Washington were like an oral history project in miniature. We located or simply called for witnesses to come and tell their stories to the Commission (often translated by my top assistant Olya Samilenko, now a professor at Goucher College), and the American politicians themselves began to understand what they were dealing with. Transcripts of our public hearings were published as government documents, meaning they are easily available to anyone who can get to a repository of such documents. The testimonies, especially with the more extensive history project, were gut-wrenching, and, at times, surrealistic. On the Prut River, the old Soviet-Polish border, starving peasants would be marched out at night and forced to dance to show their relatives on the other side how good life was in Soviet Ukraine. Another witness recalled a meeting intended to denounce foreign food aid offered. As the agitator was waxing eloquent on the virtues of Stalinist socialism, one member of the audience happened to look out the window and shouted, “Look they’ve brought in cannibals,” and everyone ran to the window to see these poor people who were no longer quite human. Denial of everyday reality was an everyday necessity if one was to survive, and I could not help but share the pain of those wounded not only by physical but also by this psychological torment. Dealing with such raw human suffering gives one an indescribable feeling of responsibility. Politicians and community activists, however, are not scholars, and the main burden of drafting our 1988 Report to Congress fell on

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my small staff and me. The core of it was an analysis of the Soviet (especially Ukrainian) official press of the period in order to document official policies of the period, which seemed to me to indicate the famine was a result of official policies. We did not yet have the brutal and crucial Communist Party of Ukraine decree of November 18, 1932, which was published only in 1991, only the weaker published state decree of two days later. But even this made it clear what the regime was up to: those who could not meet the quota of grain levied on them were to be punished by having other foodstuffs seized (fines in kind), except for seed reserves (the seed was ordered seized only in late December). It seemed to us that if someone did not have bread, taking away his other edibles would have a result not difficult to foresee. We also lacked the text of the All-Union Politburo decree of December 14, 1932, also published in full only in 1992. This blamed the Communists in Ukraine for not meeting their quotas of grain to be seized because they had supposedly been infiltrated by “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists,” along with other “enemies,” and ordered the ending of the previous nationality policy along with a thorough purge, but we did know it indirectly. Most importantly, we did have press reports of Moscow’s January 1933 official denunciation of their subordinates in Ukraine, sending in an official satrap, Pavel Postyshev, and his November 1933 report of how he had replaced most district (county would be the best U.S. equivalent) officials and tens of thousands of others. We also traced the wave of repression he unleashed against Ukrainian Communist intellectuals. I explained our reasoning to the members, and they adopted our draft without change. With our report delivered to Congress and our original mandate completed, my Commission members and I were able to convince Congress to give us an additional two years to complete transcribing the oral histories Leonid Heretz had earlier collected, supplemented by him and Sue Ellen Weber working for the Commission, and also by other groups and individuals who sent in accounts. I had literally an army of Ukrainian-Americans working to transcribe over 200 accounts in the original language. We had to use a desktop publishing program, which now seems like a dinosaur, on our 286 computers and laser printer to provide proofs for the Government Printing Office to film and publish as a three-volume report. Heretz and I edited it and tried to make it as user-friendly as possible for scholars by prefacing each account in the original language (Ukrainian, Rus-

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sian, English, half-Yiddish German, and Polish) with an Englishlanguage summary. Haste made a host of typographical errors inevitable, but the original tapes have been preserved in the United States’ National Archives and Library of the Ukrainian Parliament. As we were entering the home stretch of our work in late 1989, I began to receive feelers from Soviet Ukrainian diplomats attached to the Soviet Embassy. At the end of the year, I was invited to Ukraine by the Ukraine Society for Contacts with Ukrainians Abroad and after consulting the relevant U.S. bodies and my Commission members, I accepted. My two weeks in Ukraine in January-February 1990 constituted a true turning point in my life. It turned out that the real reason for the invitation was that the Communist Party of Ukraine wanted me on hand when they officially adopted a resolution admitting that the Manmade Famine was a deliberate and criminal act by Stalin and his associates, and for its ordering of the relevant Party archival documents (the work that appeared some months later was truly outstanding), in order that I could say how positive a step this was. The real significance for me, however, was in the fact that I was entering Soviet Ukraine in its death throes, caught between the Party faithful (including historians) and those who wanted to build a new Ukraine, the Popular Movement (Rukh), which was, in turn, a coalition of former dissidents and the literati. An organizing committee had already been formed to call Ukraine’s first international conference on its national tragedy. I was co-opted by Ivan Drach, then head of Rukh, and the late Volodymyr Maniak (I always fondly called him Volodia), who was a leader of Ukrainian Memorial and had also collected eyewitness accounts then being prepared for publication. Then one morning Volodia called: Memorial activists had been denied permission to set up a modest memorial in a village near Uman. They were threatened with arrest, but “if a foreigner were there they might take a different attitude.” I went. We took a bus and were met in the village by twelve policemen, two from the village and ten from the town. Obviously there would be no monument, but we were allowed to go to the burial ground and say a few words. It was covered with bumps because of the uneven settling of bodies, and I knew that under the bumps were thousands of innocent people. Mykola Lytvyn (a poet and composer) played songs he had composed for Ukraine’s national instrument, the bandura, Ukraine’s traditional multi-stringed mandolin, emulating his nation’s traditional wandering bards. For the first time, I un-

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derstood on a deep human, emotional level the tragedy I had studied, and I wept. Uman was more successful, and after Volodia and I had words with the lady mayor, we were allowed to stage a rally in the local soccer stadium and lay wreaths on the anonymous graves from 19371938. When the long banned blue and yellow Ukrainian national flag was unfurled, a rumor swept the crowd that the police would try to seize it. But everything went smoothly, except that at the cemetery there were not one but two memorial services; one led by a Ukrainian Autocephalous priest (suppressed in 1929 and its parishes given to the Russian Orthodox) and the other by a Russian Orthodox cleric, who refused to recognize his rival’s existence. We decided that the conference had to be held at the beginning of September on the heels of the First International Congress of Ukrainian Studies, for which many foreign savants of Ukrainian studies would be in Kyiv. I was also fortunate to persuade such renowned scholars of genocide as Helen Fein and the late Leo Kuper to attend. Thanks in no small measure to their contributions, the conference was a success but received little publicity. There was a sense of something left undone, something that would inevitably have to be done. Late 1990 saw the already posthumous publication of the commission’s oral history project and of the promised documents from the Communist Party Archive. The collection of Communist Party documents had an official press run of 25,000, but, in reality, conservative opponents in the CPU limited it to 2,500, making it an instant bibliographic rarity. Still, I felt a feeling of vindication. Personally, it was a difficult time. Nobody wants to hire a historian pushing forty, and Helen Fein consoled me by telling me that she had also been unemployed for a decade after publishing her monumental Accounting for Genocide. After temporary posts at Columbia and Illinois, it became clear to me that I had either to retrack or pull up stakes. In 1993 I decided to move to Ukraine. After all, it seemed to me, my expertise just might seem to be of use here. I first took work in the old Institute of Party History, by then transferred from the jurisdiction of the CPU Central Committee to the Academy of Sciences and renamed the Institute of Political and Ethnic Studies. It gave me free access to the former closed reserve of banned books and to the Party Archive, but I finally could not work in an atmosphere where everyone knew where the documents were but nobody was interested in independent analysis. Thus, I became

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deputy editor-in-chief of Political Thought, a political science journal, and moved to the Kiev-Mohyla Academy National University, where I teach political science. Gradually, the focus of my published work shifted from the past to the present, from researching a genocide to coming to grips with its legacy in a society deeply deformed and made dysfunctional by its own past. I have attempted to explain in my Ukrainian-language publications of the last few years how it all happened, how such a wonderful people with such abundant resources could sink ever deeper into the pit of poverty, debt to the outside world, and, due in no small measure to what it lost, its increasingly evident inability to adapt to that world. I had always avoided the topic of the Holocaust. I knew the basic literature, of course, as I had also tried to master it on various other genocides. But living in Kyiv gave me a sense of personal linkage to a tragedy that hangs over the Pod, the traditional Jewish quarter where I work, like a curse. One cannot go to Babyn Yar (Baba Yar in Russian), where I have on occasion been invited to speak, without feeling the same all-pervasive evil aura. One friend collects information on shtetls wiped off the face of the earth. The Holocaust as such, in the sense of first mass shootings of Jews in 1941, began in Ukraine. From 1933 through the Holocaust, Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and current endless economic crisis where pensioners live from begging and collecting vodka bottles at a penny apiece (it takes ten or twelve to buy a loaf of bread), I cannot escape the impression that this land is caught up in a tragedy of Biblical proportions. It reminds me of the Book of Job, a conclusion utterly without scholarly foundation but emotionally inescapable. It seems to me that when the very object of one’s research is in danger, one has to reassess one’s priorities. By trying to understand the damage done and what came about as a result, one can become a factor in helping to heal that damage. When the fate of a component of humanity itself, of a nation and a culture hangs in the balance, I felt I could do no other. In 1944, Raphael Lemkin predicted that the legacy of German genocide, the artificial and forcible strengthening of the German national element at the expense of others, would long remain a problem (Lemkin, 1944, p. xi, p. 81). In the German case, thanks to the utter defeat and destruction of Nazism, and the courage of the German people to face up to its terrible past, he might have been wrong. Yet, for a variety of reasons, in the Soviet case, he seems to have been eerily right. To explain this fully would require

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another work longer than this, but dealing with that legacy might well prove to be the ultimate challenge for the study of genocide. After all, one of the basic goals of knowledge is to heal. References Fein, Helen (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. Lemkin, Raphael (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. Lemkin, Raphael Lemkin (1947). “Genocide as a Crime under International Law.” The American Journal of International Criminal Law, XLI: 145-151. Mace, James (1983). Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918-1933. Dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. Tottle, Douglas (1987). Famine, Fraud and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard. Toronto: Progress Books. U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine (1987, 1988). Investigation of the Ukrainian Famine 1932-1933. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. 2 Volumes. U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine (1988). Investigation o f the Ukrainian Famine, 1932-1933. Report to Congress. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. von Herder, Gottfried Johann (1968). Reflections on the History of Mankind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

5 The Questioner Yves Ternon Early Years As far as I can recall, I’ve always been given to questioning, and most often, I answered my own questions with other questions. Such skepticism spared me the intellectual comfort of self-assurance. There are some questions, however, I broached belatedly: foremost, those concerning the Shoah. When the war broke out, I was seven. I was eight when France was occupied. I became familiar with hunger, cold, and fear during air raids. But no one humiliated me. The laws of the French State did not debar me from society. It just happened that—by birth—I had “inherited” Catholic parents and grandparents. It is probably because at that time I hadn’t made the effort to understand what it meant for a child to be singled out as a Jew by the public administration that I am now trying to make up for my past indifference and that I shall always have a certain feeling of guilt. The following are images in flux, pulled from a child’s memory; it is difficult to know if they will reveal the origins of my eventual commitment to study and write about genocide. It is 1940. I am eight years of age. My parents are divorced. I am in a Catholic school for girls that allows a few boys to enroll, and my only concern is to be first in my class! At the beginning of the new school year in October, the Director (a woman) introduces a “new girl” and explains to us that she a Jew, that she is in danger, and that we must be kind to her. I understand nothing of this speech; no one had ever explained to me what it means to be a Jew. One year later, my father 75

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and stepmother, who own a building in Paris, are talking about their tenants who run a shoe store, Monsieur and Madame Jacob: they are going to vacate the store. Why? I still did not understand. 1943: my mother, a member of the Resistance, offers asylum to an English pilot. He hides in the attic and comes down in the evening to chat. I am eleven and do not understand what he says, but I know that I must not talk about him with anyone, nor show the knife of British-make which he had given me. Often, on my way to visit an uncle (one of my father’s brothers, who had a farm in the North of France), the train carrying me would pass through the station at Compiègne. This was where the trains carrying Jews would depart for Auschwitz. I see nothing out of the ordinary there, only twenty years later will I realize the significance of what I saw. In Paris, my maternal aunt and uncle, who are also part of a Resistance network, welcome into their home a downstairs neighbor, the “lady doctor” Fainsilber. I understand that it is necessary to be discreet, and I grow to love the woman. One day she tells my uncle: “This child could be Jewish!” Only twenty years later did I realize that this was the highest compliment I had ever received. It was not until 1949 that I, at age seventeen, began to learn in more concrete terms what it meant to be a Jew, and what had happened to the Jewish community of my country. This occurred when my friend Marcel Goldstein spoke to me about his cousin. Of his entire family, all of whom were deported to Auschwitz, she was the sole member who had returned; her nights were still haunted, he told me, by all kinds of ghosts. During the war years we Christian children had our little daily cares: school and family first; then food, clothing, and heat. We followed the war on the newsreels, produced under Nazi censorship; in the evening, with a clandestine air, we would tune in to radio broadcasts from England: the BBC. Poised in a continual state of watchfulness, we were waiting for it all to end with an Allied victory; we hated the “Krauts” because they occupied our country, but we knew nothing about the extent of their crimes. Much later, when I calculated the consequences brought on by ignorance and indifference, I wanted to bear witness, to inform those who did not know, to confound those who lied, and to denounce the criminals responsible. My commitment to take the side of all persons of good will probably dates from these “years in an hourglass,” yet I cannot say for sure.

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Dual Occupations I had always wanted to be a surgeon and, in due course, I finished my medical studies in Paris. It had been an obstacle course. Proceeding from one competitive examination to the next, I had ended up with top positions both at university and hospital. But the last hurdle was laden with thorns and turned out to be my undoing. I asked too many questions and, in particular, questions considered unfit in elite circles, the members of which are not supposed to express unseemly doubts concerning dogma: that France bears a civilizing mission to the world, and that she must preserve her empire; that a surgeon in the Hospitals of Paris belongs to a select clan, and that anyone who would enter this clan must behave as would a docile and respectful student toward his superiors. My political stance during the Algerian war was enough to make me an outcast. The heads of departments found it undesirable to coopt me as their peer, as head of a department of surgery and university professor. I was soon to put this “failure” to good advantage, using the free time and independence of mind I had thus gained. In France, when a physician wants to take his mind off professional cares by doing some historical research, he is prone to write the biography of a well-known practitioner, preferably a surgeon in Napoleon’s Great Army. The lives of Dupuytren and of Larrey have been scoured by many generations of historically-inclined physicians. I chose another course. My “career” as a historian of genocides is the product of a series of coincidences. The first of these occurred when reading the chapter, in William Shirer’s (1960) opus The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, concerning the criminal experiences carried out by German physicians in concentration camps. How could they have violated the Hippocratic oath? How had they dared put to criminal ends the training they had acquired? I was naive enough to think that, even under exceptional circumstances, medicine remains a haven for compassion, and that a physician, like a priest, is immune to evildoing. How come the Nazi physicians had not been restrained by the safety mechanisms? I decided I would devote all my extra-professional activity to finding answers to these questions as well as to those proceeding from the initial answers. But under no circumstance should my patients fare the worst for my historical concerns. First and foremost, I remained a practicing surgeon and my patients always came first. My research on genocide

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was confined to my spare time. Such was the price to be paid if I wanted to pursue those two—seemingly conflicting—occupations. In reality, far from being incompatible, my concerns were complementary. How could I keep on looking after patients day-in and dayout if I could not fathom how physicians could have inflicted disease and death on people in perfect health? I asked an elderly friend, Doctor Socrate Helman, to work on this project with me. His philosophical inclination as well as his command of the German Language and his experience as a Rumanian Jew allowed the implementation of a thorough exploration of the intellectual drift of German medicine both before and during National Socialism. Our first source of information was Doctor Francois Bayle’s (1951) Croix Gammée Contre Caducée (Swatiska versus Caduceus), a book relating the trial of physicians by an American court at Nuremburg in 19461947. The trial was concerned with the tragic consequences of “medicine without compassion.” We were soon aware that, among the violations of fundamental principles of which these physicians were guilty, the most obvious were not the most grievous. They had used prisoners as guinea pigs for German military “medical research”; but much worse, they had executed mental patients and they had been active in the genocide of Jews and Gypsies. A visit to the ninth circle of hell... We questioned physicians who had been deported to Auschwitz. By what right, with what intent were we conjuring up memories of such suffering? The question came only as an afterthought. Thereafter, I very seldom asked anyone to recall such memories. I would receive them if and as they came. During thirty years of ongoing research, on no other occasion have I felt a greater distress. Never have I come as close to losing faith in man as while imagining that—a quarter of a century earlier, in the heart of Europe, on the ramp of Birkenau and in the barracks of Auschwitz—a physician had sorted out thousands of individuals destined either to death or to a precarious survival. By following an Adriadne’s Thread through a maze at least a century old, I came upon a young SS researcher, Josef Mengele, an alumnus of a Germany university, who made a career for himself at Auschwitz. As the favored student of the professor of Racial Hygiene, Otmar von Verschuer of the University of Berlin, Mengele had been sent to Auschwitz to conduct research on twins. Like the other doctors in the camp, he was responsible for the “selections” of the deportees upon their arrval at Birkenau.

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Over time, Mengele was emerging as the symbol of an obsession. Traveling through Bavaria, I made a detour via Günzburg, Mengele’s hometown. I had to take a picture of his brother’s tractor factory to convince myself that this man had really existed and to witness that, in spite of what he represented, his family had no qualms publicizing his name on the walls of a small German town. The incentive had come from a picture in Bayle’s book: a group of physicians, wearing white blouses, peering over a prisoner, locked up in a caisson at the aeronautical research center of Dachau. That picture had then faded in my mind, only to be replaced by another one: the boy wearing a cap, his hands up, in the ghetto of Warsaw. And another again: a fair young lady on the dock at Birkenau. Could there be a common humanity shared by the victims and the executioners? The question laid before me a new field of inquiry and of doubt as to the extremes to which man can carry evil. The field was that of genocide. Our book, Histoire de la medecine SS, was now written. We had done most of the research work at the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation. That is where I met Leon Poliakov, one of the most famous historians of the genocide of the Jews and whose works on the history of antisemitism were authoritative, and asked him for his advice as to who might publish the book. He started by telling me at great length all the publishing houses it would be well to avoid. Only then did he add, offhandedly: “You should show your manuscript to the editors of Tintin, the comic strip. They also publish a collection on Nazism.” And so, one day, I handed over a hefty one thousand page manuscript to the Casterman publishing house, better known for its comic strips than for works of scholarship. A month later I met René Wintzen, a specialist on Germany and one of the editors at Casterman. He agreed to publish our work on the condition that we agreed to have it come out as three distinct books and in reverse chronological order. The series was to begin with The History of SS Medicine, then would follow The Massacre of the Insane, and last would come The History of German Medicine Under National Socialism, 1933-1939. So must it be, we were told, in order to satisfy public taste for the sensational. The three books were published successively from 1969 to 1973. They received favorable reviews and scored satisfactory sales, but they were translated only into Polish (books 1 and 2) and Spanish (book 1). They were translated neither into English nor into German. In France, not a single

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medical journal cared to comment on this shameful episode of medical history. Now that we had become research workers on the subject of genocide, we were an annoyance to the establishment. My friend Socrate Helman was reluctant to go on with historical research. As for me, I decided to focus on another area and another period. Quite fortuitously, I became interested in the Armenian genocide. I had received a letter asking me why I was concerned only with the Nazis and why I did not write about Armenian genocide. A lady friend of mine had told me about the deportation of her parents. Taking her to be Jewish, I had mistakenly set the event in the time frame of the Shoah. In fact, she was Armenian. I did not have the faintest notion as to the circumstances of this tragedy. I was even surprised to hear this crime qualified by a term which—I thought—referred solely to the extermination of the Jews of Europe. In 1973, I began to study, side by side, the history of the Armenians and that of the Ottoman Empire. I wanted to find out for myself whether a genocide had really been perpetrated in 1915. There were hardly any contemporary books on the subject. The only indication I had for sources was Richard Hovannisian’s (1980) bibliography of the Armenian genocide. Fortunately, I soon had the opportunity of being introduced to the Armenian community in France which—in those days—tended to live in seclusion with its past, pained by ambient indifference and obliteration of the past events. The community welcomed me as would a family anxiously waiting for the doctor and ready to trust the first one who shows up. I was more than welcome, even though, far from being the specialist they hoped for, I was—as yet—only a “week-end historian.” Mine was a fearful responsibility. What if my research led me to the conclusion that there had been no genocide? But facts promptly disposed of this question. The documents left no room for doubt: the extermination of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916 was a genocide. It took me four years—from 1973 to 1977—to describe the causes and circumstances of the Armenian genocide. My knowledge of National Socialism had rendered familiar the techniques of planned mass murder and the mentalities that foster such. The book (Les Armeniens, Histoire d’un Genocide), published by the Editions du Seuil in 1977, appeared at a time when Armenian anger was boiling over and turning into violence, prodded on as it was by the Turkish government denials and by the manifest indifference of the media.

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During the period 1978-1983, I had to cope with the fact of Armenian terrorism. In the effort to understand it—but not to condone it—I pioneered some research on an unexplored consequence of genocide: the impact of negation on the survivors of a victimized community. I had to break new ground, unfamiliar to me, and to get acquainted with other disciplines. I was now studying a diaspora, the problems of its integration and assimilation, the long processes of mourning and memory, the gap between generations, the intracommunity political conflicts, resentment, and struggles: its will to safeguard its identity and its constituent components of language, religion, traditions and culture. I wrote several books on Armenia that were published at the time. Among them, one on genocide, The Armenians: From Genocide to Resistance (London: Zed Press, 1983), co-authored by Gerard Chaliand; another entitled The Armenian Cause (London: Caravan Books, 1985), which related the events of the 1980s to the genocide of 1915; and yet another, Enquête sur la Négation d’un Génocide (Inquiry into the Denial of Genocide). I also contributed to a collection of essays on the history of the Armenians, which provided me with the occasion to acquire a better understanding of the direct consequences (1917-1923) of the genocide. In full accord with Gerard Chaliand, I thought it was about time the Armenian genocide became an international concern. In 1984, a Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal was called into session at the Sorbonne. Among other eminent members, the jury was comprised of three Nobel Prize recipients: Sean MacBride, Adolfo Perez Esquivel and George Wald. The first Peoples’ Tribunal had been brought together in 1979 in Bologne by Lelio Basso. As a body, it is charged with the task of rendering justice to groups deprived of access to international courts. I reported on the circumstances of the Armenian genocide. It was my first opportunity to meet with specialists doing research on genocide. During those two days, several historians took the stand to testify. But most moving was the testimony—only a few months before his death—of Yilmaz Güney, the Turkish film director. Though already severely ill, he was intent on declaring publicly that the Armenian genocide was a fact. By 1984—willy-nilly—I had become a specialist of the Armenian genocide, at least as far as France was concerned. In the United States, though translated, my two books had received little credit. The fundamental questions raised by the concept of genocide remained as yet unanswered. My book L’Etat Criminel (The Criminal

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State) brought to a final conclusion ten more years of research. While studying successively the genocides perpetrated by the Nazis and the genocide of the Armenians, I was not aware of the fact that my approach was a comparative one. In those days, historians were wary of such comparisons. Research workers intent on questioning the specificity of the Shoah had to give very detailed arguments when they were so bold as to compare the genocide of the Jews to events they thought to be of a similar nature. In doing so, they would insist on the need for multi-disciplinary collaboration of the social sciences in order to initiate the analysis of this disconcerting criminal phenomenon. It would have to involve history, of course, but also law, sociology, and psychology. The matter deserved to be given some thought. But I first needed to take inventory. The field lay fallow, but two pioneers, Leo Kuper and Israel Charny, had started plowing it by means of comparative studies and a multidisciplinary approach. Leo Kuper was the first one to comprehend and classify the diverse events so as to include them in an encompassing concept. In my opinion, however, he over-stretched the concept of genocide, including situations that do not belong to it. For example, in his book Genocide, Kuper (1981) singled out two genocidal developments (the Turkish genocide against the Armenians, in Chapter 6; and the German genocide against the Jews, in Chapter 7), but he also goes on to classify as genocide other events, such as the massacre of the Ibos in Nigeria (1966-1970), the massacre of the Bengalis in Bangladesh (1971), and the massacre of the Jews in the Ukraine following World War I. But, before taking exception to his classification, I had to learn about the mass murders Kuper called genocides. The term of “genocidal massacres” he used afforded the means to distinguish such episodes that failed to include all the characteristics of genocide, and which preserved the specificity of the latter. But he failed to say what conditions, both necessary and sufficient, had to be filled for the event to qualify as genocide. I devoted those ten years to the analysis of the crime of genocide and of the criminal state—its motives, its mechanism, and its henchmen. That is how I came across the path of Israel Charny. My friend Israel really deserves to be called a pioneer for the quality of his work and for the steadfastness with which he elaborates his concepts. He “plowed” and he “sowed.” He offered an audience to scholars working in relative seclusion by printing their research papers in the Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide. In 1981, he brought

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them together in a symposium at Tel Aviv, organized with no little difficulty. He contributed to the elaboration of a critical bibliography of their respective works, in a compendium that has become a must for all research workers in the field (Charny, 1988, 1991, 1994). Last but not least, he added his own personal touch by focusing his research on the prevention of genocide. His efforts to posit an Early Warning System have qualified him both as a scientist and as a utopian. Those are undoubtedly the foremost qualities expected of any researcher working on genocide. At a later date, I decided to restrict my field of research to the twentieth century, the age of state criminality. I took this step partly in view of the—possibly excessive—breadth of the field covered by the collective volume Genocide and the Modern Age, edited by Isidor Wallimann and Michael Dobkowski (1987). My book L’Etat Criminel had already been published when I met Robert Melson and Roger Smith. Their work involving a comparative study of genocide— mostly that of the Jews and that of the Armenians—was already in full progress (see, for example, Melson, 1989, and Smith, 1987). They were doing this work all at once because they shared in-depth knowledge concerning these two cases and they could analyze not only their similarities, but also their differences. This comparative procedure proves particularly rewarding: far from making genocide seem banal in its repetitions, it permits us to situate each case in the framework of a single penal category. I remember the first time I met, all together, a large number of these “pioneers” in the field of research on the crime of genocide. It was in 1987. The Association of Franco-Armenian Solidarity, of which I was a member, had organized an international colloquium on genocides, the first of which was held in a room of the National Assembly of France, beginning December 7 and continuing through the 9th. Its theme: the comparison of different genocides. I had already met Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn in Montreal, thanks to the good offices of my friend Gerard Chaliand. Then, with Frank Chalk as our intermediary, we arranged for Helen Fein, Leo Kuper, Irving Louis Horowitz, Roger Smith, and Israel Charny to come to this colloquium. On the second day of the meeting I invited Frank Chalk to come to dinner at our home in Montmartre. He said that he did not wish to get separated from his friends for the evening, to which I replied that this need not pose a problem. I immediately seized the opportunity to invite all foreign participants who could

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get away. My wife, who had been informed of my rash invitation only at the last minute, improvised an Alsatian choucroute. This is how I conversed, for the first time, in my version of spoken English, which is equaled in its mediocrity only by my written English—and for the most part thanks to the help of my Anglophone spouse— with Helen Fein, Gabriele Tyrnauer, Israel Charny, and Roger Smith (Louis Horowitz and Leo Kuper were not able to come). With the help of beer, I believe we understood each other. For me, it was an excellent evening. It is only after the publication of The Criminal State, during a colloquium on the Armenian genocide held at UCLA in 1995, that I met Robert Melson. At that time he had already advanced his comparative studies of genocides, particularly on the genocides of the Jews and the Armenians, very far indeed. Like his friend Roger Smith, he was equal to this task because he had already acquired in-depth knowledge of these two events and could therefore provide analysis not only of the similarities between them, but also of the differences. The comparative approach that he took in Revolution and Genocide (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) had proven particularly rewarding. Far from rendering the idea of genocide banal, it allowed him to situate each separate event in the context of the same penal category. Definitional Concerns Competitive examinations in the course of my medical studies had inured me to obstacle courses. The obstacles I now had to overcome were of a different nature. The main obstacle encountered when researching a single word is semantic. To speak of a “breach of the law,” the definition of which is indeterminate, or even involves contradictory aspects, or extending its connotation, venturing far abroad to the very concept of humanity, calls for a perfect mastery of meaning. It requires an unswerving train of thought and unfailing vigilance if one is to avoid misuse of language or empty talk. In court, the concept of genocide is so fraught with implications that prosecutors tend to extend it, whereas defense attorneys attempt to restrict it. The historian, neither judge nor litigant, must steer a direct course, unheeding of both deviations. One of these, however, is more injurious to the critical mind than the other. Stretching the meaning of genocide risks making the crime commonplace. On the other hand, I am only too familiar with the pitfalls of restricting it. You thereby

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deprive the victim-group of a qualification it claims as a means of stressing the gravity of its prejudice. One begins to sense the full impact of this contradiction during work sessions on hotly debated issues such as the collective murders perpetrated in Bosnia by the Serbian militia. He who dares to assert, in all honesty, that, according to him, the massacre of Srebrenica, which occurred in July 1995, does not qualify for the name of genocide, in spite of questionable evidence to the contrary, risks inflicting pain on others. If his only argument is that the massacre was an isolated event in the broader frame of a civil war, he will inflict pain. He will inflict pain even if he readily admits that one of the belligerents perpetrated genocidal actions but that these were not yet part of a global program. He will inflict pain and he himself will suffer for using a word and its syntax as a shield in order to maintain the strength of a concept. Having a common understanding of what is meant by the word “genocide” is thus a prerequisite to any comment on this crime. Historians and jurists are fully aware that the legal basis for the definition of genocide is unclear. The listings contained in Articles II and III of the Genocide Convention of 1948 are conflictual: the former restricts the concept, the latter extends it. Indeed, the enumeration of the four victim-groups does not take into account the fact that it is the assassin who decides that the victim belongs to such or such a group. He is free to constitute any group according to whatever criteria in accordance with his obsessions. On the other hand, the enumeration of acts gives the court of justice leeway to list under genocide crimes that do not fit the initial definition developed by Raphael Lemkin, nor the one included in Resolution 96 of the United Nations General Assembly, according to which repression of this crime is a “matter of international concern.” As for Article III, it needlessly lists five criminal offenses that are to be punished as genocide, in spite of the fact that each of these is nothing but a component of one single breach of law. Genocide, as defined by the Convention, represents a compromise seeking to satisfy the contradictory demands of the various States, members of the Sixth Commission, which penned its final draft. That is why each research worker comes up with his own definition of genocide. As for me, I call genocide: “The programmatic and widespread destruction of any human group, no matter the criteria used to define it, whose members are killed without distinction to their age nor sex, but simply by reason of their belonging to this group.” Thus formulated, our definition includes

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the three requisite components of that breach of law: the intent, the group, and “as such.” “Planned” implies that more than one individual worked out a plan for the extermination of a human group and that these planners ordered its execution. This covers paragraphs b, c, d, and e of Article III: intent, incitement, attempt, complicity. The adjective “extensive” stands for “all or part of.” Obviously the extermination of a fraction of a group or of a few individuals will not be considered as genocide. On the other hand, it is clear that a group can hardly experience total destruction. We are speaking of physical destruction. Genocide, therefore, is an assassination. It must not be mistaken for “ethnocide” which concerns the eradication of a culture. The word “whatever” in my definition underscores—as article 211-1 of the French penal code has it—the fact that the group under consideration is not necessarily one of those four mentioned in the Convention and that it may be “determined according to any other arbitrary criteria.” Another requisite characteristic of the collective murder called genocide is that it also involves women and children, as distinct from other massacres. Lastly, it must be demonstrated that those who are killed are individuals and that their extermination as a group is totally dependent upon the assassin’s decision to qualify them as members of such a group. In this way, the Young Turks who perpetrated the Armenian genocide destroyed the majority of the Armenian population in the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, the leadership of Hutu Power sought to destroy all of the Tutsis in Rwanda. In both cases, “genocide” is the applicable term. The Serbs, on the other hand, in their program of “ethnic cleansing” in Croatia and in Bosnia, did not systematically eliminate the inhabitants of an area who belonged to a different ethnicity; instead, they proceeded to round up able-bodied men and to massacre them in several locations. In the former cases, the assassins killed men, women, and children without distinction; but the acts of the Serbs did not fulfill the goals of a pre-established program of annihilation. Moreover, the Penal Tribunal for ex-Yugoslavia subsequently took judicial action not only against the Serbs, but also against the Croats and Bosnian Muslims. In Kosovo, from March to June 1999, faced with the magnitude of the deportation of almost a million Albanian refugees, it was generally feared that the 800,000 Albanians still remaining had been assassinated. Again, it was later learned that while local massacres of Albanians had occurred,

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there had never been a systematic plan for their total annihilation. In all three cases—Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo— it is possible to classify such mass murders as genocidal massacres, as crimes against humanity, yes, and abominable crimes. But these acts do not belong to the same juridical category as genocide. A clear understanding of the word “genocide,” therefore, constitutes a necessary preamble to any discussion of this crime. Initial research on genocide developed in several directions. Jurists were concerned with the breach of law, and, in conformity with the Convention, they extended the scope of the crime. Historians pored over documents and promptly developed a controversy as to the uniqueness and even as to the “exclusive uniqueness” of the Jewish genocide. Sociologists analyzed the mechanisms of mass murder and of entailing upheavals. Philosophers examined the concept. They hindered all reflection concerning such an inconceivable reality and forbade all attempts at a comparative approach. All the while, psychologists scrutinized the behavior of the executioners, the victims and the “onlookers.” But in each field, researchers would soon become aware of the ambiguities resulting from the diverse definitions of the word “genocide.” It was not before the 1980s that— having compared notes—they marked out boundaries to their common field of investigation. They shared the opinion that the Convention of 1948 was an unwieldy legal tool, that in the course of the century there had been several genocides, that “unique” does not mean “one and only,” that each one of them had specific traits as well as common characters and, lastly, that—given several of its traits—the genocide of the Jews was an exceptional event, but that, insofar as it calls for thought, it implies comparison. All shared a common belief, one which had formerly been expressed by the drafters of Resolution 96(1): denying entire human groups the right to exist “overwhelms human conscience, inflicts dreadful losses on humanity... and is contrary to moral law and to the spirit and the aim of the United Nations.” It seems to me that this heightened awareness of a transgression, of a violation of an ultimate taboo beyond which lies a zone of extreme risk, is the locus at which converge all studies on genocide. Here converge the reflections of Helen Fein, Irving Louis Horowitz, Yehuda Bauer, Leo Kuper, and Israel Charny. These researchers, fully aware of the exceptional character and of the destructive power of this crime, join to confront this absolute evil.

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The Evolution of My Thought and Work Having read the latters’ works, I now had a panoramic view of the field of research on genocide. Before beginning to write L’Etat Criminel, I wanted an answer to one more question. In the course of my reflection on genocide, had I followed a logical course or had there been breaks in my chain of reasoning? My initial work on genocide had been the product of compassion. I had read and listened to countless descriptions by “survivors” but I had not succeeded in reducing the insuperable gap between he who has witnessed “it” and he who reads or hears about “it.” A feeling of anger now accompanied my compassion. Anger at the impunity enjoyed by the criminals and at the indifference manifested by my coevals. Humanity itself is threatened. The very essence of man is doubly destroyed. And yet, that destruction does not entail awareness of the overwhelming disaster caused by a genocide. At every step, as the crime unfolds, at every instant during which executioner and victim stand face-to-face, the former is not even aware of doing evil; he is merely obeying an imperative. While dehumanizing the one he is about to kill, the assassin is himself losing his humanity. Therefore, genocide imperils humanity on two counts: first, because men are killed; and second, because the essence of humanity, man’s sense of responsibility, is destroyed. Neither anger against the executioner nor compassion for the victim, neither a lachrymose view of history nor vengeance, much less resignation, will allow one to take the exact measure of the event. Only the explanation of the causes and motives, the precise and documented account can initiate repair of the rent, a regeneration of the broken link between those two parts of humanity. I had not in any way been directly implicated in a genocide, neither by family or community bereavement, nor though personal feeling of guilt, that of a spectator or of a son of the executioner. I had chosen the path with steadfastness and logic, so as to assume fully the condition of man. That is why I had relentlessly tried to reduce the apparently unbridgeable distance between those two aspects of a single humanity. Though I was not aware of it, my work developed along a logical path. From the beginning, it seemed to me that the victim of a genocide was in no way responsible for what was happening to him, that heaven had caved in on him, and that, in order to understand such a tragedy, one needed to take a close look at those who were bringing

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down heaven. By analyzing the causes of genocide, I had chosen to piece together the erratic path of the assassins from initial deviation to their final act, rather than that of the victims. The authors and accomplices of genocide were not born evil, no more than their victims were born guilty. The former are educated to become such. They are taught or infused with hate and fear. They offer no more resistance than clay and are thus enrolled under the banner of death. It brought to mind the dialogue between God and the Golem which Irving Louis Horowitz (1989) writes about in Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (p. 209), and I wanted to help reset the letter which had come off the Golem’s brow—a minute shift which converts truth to death. In so doing, I would help fell the man-made monster, man’s servant. Being careful not to shed either compassion or anger, both essential to man’s revolt, I learned to keep those feelings at bay and felt no qualms about seeking and producing proof, as any expert must, when called to court to state his conclusions. Thus my way of thinking had developed with time, taking into account the published work of researchers, but also current events and obstacles encountered along the way. As I had just finished my book on the genocide of the Armenians, that of the Cambodians was hitting the front page. I had fiercely fought a head of the hydra while another one sprang up. Further, in 1994, as I finished writing L’Etat Criminel, and though the manuscript was already expected by the editor, I had to add an analysis of the genocide in Rwanda. Far from being put off by the resurgence of crime, I was inclined to press on with the comparison between genocides. In like fashion, the alpinist faced by imminent danger tightens the ropes that protect him against a fall. The accumulation of genocides can in no way detract from the goal. Though all are interconnected, each one of them is specific. These singularities are not antagonistic. When victims try to compete with one another, they play into the assassins’ hands. At present the foremost obstacle encountered by research workers concerned with genocide is “negationnisme.” In French the word is new—hardly ten years old. It is the equivalent of English “denial” and is preferable to “deni” or “denegation.” It has the distinct advantage of doing away with “revisionism,” a term used by deniers and which is totally unfit since it suggests that, on the basis of new evidence, historical truth needs to be “revised,” or reconsidered. Fortunately, the label of infamy attached to genocide entails the irrevocable condemnation of all those who took part in its perpetration.

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For the criminal, confession is no longer of any avail. Negation is his last resort. Even before being submitted to an inquest, he knows his crime is beyond confession. Researchers are thus faced with a difficulty they have not learned to handle. They come face-to-face with forgers in the guise of scholars doing all they can to lead them astray and ensnare them along the way. In the end run, of course, the forgers and their trickery will be exposed. But the strategy against denial and its noxious after-effects is not easily determined. It is my opinion that denial must be actively exposed, but that one should refrain from debating with its propounders. When one is confronted by the denial of genocide, it is as if we come face-to-face with the criminal. Even when the corpse has been removed, the murder remains. It is prolonged by the ongoing labor of the survivors’ memory and constantly revived by any act of violence inflicted on truth. When I first encountered vocal denial, I was outraged. I could not harbor the idea that the extermination of hundreds of thousands or millions of individuals could be wiped clean in a sentence, much less that it was possible to reverse the charges and to accuse the victim as if he were the executioner. However, I proceeded like a scientist who is told he must have slipped up in his demonstration. I reviewed my data in good faith. But I promptly found that I was not at fault and that those who pretended I was were themselves liars, cynics, and perverts. The “denier” is a cynic since he knows the truth even though he may try to delude himself. Denial is a growing concern for research workers, especially since the worldwide web provides a medium that precludes valid editorial control of the data made accessible. Denial also takes advantage of the fact that the past wears away with time. Denial may be viewed as a resurgence of genocide and, on that ground, it is of paramount importance to fight it. Our testimony, both spoken and written, stands at great risk if we do not protect it against the “virus” which relentlessly strives to delete it. In 1995, I had occasion to collaborate with several specialists of the Great Lakes area of Africa. The genocide in Rwanda called for a new approach. The media had extensively covered this tragedy. It would be correct to say that this genocide had been announced beforehand. Calls to murder had been issued by the extremists in Hutu Power, simultaneously in their racist press and on the “Thousand Hills” radio/television networks they controlled. International organizations had not intervened to denounce this threat. When the first

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mass murders began in April 1994, the media covered the events in a general way. In June, when the genocide was almost complete, politicians and other interested parties looking into the situation were already speaking of genocide. Then, in July, the vast migratory movement organized by the militias and the military responsible for the genocide itself successfully redirected the pity of the Western nations toward the refugee camps and away from the crimes. By an adroit manipulation of media, the authors of the genocide became the principal objects of international charity, even as the survivors, saved by the victory of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, were at best forgotten, at worst viewed with suspicion. Finally, the responsibility of Belgian colonization, that of the French government and even of the Catholic church in giving birth to the genocide, became a subject of controversy in the media. Though, of course theirs was an indirect responsibility, due to ignorance and to blundering rather than to criminal intent. The analyses were conflicting. Unable to get over the “loss” of Fachoda in the nineteenth century, and obsessed by fear of a conspiracy against the French sphere of influence, the political establishment propagated the theory of reciprocal murder and bilateral genocide between African ethnic groups. The specialists of the Great Lakes area warned against the ethnic delusion, that is, against the forging of antagonistic ethnic groups in a society originally free of such. I joined those specialists as they tried to fathom the meaning of the crime of genocide, comparing it to other events of a similar nature. Our exchanges, punctuated by publications and symposia, convinced me once and for all of the need to pool expertise and knowledge in order to make some headway in research on genocide. Once L’Etat Criminel was published, I stopped working “freelance.” Well after my M.D., I was given a Ph.D. in history. Long before, I had registered at the Sorbonne as a doctoral student. The subject I had chosen for my thesis was “The Genocides of the 20th Century.” But this had also served as the subtitle of my book on the criminal state and I did not have the right to submit as a thesis a work previously published. My director therefore suggested a way out, ingenious but perfectly legitimate. I would present a résumé of the sum total of my work on genocide, published over the past thirty years. That is how, in 1995, at age 63, I obtained a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne (University Paris IV). It did not change anything as far as my work was concerned, but the degree opened wide, for me, the

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doors that—until then—were, at best, ajar. After thirty years of intellectual nomadism I became a member, perhaps not of a family, but of a circle. Time will tell if I have contributed something to my field of research. But I do wish to clarify one point. I was reluctant, throughout, to use the personal pronoun “I” when I meant to speak about “us.” I did so only at the request of the editors of this collective work. As it happens, I am the sole Frenchman who has been singled out as a pioneer. A flattering choice, no doubt, but it would be very foolish to pride myself on it. Many of us, in France, have devoted thought and research to genocide and, like most other research workers in other countries, we have concentrated on the Shoah: Joseph Billig, Alain Finkielkraut, Alfred Grosser, Richard Marienstras, Leon Poliakov, and Pierre Vidal-Naquet, among others. This list is not exhaustive. To a large extent I was nurtured on their work, as I also was, in fact, on the work of English-speaking authors. I must add that their work is complementary and it is unfortunate that translations from French to English are so few and far between. Science is thus deprived of valuable contributions. Under no circumstance would I have the reader of the present essay take me for a “ discoverer” when I have no other ambition than to share in a lineage. I think I have contributed to the piecing together of the successive steps that led to the genocide of the Armenians as well as to the exposure of how a complex spiral winds its way, both from exact science and myth, and then leads to the genocide of the Jews, by way of a “chemical formula for biological racism.” But, as some grant, perhaps I have been a “pioneer” in focusing my history of twentieth-century genocides on the State and its prime responsibility for these crimes. Before a genocide occurs, there is a long phase of inception. In the eyes of the State or of a political party, it emerges as the easiest way to solve, definitively, an obsessive problem, whether real or imaginary. I am, by no means, the only one to have put forth such a blatant fact, but it served me as a starting point on a long path along which I proceeded with the scientific tools of history and of other social sciences, with the convictions of a humanist and with no other ambition than to travel among men. Future Plans Although my years have now led me to forgo my activities as a surgeon, I have more than enough plans to keep me busy full time. I have started writing a book on the end of the Ottoman Empire and

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the birth of Turkey. In it, I analyze the emergence of passions and fervor amongst the people of three continents who were part of that Empire, which foretell of impending or actual genocides and genocidal massacres. Such memories are difficult to bear; they lead to the deletion of the dark pages of the past and to the falsification of national history. If and when I carry this project to a successful end, I intend to examine a problem suggested to me upon reading Article I of the Convention of 1948: “Genocide is a violation of the law of nations.” In French, the law of nations is “le droit des gens,” translated from the Latin “jus gentium,” initially “jus gentium intra se,” “the right prevailing between nations.” What is the history of this right, which is at the origin of international law and which presides over international relations between States? Obviously I cannot accurately predict the conclusions to which my research will lead me. Much remains to be done, and it is essential for researchers to work together in a common structure, international and multi-disciplinary, serving as an interface between conception and action. A Convention that has long been kept in mothballs and which, in fact, is of no practical use, urgently needs to be updated. Fifty years have elapsed, and yet no complaint for genocide has ever been lodged with any of the organizations of the UN. Fifty years had passed before it was decided—and with what reservations!—to create an international court of penal law, and before an ad hoc court of law, the International Court of Penal Law for Rwanda, pronounced the first condemnation for the crime of genocide. Criminals are not so slow to act. It is up to us to get ahead of them. Research workers need to be present in the political arena so as to convince the decision makers of an impending menace and to examine with them the most efficient means of fighting this curse which imperils the very survival of humanity. The twentieth century came to a close with a frightful toll. Our entrance into the twenty-first century harbors no pretense of innocence. Violence and barbarity will take on a different shape. They will no longer be the prerogative of criminal states alone. Fanatical groups will seize local power here and there, having at their disposal and technical means of spreading terror and thus will be ready to carry out any transgression if it can help them impose their imaginary vision of the world. Some, in disguise, moved by religious fanaticism, political ambition, or simply greed are presently turning collective slaughter into common practice. Tomorrow the same forces will not hesitate to perpetrate a genocide if they see

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any profit in it. There is no need to be a prophet of doom to foresee “devilry” in the genocides to come, with evil and perverse elements grafted on its implementation. It is our duty to devote our expertise and our knowledge to this combat against Evil. References Chaliand, Gerard, and Ternon, Yves (1983). Le Genocide des Armeniens. Bruxelles, Belgium: Complexe, 1980. Translation: The Armenians. From Genocide to Resistance. London: Zed Press, 1983. Bayle Francois (1951). Croix Gammée Contre Caducée (Swatiska versus Caduceus). Neustadt, Pfalz: National Press. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1988). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. London: Mansell Publishers. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1991). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. Volume 2. New York: Facts on File. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1994). The Widening Circle of Genocide (Volume 3, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review). New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Horowitz, Irving Louis (1989). Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Hovannisian, Richard G. (1980). The Armenian Holocaust: A Bibliography Relating to the Deportations, Massacres, and Dispersion of the Armenian People, 1915-1923. Cambridge, MA: Armenian Heritage Press. Kuper, Leo (1981). Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Melson, Robert (1989). “Revolutionary Genocide: On the Causes of the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and the Holocaust.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 4(2):161-174. Shirer, William L. (1960). The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon & Schuster. Smith, Roger (1987). “Human Destructiveness and Politics: The Twentieth Century as an Age of Genocide,” pp. 21-39. In Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (Eds.) Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Ternon, Yves (1985). The Armenian Cause. London: Caravan Books. Ternon, Yves (1977). Les Armeniens, Histoire d’un Genocide. Paris: Le Seuil. (Reprint Points-Histoire, 1996.) Translation: The Armenians, History of a Genocide. New York: Caravan Books, 1981. Ternon, Yves (1989). Enquete sur la Negation d’un Genocide. (Inquiry into the Denial of Genocide). Marseille, France: Ed. Parentheses. Ternon, Yves (1995). L’Etat criminel. Les Genocides au 20e Siecle. Paris: Le Seuil. Ternon, Yves, and Helman, Socrate (1969). Histoire de la Medecine SS. Bruxelles, Belgium: Casterman. Ternon, Yves, and Helman, Socrate (1971). Le Massacre des Alienes. Bruxelles, Belgium: Casterman. Walliman, Isidor, and Dobkowski (Eds.) (1987). Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Death. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

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6 A German-Born Genocide Scholar Barbara Harff Beginnings Born in Kassel, Germany in 1942, I still have dim memories of being evacuated to the countryside near the end of the war. I entered first grade in 1949. My father, having survived five years in a Soviet prison camp, eventually returned in the spring of 1950. My mother worked as a clerk for the U.S. military, which meant better food for the extended family. My brother and I lived with my grandparents until the spring of my father’s return. My beloved grandparents were old style socialists—my grandfather joined the Socialist Party about 1905, my grandmother in 1913. When she died at age ninety-seven, my grandmother had been a party member for over seventy years. My mother’s parents were also socialists, but her brother Gustav Boehrnsen and brother-in-law Willi Hundertmark were dedicated Communists. Willi was briefly in the notorious Sonnenburg concentration camp; Gustav was imprisoned by the Nazis in the late 1930s. The latter was eventually released to serve in punishment battalion 999, which covered Rommel’s retreat in North Africa. Luckily he was captured and shipped as a prisoner of war to Albertville, Alabama. Later a prominent Social Democratic politician in the city-state of Bremen, he achieved a measure of local popularity. Legend has it that when the Americans entered my hometown of Kassel looking for a few good men (i.e. non-Nazis), my grandfather was asked if he wanted to become mayor or police president. Trained as a lithographer and retrained as a revenue service bureaucrat, he 97

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declined the honors, and instead decided that he could best contribute to society by rebuilding the local revenue service. My school memories are mixed—a rebellious kid egged on by my grandparents and later my father, who encouraged me not to accept authority at face value (his advice was to do right and not be afraid of anybody), I found it difficult to buckle down and study hard. I was great in subjects I liked (history and social studies) and otherwise lazy. Unfortunately, a lot of minor Nazis still taught at gymnasiums, and took a dim view of a mischievous girl with my family background. My grandfather, who served on the denazification committees, and my father, who decided to become the first vice-president of the state of Hesse’s newly-founded and controversial Elternbeirat (the equivalent of the PTA), did not help my school career. Eventually I decided to become a social worker or bureaucrat. Politics ran in the blood, and at fifteen, I joined the Socialist youth (the Falcons) and later became a Social Democrat party member, only to drop out just before emigrating to the United States. Not ready to accept anybody telling me what to believe, I especially had problems with what was in the 1950s still the quasiMarxist platform of the Social Democrats. My uncle Willi—who must have been the only Communist ever honored with a WestGerman Bundesverdienstkreuz (Federal Public Service Cross) for his work memorializing the victims of the Holocaust—and I always argued about the Communists in the Soviet Union and their bloody history. This is part of the subject matter of his recently published biography. At the tender age of twenty I identified myself as a pacifist, an agnostic, and a believer in the unity of Europe at the expense of the nation-state. In 1967 I entered the United States after having married an Irish American Catholic with a Dominican high school and college education. Because I had decided to drop out of church formally (a minor legal procedure in Germany) I was never married in church. I thought that established religions had sacrificed essentially humane messages and replaced them with righteous claims to the detriment of non-Christians. Thus, unprepared for the religiosity of my new family, I succumbed to pressure to have my only son, Timothy, baptized a Catholic, something I have never regretted. Thanks to some progressive nuns he spent three good years in a Catholic elementary school in Chicago, which in turn prompted me to take a closer look

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at world religions. I consider myself a devoted mother, somewhat overprotective (my son is now a thirty-three-year old, married metallurgical engineer with a minor in social studies), I nevertheless decided to go back to school after Tim was in first grade. I finished my undergraduate degree in political science in 1973, my M.A. in international relations in 1975 at Northeastern Illinois University, and my Ph.D. in political science in 1981 at Northwestern University in Evanston. During my graduate work, my marriage to Tim’s father fell apart. Shortly after accepting my first academic appointment at LaTrobe University in Melbourne, Australia (my third Continent), I married Ted Robert Gurr, which has proven to be a lasting and intellectually satisfying relationship. Why Genocide Studies? During my Socialist youth I read my first book on the Holocaust, The Yellow Star (Der Gelbe Stern), a copy of which was in my bibliophile father’s library. The Holocaust and its atrocities were not then part of the school curricula. Though my grandparents taught me that Nazis were bad people, I really knew little about the Holocaust. However, I had a general idea that the worst thing I could call anybody in anger was a Nazi, which of course as a rambunctious kid I did often—an epithet my opponents rarely appreciated. My mother had a Jewish friend who survived a concentration camp and became a prosecutor in my hometown (her gentile husband did not divorce her). I remember her well. My mother admonished me to be always on my best behavior because the Nazis did horrible things to her. I tried, but only because I liked her. I remember a similar scenario when a Gypsy woman came to our apartment asking for food, which my mother gladly provided. When my mother allowed her to use our washroom she kissed my mother’s hand, which deeply embarrassed me and made me wonder why. I learned early on that Gypsies were also badly treated by the Nazis. I was not punished but also not encouraged for hanging out at some camps of Gypsies, whose exotic good looks fascinated me. Occasionally my mother would talk about Kristallnacht and wistfully said that it was to be expected that the world would seek revenge against the Germans. In some ways she saw herself a victim—her brothers in camps and prison, the Gestapo searching her childhood home, my father battered and demoted during the Nazi era (because of his socialist upbringing) and returning from Russia in 1950 a sick and broken man.

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There is another dim memory that has often haunted me. Sometime in fall 1946 or spring 1947 I saw kids in winter clothes, spitting at me from a former military barracks (probably turned camp for displaced persons), and my grandmother telling me that I should ignore it, because these kids had had a very hard time. But a full picture of the Holocaust emerged only after I saw my first pictures of survivors and corpses. Could this be my country and my neighbors? For better or worse, I started to ask the most obvious questions of anybody who would listen—what did you do in the 1930 and 1940s, did you hate Jews, Gypsies and retarded people, and if so why? Why did you not fight the Nazis and did you help any one? I was proud of my grandmother, a strong willed woman, who slapped a Nazi youth after he had admonished her for not returning the Hitler salute. But despite my family’s decent behavior during bad times, there were no great heroes among them. The attitudes and excuses expressed in such sentiments as “How could I do anything as a single person against the Nazis?” led me to conclude that civil courage was not a great part of the German psyche. Despite my uncles’ activities before and during the war, and despite my parents’ honesty in telling me what happened, my youthful temperament led me to have little sympathy for my fellow Germans. There was also the matter of my grandmother’s two sisters who were married to minor Nazis. Not until my teenage years did I know that the woman next door, who my grandmother called the Nazi and never talked to, was one of those sisters. Returning to College in the United States My undergraduate degree in political science was earned at Northeastern Illinois University, which was located in an old Jewish neighborhood in Chicago and attracted many Jewish students. Here my personal challenges began; being an immigrant German in 1970 was, in my experience, a dubious distinction. The few Arab students at Northeastern favored me for the wrong reasons. At that time I knew next to nothing about their history or that of the Palestinians. Eventually I made friends among both groups. How? I remember explaining my family’s history, listening, and preaching mutual tolerance, all the while hoping for acceptance. I was simply not proud to be German and tried to hide it wherever I could. Not until my graduate studies did I truly come to accept my heritage, with its many good and horrible contributions to mankind.

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My intellectual development somewhat resembles the path of my personal development. Thinking that a perfect legal system (international law) could strengthen human rights law, then in its infancy, I saw legal solutions as the best means to deal with inequities and injustices. To me, international efforts (i.e. humanitarian intervention) seemed to be the only way to stop or deter massive human rights violations. Little did I realize that the principle of humanitarian intervention had a dubious standing in international law. For many legal scholars (writing as early as the 1880s) intervention by outside powers into the internal affairs of a sovereign state was unacceptable—mutual respect of sovereignty was treated as the key to harmonious international relations. Yet there were dissenters who argued that humanitarian intervention resembled the just war doctrine, which allowed for external interference in domestic affairs in cases of massive human rights abuses. They argued that states were subjects of international law, and as such if treated as legal persons, they had to adhere to minimum ethical standards. Provisions should be made for punishment for violators of given ethical provisions. In my dissertation I developed a complex legal/philosophical argument that elevated humanitarian intervention to the status of intervention by right (an accepted legal principle), which in turn would enable outside states to intervene (legally) in cases of genocide. I have written numerous articles and a monograph expanding the various arguments, some of which have been reprinted in ethics readers and cited quite extensively. In the early 1980s I branched out in a new direction because I was bored with what I saw as an essentially sterile debate. Over the last twenty years the same arguments have reemerged, sometimes attached to different case studies, but theoretically not too different from the 1880s, 1920s, 1950s or 1970s. The only major shift was that by the late 1990s the majority of scholars came to view humanitarian intervention as legal in cases of massive human rights violations. Thus I felt that the task I had set myself was accomplished and I eventually abandoned the safety and rationality of law for collecting evidence on gross human rights violations. By identifying and collecting comparative evidence on cases of genocide and politicide, I sought to explain inhumanity, with the ultimate goal of predicting where genocides were in the making. Was there one key event that strengthened my commitment to doing genocide research? Not really—perhaps it was meeting Helen Fein, a critical but exceptionally

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supportive scholar and exceptional human being, perhaps it was visiting Auschwitz—but more likely bits and pieces of my upbringing, early political engagements, reading about and accepting my peoples’ responsibilities for doing evil, all joined with my optimism that human will can change things. Visiting Auschwitz My commitment to becoming a scholar of human rights and genocide scholar deepened after a visit to Auschwitz in summer 1983. I was and am convinced that each of us has a special responsibility (especially those of us who teach the next generation) to make others understand that prejudice, hate and indifference contribute to the making of the horrendous events that we call genocide, and that we need to find ways to prevent their reoccurrence. On a sunny, beautiful afternoon, Ted and I walked almost alone in Birkenau after visiting Auschwitz One. It was eerie, I remember talking to myself, addressing the dead—cursing the Germans, pitying myself for being one, crying—but most of all I remember my anger about so many people who were not allowed to live their lives, about a God in whose existence so many believed and who allowed such evil. I wanted revenge, and I think it was then that I concluded capital punishment was appropriate punishment for mass murderers. But above all, I felt I had been here before. I suppose my vivid imagination allowed me to imagine how it must have been to be here and I asked myself what would I have done to survive, how could I have protected my child. And I remember the overwhelming feeling of total helplessness. I still believe that imagining oneself in the place of the victims makes one understand and empathize. My husband had to hear fiery speeches for the next weeks on how I (single-handedly, of course) would always do the right thing. Now that I am older and tired, my greatest hope is that I have contributed through my work to help others understand why elites and peoples conspire to annihilate other peoples. We need to make others understand that genocide is not a thing of the past, that it could happen again anywhere, that we need to be on constant alert, and actively engaged in preventing the murder of peoples who are condemned to death for who they are or what they stand for. My youthful missionary zealotry has given way to what I hope is tolerance for those who do not necessarily agree with me, but then I also will never budge on my core principles.

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Professional Development Northwestern University’s Department of Political Science, where I was admitted to the Ph.D. program in 1977, was strongly behavioral and an international law dissertation on preventing genocide was an orphan project. I opted for the way of least resistance, selecting professors who had marginal knowledge of an obscure topic. I remember a brief conversation with Thomas Buergenthal, a human rights and international law professor visiting the University of Illinois Chicago Circle, who encouraged me to pursue human rights but not necessarily international legal approaches (something about gathering dust on the shelves of obscurity). The discipline of political science was less than hospitable for human rights scholars (I considered myself part of that community then) and human rights issues were not considered the stuff that lends itself to the systematic testing of hypotheses. My dissertation however was readily accepted, probably because I had found a way to pacify the behavioralists. I conducted a survey to test for empathic responses to scenarios of rights violations in a small universe of the student population and thus persuaded my professors that indeed I had devised a way to combine good social science with something of value. My first professional paper, given at the 1981 International Studies Association meetings upon our return from Australia, attracted an audience of two for a panel of five people, one of whom left soon after we began. 1 A well-known scholar (who shall remain anonymous) jokingly said that if I were to insist on pursuing a career researching genocide, my gravestone would read “Here lies a promising scholar.” Others warned me that since there were only a handful of cases in modern history, I could not possibly do the kind of comparative research that would lead to publications in respectable journals. What made me persist was probably a personality disorder— after all, I needed a position and had to support my son. But being the eternal optimist, I felt that since I had persuaded the Australians to give me a job in a legal studies department, I could persuade the academic community that I had something to say about a topic that should have gotten attention a long time ago—along with the civil rights movement and the women rights movement. After all there was a world out there in which peoples did not enjoy the most basic rights of all: the right to live and freedom from torture. Among my early supporters I count J. David Singer, known for his unabashed

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commitment to systematic research and frank judgments. He wrote a note voicing his support, which was published in Israel Charny’s Internet of the Holocaust and Genocide Studies newsletter in 1988. Somewhat to my surprise, he suggested that this work was worth doing. But, what needs to be done? The Prevention of Genocide In my 1981 dissertation, I proceeded from a radical positivist perspective using Hans Kelsen’s approach, which treats law as a system of normative propositions. I argued for extending the principle of humanitarian intervention to intervention by right in cases of genocide. 2 In a number of later publications I extended the complex legal argument (debating the merits of various schools of jurisprudence) to include analysis of strategic aspects of humanitarian intervention. I have argued that the traditional view, which holds that sovereignty reigns supreme, is outdated, especially in light of the emergence of standards pertaining to the rights of citizens vis-a-vis their states. Although the legal community is not in the business of policymaking, legal scholars by and large have come to realize that any debate about the legality of humanitarian intervention will push them into the policy arena. In as much as few scholars now argue against the merit of humanitarian intervention in cases of massive human rights violations, the debate now centers on the circumstances in which intervention could or should take place. Especially thorny is the question of whether or not unilateral intervention is desirable and legal.3 For some scholars it is satisfying to stay within the realm of law, but once an acceptable compromise position emerges (as is the case with humanitarian intervention), what then? For me the legal debate is over, in light of my conclusion that a majority of scholars agree that humanitarian intervention is legal in cases of genocide (e.g. Louis Henkin, and probably Michael Walzer). But other issues are unresolved. Although it may be morally right and legally acceptable to intervene, few states take action when it is needed. When they do, it usually is during or after the fact rather than before or at the onset of genocide. Part of the problem, I think, is that many scholars and policymakers were and are persuaded that genocides are too few to warrant the kind of attention envisioned by genocide scholars and human rights experts. Thus, I turned to collecting information on cases of genocide since World War II.

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Collecting and Compiling Information on Cases since 1945 When I began collecting information on mass murder my first goal was to demonstrate that genocide was a recurring phenomenon. My emphasis on post World War II cases is practical and I thought more relevant. First, information is more readily available, second the world has changed since 1945, insofar as many new states have emerged, some of them perpetrators of geno/politicide. But I soon found that little work was done systematically comparing and contrasting cases of genocide, research that is a necessary precondition for prediction. As other scholars have done, I also compared cases. In addition, I have tried to explain (using survey data) why people kill, but I was not satisfied with my answers. Little or no research was being done using good social science methods to allow us to test explanations of why such events occur. Was this really me? During my graduate studies at Northwestern University I was bored to tears with the emphasis on quantitative analyses, also known as mindless number crunching. The only reason I did relatively well in statistics was that my pride was at stake, since I had the reputation of not being interested in the “hard” sciences. I was going to show them that I could equally well crunch numbers, at least as well or better as my male peers (there were four women among twenty-three graduate students starting the Ph.D. program in 1977). In statistics I managed two As and a B+—pretty darn good for somebody out of high school for a few years (I was thirtyfive and getting younger). I felt that this excruciatingly dull emphasis on detail was surely detrimental to thinking great thoughts and it was taking the fun out of whatever great contribution I was going to make to the world at large. And I do remember the well-intentioned professor who earnestly encouraged me to “count” all interventions that had ever taken place, instead of doing something philosophical or legal. Oddly enough, one of the great scholars of international law, Gerhard von Glahn, had actually completed his dissertation in the same department a few decades earlier, but he was almost entirely unknown among my professors. When I began the seven-year process of identifying cases, with the help of undergraduate and graduate assistants, I realized that what I needed first and foremost was a clear definition of what constituted genocide. Here I credit Helen Fein with introducing me to the complexity of such an effort. My contribution to the definitional

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debate lies in the invention of the term politicide. My working definition is that geno/politicide is the promotion, execution and/or implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents—or in the case of civil war either of the contending authorities—that result in the death of a substantial portion of a communal, political, or politicized communal group. I distinguish between two types of episodes. In genocides, the victimized groups are defined primarily in terms of their communal characteristics. In politicides, by contrast, groups are defined primarily in terms of their political opposition to the regime and dominant groups. I differ from the United Nations Genocide Convention of 1948, which also includes doing mental harm to members of a group, because this would extend the definition to innumerable instances of groups which have lost their cohesion and identity, but not their lives, as a result of processes of socio-economic change.4 Let me briefly introduce a few problems that emerged as a result of my case finding exercise. I cannot emphasize enough that an episode is not determined by the number of people killed. In civil wars large numbers of peoples are killed but they are not ordinarily genocides. To determine whether or not a genocide is in the making, we need to assess motive and intent, look at whether or not the killings are planned or random, identify who the perpetrators are (the state or other authority should be directly or indirectly responsible) and determine which means led to the death of victims. On the last point, deliberate starvation that eventually leads to mass death should of course be included. It also is exceptionally difficult to determine the onset of a genocide: When does a genocide begin or end? And it is here that we often think of the number of peoples that have been killed to help decide that, yes, now it is genocide. This is because we do not have the capabilities to identify and analyze the processes that may lead to genocide, i.e. have an early warning system that would enable researchers and policymakers to trace the descent into genocide. Most of the forty-eight cases I have identified are politicides— while some are mixed cases—true genocides are rare. In mixed cases, victims are communal groups targeted for their political activities. This is an important finding because, given the definition in the Genocide Convention that omits reference to political groups as potential targets of genocide, no mass murder of political opponents would be considered a genocide. This would be a tragic mistake,

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because once again hundreds of thousands lives would be unaccounted for. Let us remind ourselves that the original draft of the Genocide Convention included political groups as potential victims of genocide, but their inclusion led to the rejection of the draft by the U.S.S.R. and its allies. The final draft omitted any reference to political mass murder, probably because the support of the U.S.S.R. was needed for passage. Raphael Lemkin was surely not interested in devising ways of excluding potential victims of genocide, but instead tried to separate the victims of genocide from civilian deaths during war and extend them international protection. In the process of gathering information I began to realize that another phenomenon was closely related to and hard to distinguish from geno/politicides, namely ethnic conflict. My interest in ethnic conflict constituted a slight detour from genocide research. Partially as a result of my teaching (I am the Middle East expert in my department and also teach the politics of Southeast Asia), ethnic mobilization and nationalism were an integral part of my teaching agenda. Besides, I felt that others should, could, and did equally well collect new information on new genocides and political mass murders. I wanted to widen my horizon and find some links between other research topics and my own interest. I also felt that we, the community of genocide scholars, were talking too much to one another. I needed a fresh outlook, something current that would bring my work to the attention of the policy community. I wanted to reach those who most needed to hear the simple message that genocides were a recurrent phenomenon and that the United States, given its moral pretensions, had a responsibility to help people in need. In my heart I was still preaching, but I needed to find the right tone. Ethnic Conflict My husband’s expertise and claim to fame derive from his many years of research and innumerable publications on internal conflict. As he often has said to me and others, I was mainly responsible for stimulating his interests in human rights issues and genocide. He began in 1985 to collect information on disadvantaged ethnic groups worldwide, which led to the publication of his acclaimed work Minorities at Risk (Gurr, 1993), which traces the changing fortunes of over 250 groups. This study is related to his work on internal conflict insofar as increased ethnic awareness may lead to mobilization of groups seeking autonomy or trying to improve their lot in exist-

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ing states. We realized early on that my identity groups (victims of genocide) were often identical to his repressed minorities. His information on the extent of discrimination and on group organization and political actions was useful for my research, as I sought to identify factors contributing to the use of genocidal policies by states. We have collaborated on a number of articles combining his and my data, and on a book on Ethnic Conflict in World Politics (1994). These studies use elements of both of our data-sets, theoretical models, and my work on humanitarian intervention to show that ethnic conflicts often lead to genocides and politicides. Our combined efforts have gotten attention in various quarters, not least among policymakers. From late 1994 to 2000 we were senior consultants on the State Failure project, a massive data collection and hypothesis testing effort initiated at the request of Vice President Gore.5 This work should be of interest to genocide researchers, in part because it shows among other things that some in the Clinton Administration, and the Washington foreign policy and intelligence communities, sought an empirically grounded understanding of what causes ethnic and revolutionary warfare, geno/politicide, and regime crises. The State Failure Task Force I really do not know why the sudden interest in genocide. Maybe it was the Rwanda embarrassment, or that presidential candidate Albert Gore really wanted to do better. Or perhaps the CIA hoped to rehabilitate its reputation, serve humanitarian causes, or whatever— just maybe I was being tasked to build an early warning system that is geared specifically to detection of genocides. Lucky me or unfortunate me? If the models are mediocre so is the researcher. So far, we have some good results, and I believe that the basic ideas are all there, but just wish I had a few years to really think. However, the government wants everything done yesterday, and so be it—this has been my chance to do the most important thing I could possibly do, which is to persuade policy types that academics are occasionally useful in finding better answers to age-old problems. The Task Force, led by a half-dozen senior consultants, has identified all instances of serious political conflicts and crises (see above) from 1955 to 1998. We also identified over 250 potential causal variables, and collected close to complete information on over seventy variables, which we thought were of the greatest importance.

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Using methods such as neural network analysis and genetic algorithm analysis, as well as conventional logistic regressions, many plausible hypotheses have been tested. For example, we wanted to know under which circumstances democratization succeeds or fails. What impact does environmental degradation have on the onset of political crisis? How do quality of life indicators impact on democratization and crisis development? How do ethnic discrimination and colonial heritage affect the likelihood of state failure? In addition. I have designed my own project, which traces the occurrence and frequency of accelerating events that are theoretically expected to precede and forewarn of ethnic war, regime collapse, and genocide. Accelerator analysis is being completed in 2001 for a dozen high-risk states for two years, each with statistical analyses already designed. We also tested general models of geno/politicides using factors that are included in Helen Fein’s and my theoretical models. These are the key findings in our initial report, prepared for the National Security Council in November 1998: Between 1956 and 1996 there were 36 episodes in which regimes targeted ethnic, religious, or political groups for destruction in whole or part. Of these episodes of genocide and politicide 14 occurred in sub-Saharan Africa and 12 in Asia. Episodes almost always occurred after a previous state failure, usually an ethnic or revolutionary war, sometimes an abrupt regime transition. Only one in four state failures led to genocide or politicide. Episodes were most likely (1) after prior upheavals (state failures), in (2) autocratic regimes whose leaders either are (3) ethnically nonrepresentative of the larger population or (4) adherents of exclusionary ideologies. A contributing factor is (5) low trade openness. These factors in combination lead to correct classification of three-quarters of the historical cases of genocide and politicide. That is, statistical analysis accurately postdicted three-quarters of the episodes of geno/politicides included in the study. The risks of genocide and politicide in future state failures can be estimated based on these results.

People in the U.S. foreign policy community have come to realize that genocide is a recurrent phenomenon and are apparently willing to give it the attention it deserves. Many of them believe, as I do, that policymakers need more precise and reliable forecasts of impending conflicts. Time is crucial in preparing effective responses to escalating crises, and of course costs in both human and material are among the considerations. My current research emphasis is on developing early warning indicators based on the near-real time analysis of accelerators.6

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The Need for Early Warning and Some Explanations Let me suggest that we are indeed in need of a systematic early warning system. We need it because ideally it would enable analysts to warn activists and policymakers in a timely fashion of impending crises. I do not think it should be necessary to defend that position, but two persistent myths continue to flourish: First, that there already exists such a system, and second, that policymakers routinely ignore those who warn of impending disasters. The illusion persists that there exists an enormous amount of systematic information on all kinds of conflict that is gathered by governmental agencies and international organizations, that this information is readily available for distribution and analysis, and that analytic results are routinely communicated to policymakers. All this is simply untrue. Despite years of effort, most analysts are unable to give reliable assessments of whether, where, and when we can expect different types of crisis to occur. Aside from my own independent efforts and the State Failure project there are a handful of other attempts to improve risk assessments and establish systematic early warning systems for political crises and humanitarian disasters. One such project was begun by the Swiss Peace foundation in fall 1998, with funding from the Swiss government, in which I was also involved. Another myth is pervasive among those who think of systematic early warning efforts as superfluous. This is the all-too-common view that many early warnings are given to policymakers, but are ignored, and that no preventive action occurred because no political will exists to mobilize reluctant governments to act on warnings. There is merit to the second part of the argument; the lack of political will continues to be an issue. But again, there is no such thing as an established systematic warning system. As of now, warnings are seldom precise or accurate, and often come after violence has escalated, at which time intervention is more costly in both human and material terms. Policymakers need more timely and systematically-derived warnings that enable them to plan and implement preventive actions that are both cost-efficient and effective for preventing escalation or crisis development altogether. Thus, we need reliable, model-based open-source, publicly accessible warnings. Only when we have demonstrably reliable early warnings that minimize false alarms can we discuss and evaluate the utility of such a system. In the last couple of pages I will briefly describe what I have learned and where I plan to go from here.

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My Future My husband reminds me that I have said nothing about my place of academic residence, the United States Naval Academy, where my teaching responsibilities include comparative politics of Southeast Asia and the Middle East (my primary area), and introduction to international relations. Over the years I have been closely involved with the selection and advising of our foreign nationals, and I am the informal advisor of all Muslim midshipmen. It is a good place for teachers with very smart students who, when motivated, can do astonishing things. Our best can easily compete with good graduate students. For researchers, it is a tolerant place. Nobody asked me when I interviewed in 1986 whether or not my work was worth doing. This was quite different from my experience in other places, where nonmainstream research was not welcomed. But, despite its good features, the Academy lacks the kind of research support that most universities provide. Active researchers get little pecuniary rewards or attention, but then again most of us are ignored anyway, especially among our colleagues, and then who cares? I found the University of Maryland’s Center for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) a good place to base my research, not just because of grants that have come my way, but because of the Center’s cluster of scholars whose interests complement mine: Edie Kaufman (usually at Hebrew University), Shibley Telhami, and my husband Ted. What have I learned? Well, here is my advice for the younger generation of scholars: Let nobody discourage you. What you do is important and reaches beyond the confines of narrow academic discourse. The old-timers in the field have provided the groundwork, but a lot of work lies ahead. We need scholars who search widely for information on potential cases of genocide. We need more case studies. We need systematic analysis of factors thought to contribute to the onset of genocide. And, my pet, we need modelers and nonmodelers who monitor ongoing crises with the intent of building early warning systems. We also need to know how best to stop genocides in the making. We need to know what works and what does not work in rebuilding post-genocide societies. And I can think of many more issues that are more discipline specific. For example, do we know what makes perpetrators tick? How are whole societies transformed into bystanders? Are there cultural factors that inhibit genocidal behavior and others that contribute to it?

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Plans I will continue to test explanations systematically, and hope to contribute to the building of an effective early warning system. By the time it is in place I will probably be dead, or at least retired. If nobody other than the small remnant of my family remembers the real Barbara Harff, that is fine, but I will leave my work and this autobiography behind. What more can a person hope for? As a scholar I hope that the next generation will build on mine and others’ findings, contributing to understanding and preventing the most abhorrent event in human history—genocide. Notes 1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

6.

This paper was the basis for my 1987 article, “Empathy for Victims of Mass Human Rights Violations.” For full references to all publications cited in this chapter see the selected bibliography at the end of the volume. The dissertation’s legal and strategic arguments are summarized in my 1984 monograph, Genocide and Human Rights: International Legal and Political Issues. My contributions to this discussion include a widely-reprinted 1992 article on “Bosnia and Somalia: The Strategic, Legal and Moral Aspects of Humanitarian Intervention” and a 1995 article on “Rescuing Endangered Peoples: Missed Opportunities” that was first presented at a conference held at the New School for Social Research celebrating its sixtieth anniversary. The conceptual distinctions are most fully developed, and the cases listed, in my 1992 chapter, “Recognizing Genocides and Politicides.” A summary of the project’s first phase is Daniel C. Esty, Jack Goldstone, Ted Robert Gurr, Barbara Harff, Pamela T. Surko, Alan N. Unger and Robert Chen, “The State Failure Project: Early Warning Research for U.S. Foreign Policy Planning,” pp. 27-38 in John L. Davies and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Preventive Measures: Building Risk Assessment and Crisis Early Warning Systems (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998). Examples of my empirical early warning research are reported in a 1996 chapter, “Early Warning of Potential Genocide”; a co-authored 1998 article on “Systematic Early Warning of Humanitarian Emergencies”; and a forthcoming chapter on “Avoiding Humanitarian Crises and State Failure.” The cases examined in these studies include Bosnia, Abkhazia, Burundi, Rwanda, and Zaire.

7 Studying Genocide to Protect Life Herbert Hirsch Introduction There is an old adage attributed to Karl Marx that says something like: People make their own history. Since I believe that our lives are a mixture of work, luck, and random occurrence, as opposed to the intervention of omnipotent forces, I also believe we have at least the potential to create, to a certain extent, the conditions in which we live with our partners on the planet. Therefore, in understanding whether we are able to live together peacefully or kill each other, we have to begin with ourselves. I came upon these reflections by way of the deepest memories I was able to dredge from the rivers of my life. As a result of my good fortune and my parents’ hard work and support, I am now a tenured professor of political science. I could just as easily have been born to a different context. For example, if I had been born in Europe instead of the United States in 1941, I would have been caught in the Nazi exterminations. Instead, I sit in a warm, if modest, house, well fed and comfortable, pecking away at my computer. This fortuitous good fortune reminds me of the debts I owe to those who helped me get here and my obligations to those who are not similarly blessed. I think we owe our co-inhabitants of the planet at least our best attempt to make their every day lives less ugly and violent. My approach to this is to study memory. I believe that our understanding of the present is tied to our view of the past. What we remember, or what we think we remember, plays an immense role in our construction and perception of reality and my construction starts with memories of childhood. 113

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Memories of Youth Our memories are as clouds on a hazy autumn afternoon, buffeted by the wind and pierced by occasional rays of sunlight. We remember and create what we wish to remember. Memory, as I argued in my recent book, Genocide and the Politics of Memory, is not always an accurate account of actual events. Memories are often constructed and reconstructed to fit either psychological or political needs. Therefore, as I attempt to peer through these clouds, various images float to my consciousness, some from long ago, some from books I have read, some from I do not know where. It is hard to make sense of this in prose so I tried poetry. “Drifting Clouds of Memory” Through drifting clouds of memory, soft, hazy apparitions appear, approach. I, peer as through a wax paper veneer, to see if I can touch, hear? ‘Who is there?’ ‘Grandma?’ Are you still in front of the silver, turned to black, old iron stove? Or, have you started to use gas or electricity? You see, I do remember when they bought that gas stove and you said it never worked and only used it when the silver stove was full. It never smelled like wood or strudel, and it could not warm the kitchen, or anyone’s heart.

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‘Lorenzo,’ who shared his food and his life with emaciated and imprisoned Jews, I know you only through Primo Levi, but I see you and you fill my thoughts. Can pure goodness exist apart from pure evil? Help us find it. I am first generation in the United States. Born in New York City. My mother and father came to these shores because their mothers and fathers sought to escape the prejudice, repression, and murder visited upon the Jews of Europe. Like so many others, they came through Ellis Island and settled in the City of New York. They came to the United States just before the Holocaust began. Passing through the confusion of Ellis Island and the chaos of New York, it was often difficult to tell where fact and fantasy merge in the stories I was told about those years. My father never tired of recounting—he was a storyteller—how he was the youngest of seven— two sisters and five brothers—all now dead. In some ways his life was the quintessential American story, embodying all the contradictions—the escape from antisemitism in Europe and yet, experiencing similar but milder forms in the United States. His parents arrived in the first wave of Eastern European immigration in the early 1900s as they escaped the periodic pogroms that threatened Jews in Romania. Interestingly, my grandparents rarely talked about these events and never told stories. All they said was “we do not ever want to set foot in Europe.” They created for themselves a wall of silence and tried to assimilate into the American dream. My father was a bright young man who wanted to become a doctor but could not afford the luxury of college and yet managed to educate all his children. Instead, he learned a trade, became a watchmaker, married, moved to the suburbs, or more accurately the country of Northeastern Pennsylvania where his in-laws owned a farm, started his own business, bought another one later and managed to live a comfortable if not luxurious life. He was always interested in politics and so he volunteered to undertake many commu-

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nity service positions such as running the local chapter of the boy scouts. He was elected to the town council, participated in the work of various organizations such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and held assorted other positions, all, he thought, to help the community. You see, he believed that he owed something to this small community. Not because it accepted him without incident, but because even the antisemitic bigots were ultimately won over by his spirit of helping others in the community. In his later years, if a neighbor was diagnosed with cancer he would drive them to New York City, a journey of some three hours, to Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital so they could get the “best” care. If someone needed a wedding ring and did not have all the money he would sell it on his own installment plan which essentially meant “pay me when you get the money” —in some cases this turned out to be longer than even he expected because there were some who never did manage to “have the money.” He believed in what we academics might call “the public good”—in community values. Basically he believed we were all in this life journey together and we should help each other to try and make it as pleasurable and rewarding as possible. When his luck finally ran out, his funeral was held in a Lutheran church, presided over by a Lutheran pastor who read from the Old Testament. Yet, he remained to the end a Jew. So he was lucky. Lucky to have escaped Europe, lucky to move to an obscure small town, lucky to have this immigrant American experience. That experience, however, was not without pain and prejudice. It turned out that we were one of only four Jewish families in that small town, which was distinctly lacking in what we euphemistically call today, “diversity.” Oh, to be sure, there were lots of Catholics and Methodists and Baptists and Lutherans, along with a sprinkling of other white Protestants. But they were all white and they were all caught in the mindset of small town America in the 1950s. Do not get me wrong, they were “good” people in the definitions of the times, but they had no interest in or knowledge about momentous events that were soon to overtake them. Poverty did not exist; segregation was of no consequence, if the term was ever poised on the lips of those good citizens. But there were some Jews in town and, while they were white, or seemed to be, and, therefore, appeared similar to the Catholics and Protestants, there were differences. They did not attend church on Sunday and

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some of them did not celebrate Easter or Christmas. In the 1950s this was almost “un-American.” In fact, some may remember that there was once a congressional committee charged with the responsibility of looking into activities that were thought to be distinctly “un-American”—activities such as believing that minorities should have the same rights and privileges as those good citizens of that paradise in the hills of Northeastern Pennsylvania. But, since there were no minorities, this was not relevant. What was relevant was that we Jews seemed to be OK—we never caused “trouble” and got along with everyone. Yet, we were different and there were subtle and not so subtle ways to remind us of that fact. One of the subtle and most interesting, soon to be declared unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court, was released time for religious study on Friday afternoons. This was a fascinating practice where students were allowed to leave school early on Friday afternoon to attend religious study. If, for one or another reason you were not so inclined, you were made to stay in school, usually by yourself, sometimes with one or two other heathens. This was a very persuasive instrument provoking many non-Christians to consider, especially in elementary school, “conversion.” Another was having teachers read the Bible, usually the New Testament, before the start of school—also soon to be outlawed by the Court. Less subtle means also came into play. These often occurred on Friday and Saturday nights after some of the good citizens, usually younger males, had indulged in their primary evening activity of consuming vast amounts of alcoholic beverages. On some occasions, at 1:00, 2:00 or other early hours of the morning, they might be moved to drive up and down past the homes of these not altogether almost accepted, apparently white Jews, and yell things like: “Dirty Jew,” or “Hitler was right,” or other well known epithets from the thousand years old tradition of antisemitism. Luckily for the few Jews in paradise, the local law enforcement personnel did not look kindly upon that activity, apparently because my father fixed all of their instruments and watches for free, and would show up, usually after the brave night riders had disappeared into their morning hangovers. Fortunately, no bodily harm was ever done to the Jews. Pennsylvania, after all, was “civilized.” I remember one particular Saturday evening when I was about thirteen, when several of the night riders drove up and down the street in front of our house—we lived above my parent’s store—

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shouting the usual things. This time for some reason, my mother got particularly upset and I got particularly mad. By the time I was thirteen—remember this is a town in rural Pennsylvania—I was a fairly accomplished shot with a gun. I was the proud owner of a twenty two with a 4-x scope, a 30-30 Winchester, to hunt defenseless deer or (I embellished a bit and said) bear, knowing full well if I ever saw one in the woods I would probably run in the opposite direction, and a twelve gauge double barrel shotgun for hunting pheasants, grouse, ducks, rabbits, and squirrels. My room was down a long hall away from the front window and by the time I figured out what was going on I decided it was time to take action. In my pajamas I took my twelve gauge off the rack, broke it (i.e. opened it up), and took out a couple of double ought buckshot. I figured that it was time to teach some nightriders a lesson before the cops arrived on the scene. Thinking back on it now, I suppose it was a good thing that my Dad intercepted me as I was poking the two barrels out the upstairs window. I mean, I really had not decided if I was going to shoot at the tires or the windows but I was damn sure going to shoot at something. So there we were, Mom crying, Dad trying to stop me from killing some rural Pennsylvania antisemites, and me in my pajamas trying to stick my shotgun out the window. I wonder if that isn’t a metaphor for the American male—trying to stick his shotgun out the window. From personal experience I know that the mixture of a testosterone-besotted teenager and a loaded gun is not a good thing— in that rural Pennsylvania town we shot animals, birds, cans, bottles, windows, houses, sometimes even frogs, but not very often people— but I almost got me a couple of rednecks that night who, at that time, were not called “rednecks” but rather “wood burners.” Ultimately, I did not kill anyone and did not even get to blow away a car—which I must admit left me with mixed feelings of relief and disappointment. The nightriders disappeared, the police showed up, and some of the nightriders came by the next day to apologize. I was still a bit disappointed. In addition to the night driving alcoholics, there was, as always, the usual school bully who delighted in provoking Jews with the same antisemitic vocabulary. We usually dealt with this by either beating the shit out of the offending bigot or getting the shit beat out of us by that same offending bigot. And of course, there was one blonde and tall kid with a German last name who used to badger us. He always made me a little afraid to go to school because he was

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always threatening to beat the crap out of me. But, again, my dad used the old fashioned rhetoric of the earlier times: “Don’t start a fight but if anyone messes with you, beat the shit out of them.” And he added, “Don’t wait for them to hit you first.” Good advice I found out, especially after one of dad’s friends, who happened to be a golden gloves boxer, took a liking to me and taught me, after administering a number of bloody noses, how to lead with my left and cross the right hook. I also had an uncle, a hero of the Second World War who knew, this was before karate, Judo, and taught me a few, I guess we now call, moves. So after getting pushed around a few times, one day before school my blonde adversary called me a “dirty Jew” and, although my memory is not really clear, I must have hit him because the next thing I knew his nose was bleeding and he tried to grab me at which point I kicked him and flipped him and the next thing I knew I was in the principal’s office. Luckily, for both of us, after we explained what happened, we were told not to let it happen again and to meet in the gym after school where the physical education teacher would put boxing gloves on us and let us settle our differences the “right” way. I have to tell you this did not exactly make me happy because he was a hell of a lot taller than I was and he did not fight the right way. So, where I had the best of the street, the ring did not turn out nearly as well, as my black eye attested when I arrived home after school. My parents, being enlightened in the ways of small town America, said I did the right thing and they hoped we would become friends—an unlikely occurrence. But what did happen was to provide a beginning experience with prejudice and to start questions in my young mind. Why did “they” appear not to like us at night and tolerate us during the daylight? How were we different? Why was it important? What makes people do these things to other people? While I did not frame those questions so explicitly, they followed me through my life to my present interest in genocide. It is no great insight to say that what we remember, or what we think we remember, plays an immense role in our construction and perception or reality. So somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory there are thoughts of nightriders in the Pennsylvania night and I see a connection to the pogroms of Eastern Europe from which my grandparents escaped. My parents and grandparents had, on occasion, talked about the Cossacks and the way they rode through the villages killing Jews. I

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began to make a connection and to wonder about prejudice and to catch hints that would ultimately allow me to attempt to piece together the puzzle of silence. The silence of those who do not wish to confront the fruits of prejudice and would simply like it all to go away. Wishing to break the silence and give voice to those who suffer the indignities of genocide I decided that I would study this horrible repetition of mass death so that I might become one of those who could try to prevent its continuation. Education My study of genocide did not begin in high school. In high school these questions were never discussed. History was sanitized as positive memories of negative events were created. The Native Americans were never killed by the Anglo-Europeans who drove them from their land. The Armenians were not even a footnote, and, back in the late 1950s, the Holocaust was not a subject for high school history. My “real” education began in college. As an undergraduate at Concord College in Athens, West Virginia (1959-1963), I started out in engineering but found I was terrible in math so I switched to prelaw. Since most pre-law students major in political science that was my field. I was very fortunate to have two excellent teachers. Dr. George Moore introduced me to the mysteries of United States Politics and Dr. Bernard Keirnan taught me comparative politics. Since both were such wonderful teachers I decided at the last minute, about two months prior to graduation, that I would try to go to graduate school in political science. During my undergraduate study of political science I do not remember a single reference to the Holocaust or genocide. Political scientists studied voting, elections, legislatures and, other subjects less vital than life and death. It really was not until I started working on my masters at Villanova University in 1963 that I began to rediscover the concerns of my grandparents and parents. It was almost exactly twenty years after my father returned from his war in 1945 that I saw war for the first time as television showed pictures of American soldiers landing at a place called Da Nang in 1965. I was now twenty-five and had gone to the university. The reality of life and death rarely intruded there or in any other area of life in the early 1960s. In the movies there was never any red stuff that came out of people when they were shot or blown to pieces, in

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fact no one was ever blown to pieces. Now there it was. On TV at 6:00 every evening. And I had two little girls and they saw the pictures and were never as young as me. I began asking questions about that particular war. I learned where Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos were located; I studied their history, and I tried to find out why the United States was involved. Truthfully, my interest went back to 1963. I remember sitting in the cafeteria at Villanova University debating whether the United States should have “advisors” in Vietnam when the television announced that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas. I was arguing that it was none of our business and that we could only get into deeper trouble. And while I opposed the Vietnam War in 1963, I started opposing it more actively in 1965. I campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968, and participated in anti-war demonstrations and student and faculty strikes throughout the period until the end of the war in 1975. In graduate school at the University of Kentucky, where I earned my Ph.D. in political science in 1968, I studied repression and poverty among children in Appalachia and wrote my dissertation on the effect of poverty on those children. It became my first book, Poverty and Politicization: Political Socialization in an American Sub-Culture. This grew out of my work as a soldier in Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. From 1965 through 1968 I evaluated the impact of the War on Poverty in Southeastern Kentucky. In order to pursue this evaluation I traveled through Appalachia visiting community action centers and interviewing people in an attempt to ascertain whether the money was meeting the targeted goals. The result was a multi-volume report that was sent to Washington with recommendations on how to make the War on Poverty more effective. Not a single one was ever implemented which gave me one of my most important lessons in politics and bureaucracy: If the facts do not justify policy you wish to pursue, ignore the facts. Following the completion of my dissertation I took a job in 1968 as an assistant professor of political science at the University of Texas at Austin. I taught the usual subjects such as American Politics and Legislative Process, but I also taught a course on the War on Poverty and remained interested in the psychology of power and repression. As I became more aware of the historical manifestations of these phenomena it dawned on me that a great deal of human energy was devoted to attempts to destroy other humans. Why, I asked myself,

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are people so willing, now and in the past, to kill each other in large numbers? Seeking answers to these questions I began to think back to 1945 and my father’s return from the war. I figured that since the Holocaust was the ultimate example of large scale extermination of human life, I must learn more about those events. So I began to read. I was influenced by Raul Hilberg’s (1985) analysis of the multiple aspects of the Holocaust, in particular the motivations of the perpetrators, and by Richard Rubenstein’s (1978) analysis of the social and cultural aspects of genocide. Accounts of survivors, in particular Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, were likewise instrumental, as were too many others to name. I also read inquiries into the philosophy of evil beginning with Nietzsche concluding with the modern Frankfort school. Of particular interest and importance to me were Herbert Marcuse and Jurgen Habermas. Their interest in politics and ethics raised questions about why people are so willing to obey orders. These concerns lead me to Stanley Milgram’s (1974 and 1977) studies of obedience to authority. As I read and observed what was happening in Vietnam, my interest was further crystallized by the events that occurred in 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana, where 950 followers of the “Reverend” Jim Jones were persuaded to commit suicidemurder. If so many people, I thought, would follow orders to commit mass suicide, to take their own lives and those of family members and friends, how difficult could it be to motivate people to kill others more distant from them whose racial, religious, sexual, or other characteristics had already been denigrated? To try to answer these difficult questions for myself, my students, and my children I began to do research on genocide. How I Study Genocide As I became more involved in this research, I realized that the traditional fields of political science paid very little attention to the subject of genocide. There had never been a panel at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting that dealt with the subject. To attempt to rectify this omission, I decided to organize such a panel for the 1983 meeting to be held in Chicago. When I proposed this panel, the committee in charge of organizing the meeting liked the idea, but did not have any idea where to place the panel because it did not fit their regular categories. I had persuaded some of the most noted scholars in the field, including Richard Rubenstein, Irv-

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ing Louis Horowitz, and Roger Smith to participate, but the committee still decided to allocate the panel to the last session of the last day of the meeting and assigned it a room which would sit no more than twenty-five people. Fewer showed up, and I decided that the traditional political science associations were not the place to go for discussion of genocide. They are more concerned with less difficult issues, such as why people vote as they do and with methodological questions about how to study politics than they are with stopping the loss of human life. So I left these organizations and started to participate in others more interested in the study of genocide. I do not waste much time attempting to define genocide because I am interested in stopping all forms of human violence. Genocide is, to me, the largest in terms of numbers, and, if we understand why people kill large numbers perhaps we can stop those who kill at all levels. So my primary aim as a scholar in this field is to get rid of the subject I have spent the last twenty years studying. My focus in this direction has been on understanding memory and the psychology of violence. Numerous scholars who came before me and who work as contemporaries have influenced my approach and deepened my understanding. As I dug deeper into the questions of genocide and the psychology of violence I began to see that memory played an important role motivating atrocity. In my book, Genocide and the Politics of Memory I undertook an extensive examination of how this operated. Basically, I argue that memory has been manipulated to serve political ends. When we abet forgetting, we cannot hope to control the primal impulses to kill each other in large numbers for reasons of racial, religious, ethnic, or national hatred, and we have been, consequently, unable to successfully stop the massive destruction of human life. The memory of these primal passions appears to run so deep that it is not erased, replaced, or controlled by the attempt to impose a veneer of civilization. People continue to behave and to kill for the same reasons, and the memory of these attachments to ethnic, religious, racial, national, or regional territory continue as prime motivations. The species can only hope to ameliorate this condition if we look deeper into the importance of these memories and attempt to understand in greater depth the relationship between memory and politics. The politics of memory and the psychology of politics are intimately related to each other. Memories, and the myths and hatreds

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constructed around them, may be manipulated by individuals or groups in positions of leadership to motivate populations to commit genocide or other atrocities. The justification for the acts of violence are generally formulated by invoking some higher or greater “good” such as “purifying the race,” “saving democracy,” self-defense, or some other over-arching ideology. These memories are then passed from generation to generation via the process of socialization, and the cycle of violence may be perpetuated by this continuous reinforcement of the memories of the hatreds that have been passed to succeeding generations. The connection, therefore, between memory and politics may be one key to unlocking the enigma of mass death. Memory, history, politics, and psychology are messy and disorderly phenomena. Generations pass on their memories, which become part of the historical record, using language to transmit their particular version of events to the next generation through the process of socialization. These processes contribute to the formation of an individual’s identity or sense of self which may, in turn, influence the decisions a person will make when confronted by a crisis or an order to commit an act which might, in most circumstances, be considered morally questionable—an order such as marching elderly men, women, and children to a ditch and killing them. The individual actor, now the repository of personal and social memory and memories, in turn, becomes the transmitter, the eyewitness through whom history is constructed and interpreted. These narrative accounts and resulting historical interpretations influence present policy, which may be destructive or constructive of human life. The importance of memory and of history is as a “warning sign.” We have to learn what to avoid, we have to point out that there are things we should not do to each other instead of glorifying past violence and injustice. If we examine the collective record of historical memory and try to understand what happened and why, and then resolve to try another approach—and this is the hardest thing to do— perhaps we might begin to see the important connections and how we, as individuals with choices to make, might influence the present and the future by remembering the past. In formulating these ideas, I benefited, as I noted above, from the insights of psychologist Stanley Milgram (1974 and 1977) who wrote about obedience and in an “unpsychologist” way tied it to historical events. His analysis of why people obey was a starting point and

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runs as a dominant theme throughout my present work. In fact, Milgram’s analysis is the basis for my present interest in responsibility at both the national and international levels. The argument being that if there are no mechanisms of accountability, and if individuals are not socialized to accept responsibility for their actions, it is not likely that violence in general or genocide in particular will be successfully controlled. I have also benefited and learned from the writings of other scholars with whom I talk. My friend and colleague Roger Smith has helped with his criticisms and his insights into different aspects of genocide. Roger’s analysis of denial and the importance of memory have also shaped my own thoughts. His analysis of the importance of memory in fighting denial was particularly important. We also worked together on an essay called “The Language of Genocide,” and we continue to talk. Franklin Littell and Hubert Locke are important to me as models of Christian scholars who understand the importance of stopping genocide, but also as models of humane behavior—in the old sense of the word they are true “gentleman” who present not only scholarly analysis but transmit human warmth as well. These friends and colleagues, I fear, are only a small portion of those who have helped me shape my thoughts. While they are still actively involved in the field of genocide studies, I must confess that I am worried about the future course of the field. I worry that we will move in the direction in which the traditional social science disciplines have traveled and lose our primary focus on humanity and the over-all goal of preventing genocide. There are some scholars who now focus on counting genocides and who argue that the study of genocide must follow the scientific model of some of the other social sciences. Some of these, in their pursuit of methodology, have lost their focus on humanity. The study of genocide must focus on humanity since we are ultimately concerned with preventing the loss of human life. Methodology is a tool, not a goal. Contemporary events prove that the discourse involved in human story telling cannot be replaced by scientific methodology. What Do I Do Next? When I think about the obstacles confronting the new field of genocide studies I find that they are many, but I wish to mention only the most obvious. Humans do not seem to want to stop the

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slaughter. It is no secret that we have killed each other repeatedly and that the twentieth century is the deadliest century in human history. We have not learned from previous genocides to prevent subsequent genocides. If I had time and space I would show how the Holocaust was not prevented by knowledge of the Armenian genocide and knowledge of the Holocaust did not prevent any of the subsequent genocides such as that in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, etc. And, knowledge of those genocides, which we now were able to see as they happened on television, has not stopped the violence in Kosovo. We cannot escape the same question that has haunted us since the beginning of our existence: “How can we stop the violence?” In fact, this is the goal of all my projects. Sometimes I truly do not know where I am going next. Sometimes I want to write poems, sometimes novels, sometimes scholarly, social science. Whatever I do, I take heart from the fact that there appears to be a growing number of colleagues and friends who are asking similar questions. This in the face of the reality that most of the academic disciplines avoid these most difficult questions. I remain, however, haunted by events I never experienced. Sometimes I awaken at night jolted by dreams of horrors I never saw. The literature of death, the memories of survivors and killers, and the stories recreating these acts have that force. They cause one to live and face events we did not see and, perhaps, provide us with a point of empathy and identification. They also encapsulate and create memories so that these are the versions of historic events that are most powerfully rendered and, most likely, remembered. History and social science cannot compete with these and with film and drama in the creation of memory. Why is this important? Not because of the titillation and gore which appear to motivate much of the media presentation of violence. It is important to explore the experience of mass death because it may have two broad consequences: first, and most optimistically, we all hope that by learning about the most horrible atrocities of the past, we will be able to prevent them in the future. Second, the exact opposite, they may very well whet certain appetites for destruction and people may indeed learn how to do it more successfully next time. However, we cannot submerge our heads in the sands of civilization and pretend that these types of events will never again plague humanity. Of course, they have, they are, and they will. The literature of death provides a means to explore and to see what we must avoid.

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Human interaction is a tenuous thing. Cultures, societies, and polities are fragile. They are bound by threads that may unravel with incredible ease. A single person with a gun, or even a knife, or many people with guns, or, in some cases, a misplaced word or words, may cut the thread. The fabric is so finely woven! Part trust and part responsibility. If both unravel, if they are not part of the cultural diffusion flowing into the head and heart of us, our neighbors, our children, we might easily regress to a state of uncontrolled violence and perpetual insecurity. For without trust and responsibility there can be no security, no, however ephemeral, minimal certitude that life goes on. It is not difficult to imagine how easy it is to unravel the tenuous thread. Historians look at the great atrocities and cruelty of history as a warning and writers and poets try their very best to stir our foreboding and create a sense of the necessity for vigilance. That is what those of us who spend our lives studying genocide are trying to do, warn humanity. We have been bludgeoned by the horrible events of the twentieth century, not to mention what came before. Yet, humanity continues to try to escape the reality of human cruelty and act as though there is nothing that can be done to alleviate suffering. As naive as it sounds, if we all, when the time comes, love instead of leave, we would, for a change, move in the “right” direction. I fear, however, that when the time truly comes there may be something in most of us that suggests we are not above leaving. References Hilberg, Raul (1985). The Destruction of the European Jews. 3 volumes. New York: Holmes and Meier. Hirsch, Herbert (1995). Genocide and the Political of Memory: Studying Death to Preserve Life. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press. Milgram, Stanley (1974). Obedience to Authority. New York: Harper and Row. Milgram, Stanley (1977). The Individual in the Social World. Reading, MA: AddisonWesley. Rubenstein, Richard (1978). The Cunning of History. New York: Harper and Row.

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8 How I Came to the Study of Genocide Kurt Jonassohn I was born in 1920 in Cologne, Germany. I recall how, in that environment, I acquired a rather skeptical attitude quite early in life, although I do not recall the actual years when it happened. A number of events helped to form this attitude. When, as a child, I was taken to the zoo, the occasion became memorable not only because of the large number of interesting and exotic animals featured there, but also because of the prominently displayed extended African family, complete with straw huts and outside cooking fire. When, somewhat later, we visited the natural history museum, which was located inside the old Roman city wall, I was particularly impressed by the section on the human races. These were vividly illustrated by pictures and wax figures, accompanied by explanatory texts. That occasion has remained in my memory because the featured races included, in addition to such traditional categories as Black, Red, White, and Yellow races, also Aryans, Jews and Communists. This is not to suggest that I was precocious enough to be analytical about these experiences. However, the very fact that I so clearly remember these events seems to prove that I was aware of a certain incongruity. Much later, when occasions arose to talk about these memories with colleagues interested in the Nazi period, they did not seem surprised; instead, without the least embarrassment, they doubted my veracity. Since then I have found evidence to support the accuracy of my memories; but I have also found evidence that people of my generation, who must have had similar experiences, have repressed such memories that testify to an earlier worldview. That type of repression seems to occur equally among members of 129

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the perpetrator nation and among their former victims. In the present context these memories are relevant because they seem to presage some of my future interests. Early in 1939 I left for England on a one-year apprenticeship visa while my brother was able to go on Youth Aliyah to what was then Palestine. We all knew that shortly there would be a war, and therefore the one-year limitation on my visa seemed entirely irrelevant. In spite of our concerted efforts, my parents, as well as several other relatives, were not as fortunate. A couple of years later they were deported to Lodz and then to Auschwitz. The English people I met in London were very hospitable, but they perplexed me. They had never heard of Czechoslovakia before Hitler invaded it. They also re-named me “Robert” because they claimed to find “Kurt” unpronounceable. I suspected this to be a polite subterfuge to get me to drop my rather Germanic sounding first name. However, what impressed me most on my explorations of Central London was the casually cosmopolitan atmosphere; people from all parts of the world could be seen wearing their native costumes in public and none of the Londoners stopped to stare at them. This did not change even with the advent of the war. In due course, the threat of invasion and the shortage of food caused the government to intern everybody born in an Axis country and to ship them off to Australia and Canada. Since this happened at the height of the U-boat war, not all of them survived the dangerous crossing. I arrived safely in Canada where, after a couple of years in internment camps, I was offered the choice of returning to England or staying in Canada. I chose the latter option and settled in Montreal where a new experience awaited me. During a couple of social evenings my new friends asked me about Germany. While they were too polite to say so, it became obvious from their facial expressions that they did not believe a word I said. It was not a question of their being in sympathy with Hitler, but rather that my replies did not fit with their notion of Germany as a Western, civilized and cultured society. After a couple of these puzzling experiences I evaded questions by saying that I preferred not to talk about it. For some strange reason people found that answer more acceptable. Eventually I became a sociologist and realized that I was a perfect case of the sociological stranger (à la George Simmel) who does not belong to any group and is not at home anywhere. This role, and an understanding of it, gave me the tools so essential to developing a

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sociological perspective on society as well as an insight into my own career. My thinking was most strongly influenced by my teacher Everett Hughes at the University of Chicago. He recommended that to do good sociology one must learn to look for what is not there, and to compare phenomena that on the surface appear to have nothing in common. These two precepts have guided my thinking and research ever since. They have also led me repeatedly into unorthodox directions of research that only the security provided by a tenured faculty position allowed me to pursue. At this point I shall fast-forward to the late seventies. During a sabbatical year I spent some weeks travelling around Europe on a Eurailpass in order to interview people in connection with a project totally unrelated to my future interests in the study of genocide. To save time between interviews, I did most of the travelling at night. Since I rarely had more than one interview in any one location, the great amount of travelling provided much time for reading and meditating. Although my schedule included only one interview in West Germany and another one in East Germany, I had to cross Germany several times due to its central location between Poland and France or between Norway and Switzerland. It was during these periods of extended rail travel that the phenomenon of genocide began to occupy a good part of my thinking. Frankly, I have no idea why. It just seemed to surface of its own volition, unless the frequent contact with things German contributed to this preoccupation. The process of thinking has always been a mystery to me. I am not referring to the deliberate thinking about a specific topic, but rather to the unplanned and often serendipitous processes that seem to arise spontaneously when least expected. Neither is it clear to me how such unplanned and unintended thinking coalesces into a plan for deliberate action. In retrospect, it also seems curious to me that from the beginning I thought of genocide not only as referring to Nazi Germany but as an event that had occurred repeatedly throughout history. I guess it was thanks to a classical gymnasium education that I knew of several cases long before I started doing that kind of research. Being a Jew in a hostile environment contributed to my interest in a comparative perspective. By the time I had returned home to Montreal I had already made up my mind that I wanted to teach a course on genocide, that being the standard method in academia to free the time required to engage in a new project. I prepared a proposal to be submitted to the various

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committees that had to approve the introduction of a new course. While my colleagues showed no signs of great enthusiasm, being the most senior member of the department facilitated my proposal’s passage. Shortly after my return from these sabbatical travels, I met my friend and colleague Frank Chalk from the history department and, over a cup of coffee, we brought each other up-to-date on our respective activities and plans for the next year. When I told him of my plan for introducing a course on genocide, he immediately asked to team-teach it with me which in due course we did, starting in 1980-81. Considering the amount of material that this course would have to cover, we planned it to be a two-semester course. For the next fifteen years this course became a regular offering although originally we had planned to offer it only every other year, partly because we both had teaching obligations in other areas, and partly because we thought the depressing effect of the subject required periodic relief. But the pressure of student demand could not be ignored and so we did not get the anticipated relief, except in the summers and during sabbaticals. In 1996, I finally decided that my decreasing energy levels required some consideration and I stopped teaching altogether. This left Frank Chalk, who is quite a bit younger than I am, to carry on and try recruiting an interested colleague with whom to share this course on genocide. From the beginning, our course was a great success, partly because we used a somewhat unusual method of team-teaching in that both of us were always present for all lectures and switched back and forth in presenting materials. The other reason the course was successful was that it was the only course where students could explore issues concerning the genocidal events that the news media kept reporting with such depressing regularity. The enrollment was remarkably diverse: while there were always Jewish and Armenian students, these were usually outnumbered by students from many other backgrounds. However, no matter what their background, our students shared our explicit aims: to achieve an understanding of the historical and sociological background of the situations and the processes leading to genocides. Only such understanding can justify the hope that in the future we shall be able to develop methods of prevention or intervention. Since we deliberately kept the course prerequisites flexible, students could come from many different disciplines, and since we always offered it in the evening program all age groups were represented. While all this was very stimulating,

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the actual presentation of the course posed enormous problems. In retrospect the reason was embarrassingly simple: I had justified the introduction of this new course by arguing that our university should be doing something that was becoming commonplace in many other universities. However, upon starting the required research and preparing lectures, it turned out that nobody was offering such a course and that the literature that we had counted on using also did not exist. Yes, there were Holocaust courses and there were even some that included the Armenian genocide; but nobody offered a course on comparative genocide. So, instead of building on the experience of others we found ourselves in the position of being unintentional pioneers. Of course, we used Raphael Lemkin’s (1944) Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and the text of the United Nations Convention (1948). Leo Kuper’s (1981) Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century also had just appeared, but it dealt only with twentieth-century genocides. Thus, preparing the course, instead of building on the work of others, meant laborious but exciting library searches for case material in some pretty obscure sources. What drove us to explore these more obscure sources was the tendency of many of the well-known sources to report events only from an elitist perspective. Thus, they might contain detailed reports of empire building, military campaigns, and great battles without any mention of the victims. Still, we stuck to our original intention of attempting to deal with genocides in all periods of history and all parts of the world. For the first few years our students had to read large numbers of small excerpts from a great variety of sources. But the aim of studying these cases was clear from the beginning: to try to understand the situations and the processes that were likely to eventuate in genocide and to explore possible avenues of prevention and/or intervention in the future. Eventually we pulled some of our materials together in a book that would become the core of the course. It took us longer than anticipated and we had to omit some of our materials to keep the manuscript to reasonable proportions, but it finally was published Yale University Press in 1990. The book was well received and used by many institutions in the increasing number of courses taking a comparative approach to genocide. It gives us great satisfaction to see that it is still in print and that the publisher still receives requests to reprint excerpts. Concurrently, we invited specialists to give guest lectures in our course and meet with interested students and faculty in workshops as well as individually to discuss relevant issues. Many of these oc-

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casions were attended by visitors from other universities within commuting distance. By far the most important of the invited guests was Norman Cohn, who came several times from England for extended visits, and who had the greatest influence on our thinking and writing. He chaired many of the informal workshops that we were organizing and he presented a series of public lectures. Many important contributions to our thinking resulted from our informal discussions with him and some of them eventually produced the definition of genocide that is included in our 1990 book: “Genocide is a form of one-sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator” (p.23). We are still using this definition. It has been criticized by several colleagues: some rejected our definition of a group and some even thought that our emphasis on intent was superfluous. So far, none have argued convincingly enough to give us a reason to modify it. As a result of these activities we began to feel the need to establish a formal organization that would act as host and that would allow us to be in contact with other organizations. Thus, the Montreal Institute for Genocide Studies came into existence in 1986. One of its first enterprises was to start a series of Occasional Papers that would include our own papers as well as those of interested colleagues. The motivation for the establishment of this series was twofold: on the one hand we wanted to circulate these papers among the quite small number of people who were interested in comparative genocide; on the other hand we wanted to reduce the time that normally elapses before a paper appears in print. This project required quite an effort in time and money. When we asked our correspondents to give us their fax numbers and/or email addresses in the hope of saving mailing costs, only a few of them were equipped with either. Since then the rapid spread of new technology has greatly simplified matters. The Institute now has an Internet address (migs.concordia.ca) and new papers as well as all other information are instantly available to any interested visitor. In spite of these advances in faster and cheaper communication, the number of scholars interested in genocide is still surprisingly small. The first two meetings of the newly established Association of Genocide Scholars (in 1995 and 1997) attracted forty-odd attendees, not all of whom were actively involved in research and writing. Unfortunately, from my point of view, this slowly expanding field

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seems to be moving in the wrong direction. Too much attention seems to be paid to definitions, typologies, numbers of victims, and methods of victimization. While all of these concerns have their relevance, too much attention to them detracts from a focus on analyses that might lead to useful conclusions. It seems to me that such useful conclusions require at least two preconditions. The first one requires a much greater attention to the historical antecedents of the genocidal event. The contemporary situations undoubtedly provide a number of clues that should not be ignored; but rarely, if ever, are these sufficient for a successful analysis. The second precondition requires that each case be examined in terms of its own cultural, economic, and social setting in order to elucidate its particularistic features. Unfortunately, these preconditions impose a heavy burden on those of us who are engaged in comparative analysis. Nobody can possibly be conversant with the history, culture, languages, etc. of several cases. One can only rely on the cooperation of experts in the relevant areas. It is this dilemma that makes the comparative study of genocide an interdisciplinary and cooperative project. As a contribution to this approach, I have published (with Karin Solveig Björnson) a book in 1998 that deals briefly with a large number of cases from all periods of history. However, I believe a major contribution of this volume to be Part II, which deals with research methods insofar as they have to be adapted to the special requirements of comparative research on genocide. My academic training as a sociologist has been crucial in defining my perspective. Therefore, it has been one of my efforts to try, albeit with very little success, to make more sociologists aware of and interested in this area of study. At the above-mentioned meetings of the Association of Genocide Scholars only a minority of the forty-odd attendees were sociologists. I have organized and participated in sessions on genocide at the annual meetings of the Canadian Sociology and Anthropology Association and the American Sociology Association that attracted something less than packed audiences. The program of the 1998 World Congress of the International Sociological Association that was organized into hundreds of sessions and attended by thousands of people listed no sessions on genocide. This is a curious phenomenon, considering that some of us think that sociology is the study of society. Needless to add that I am not alone in attempting to alert our colleagues to this lacuna in our discipline. Perhaps we are just too impatient and should look

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forward to the time when our message will percolate into the next generation of scholars. My continued activity in this field may perhaps contribute to that end. If there has been one aim in my work in this field it has been to find the key to the prevention of future genocides. Although I have thought several times that I was getting close to that key, on further reading and thinking I was always disappointed. It was not only that my ideas changed, but also that they were falsified by events. One reason why I had to keep revising my ideas is that I kept getting sidetracked by the literature. One such phase was the debate about definitions and typologies. At one extreme was the notion of each victim group that their case was a unique event; at the other extreme was the inclusion of all massacres. I refused to participate in these debates when it became clear to me that they were either treated as ends in themselves, or that they lead to conclusions that I could not accept. So, I have stuck to my original idea that definitions and typologies are tools of research and are good or bad only insofar as they lead, or do not lead, to valid conclusions. Another way in which the literature sidetracked me is its widespread emphasis on the victims. It is hard to ignore that literature, not only because of empathy with their fate, but also because of the urge to assist in alleviating their suffering. It is very easy to imagine that support for NGOs, humanitarian aid organizations, and fundraising drives, will intervene in or prevent further victimization. Much of that pious hope does not survive a more detached examination of the effects produced by many of these organizations. Perhaps some of these findings will lead to more sophisticated methods of alleviating suffering. Another aspect of the emphasis on the victims is the increasing appreciation of their value as reliable witnesses. They are a source of information that is not biased by the interests of the various observers. However, the feature of this literature that I found misleading is that it does not help me to understand the dynamics of the genocidal process. In order to understand that process one needs to study the perpetrators. In that study, a focus on the victims can assist as a source of data, but it is not able to throw light on the genocidal process itself. As has already happened several times before, I now think that I have finally got a handle on the key to prevention; but that handle is still too tenuous to warrant writing about; it requires quite a bit more reading and thinking. This search for explanation, understanding,

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and prevention is leading me, as well as other scholars, into areas that did not seem obviously relevant. This search basically involves the exploration of the roles of poverty and indebtedness of nations, their participation in the arms trade, their exploitation of ethnic and nationalistic ideologies, and their policies with regard to population dynamics. It will also be essential to look at the corollaries of these variables for the individuals who are subject to such economic inequalities and ideological appeals. I know this sounds very vague and even utopian; but it does seem to me that the key to conflict and violence that can escalate to massacres and genocides is located somewhere in the exploration of these areas. This approach, and others like it, make it easy to understand why so much of the literature is scattered into several areas. The whole field of genocide studies is barely twenty years old. The original coining of the term and the first book-length treatment, both by Raphael Lemkin, occurred over fifty years ago. It took another thirty years before the scholarly community took up the issues that he had raised. But even now, the number of serious students of comparative genocide remains small. The increasing spread of the topic into high school and college teaching leads on to hope that the next generation will provide an additional impetus to such studies. An Afterthought I do not expect to produce another book. Shorter papers and oped pieces are more to my taste. However, in either case, this may well be the last piece to fall into the hands of editors and publishers. The spread and the acceptance of the Internet are providing alternatives that allow authors to avoid the irritations, indignities, and delays imposed by the print media. In addition, the Internet allows authors to avoid and evade the hypocrisies associated with the talk about intellectual property, publishers’ contracts, copyrights, and royalties. Most of us write with the aim of communicating our ideas, thoughts, research findings, and/or policy recommendations and would prefer to avoid negotiating with the print media in order to find an audience. In any case, there can be no question that the Internet is able to provide access to a much larger audience than the traditional methods of publication. Having got all that off my chest, I hope that the next time we meet it will be at migs.concordia.ca.

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9 My Journey in the Study of Genocide Robert Melson The Start of the Journey As a child I survived the Holocaust, and as a young adult I witnessed the beginnings of the Biafran war that led to mass death in Nigeria.1 Both of these events, in different ways, started me on the intellectual and emotional journey to study genocide with the hope of understanding and preventing it. On October 12, 1941, most of the Jews of Stanislawow, a midsized town in Polish Galicia, were massacred by units of the SS and the Order Police under the command of Hans Krueger. My parents and I survived because, mistrusting the Germans’ motives, we had refused to go to the place of assembly and went into hiding with Hela, our young Ukrainian cook. Later, my parents refused to be herded into the ghetto with the other survivors of the massacre. Instead, showing great chutzpah, and drawing on her background as an actress from before the war, my mother went to the local church where she successfully impersonated Janina Zamojska, the wife of aristocratic Polish acquaintances. The Zamojskis were about my parents’ age, and they had a little boy approximately my age. In church, she managed to persuade the elderly priest that we had lost our birth certificates during the occupation and that he should make out new ones in the names of the three Zamojskis. With the phony birth certificates in hand we were able to get the other documents, “false papers,” that enabled us to pose as an “Aryan” Polish family for the remainder of the war. Other members of my family were less lucky. My grandfather, my father’s father, committed suicide before his arrest by the Ge139

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stapo. My other grandparents, my mother’s parents, were first interned in the Warsaw Ghetto and then killed in the Treblinka death camp. After the war I heard about many other relatives who had been murdered, but either I did not know them or could not remember them. I was four years old at the time of the massacre and eight when the war ended in May 1945. Except for periods of hunger and many close calls we survived unscathed. For example, in Prague, late in the war, my father was arrested by the Gestapo, not because he was a Jew, but because he was accused of helping a Jewish woman to flee. My mother was under suspicion as well, but she went to the Gestapo on her own volition, hoping to free my father and save herself. In the meantime she had placed me with a childless peasant couple, insisting that they not tell her where they were taking me because she was afraid that she might be forced to reveal my location and I would be killed. She left instructions that they were free to adopt me should she and my father not return. Incredibly, both my parents survived, and we were reunited close to the end of the war. Hence it was not physical privations that affected my family and me as much as it was the legacy of living for years in constant terror of torture and death. After the war I experienced my mother’s shock and grief when she learned the details concerning the murder of her mother and father. And it was the growing awareness of the horror— the mounds of bodies, the piles of suitcases, shoes, and hair, the discarded dolls—that left me with an indelible impression. For years I could not think about what others called “the Holocaust” without feeling a numbing sense of dread, disgust, and despair. Like an evil monster, “The Holocaust” was something that my family and I had barely escaped. Even to think about it was to risk falling into its clutches. After we came to America in 1947 we tried to resume a normal life, and in many ways we did. My father started a business, my mother became a “suburban housewife.” My brother Richard, who had been born a year before in Belgium, and I tried to become regular American kids. Seldom did we talk about the war. It was a wounding experience, something not to be understood but simply endured like an incurable illness. By the early sixties, when I was in graduate school, like many of my generation I was attracted to the study of Africa and Asia. It was an idealistic period presided over by President Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The civil rights revolution at home and the

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emergence of the “Third World” drew many of us into the struggle for a more hopeful and more humane world. In retrospect, however, I realize that one of the reasons for my early involvement with Africa and the Third World was that these were areas far from Europe and the Holocaust. In March 1964 I went to Nigeria to study the labor movement in preparation for my doctoral dissertation in political science at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In September, Gail Freedman, whom I had earlier met in the Widener Library at Harvard, joined me in Africa. We were married in Ibadan by a Nigerian judge and given a Jewish wedding by some visiting Israeli friends who were working on the Ibadan waterworks. That year we should have been aware of the portents of trouble all around us, but we were oblivious to the coming conflict. Gail and I were young and happy and thought that Nigeria’s future would be as bright as our own. After fifteen months in Africa we were back in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was still working on my dissertation, when in January 1966, the then corrupt Nigerian civilian government was overthrown by a military coup, many of whose protagonists were Ibo officers. In apparent retaliation, in March and September, the killings of the Ibos began. Thousands of people, including Ibo trade unionists I had interviewed a year earlier, were massacred all over Nigeria. Their deaths precipitated the Biafran secession of 1967. During the civil war that lasted until 1970, some one million, perhaps as many as two million, Biafrans starved to death. American television screens were filled with images of emaciated children, their hair turned white, waiting to die. They perished because the Nigerian Federal Military Government (FMG), the successor to the earlier coup, refused to lift the blockade that would have relieved the defenders, and the Biafrans—fearing genocide—refused to surrender. The reality of what was happening in Nigeria was brought home to me in New York when I ran into a Nigerian acquaintance, a trade unionist I had met in Lagos. At a meeting of the African Studies Association, in a nondescript hotel room filled with people drinking and chattering away, I asked him about Gogo Chu Nzeribe, an Ibo trade unionist I had interviewed and respected. As I sipped a beer he told me, “Gogo? Haven’t you heard? Some troops came to his house in Ikeja and clubbed him to death.” The conversation continued to swirl about me, but I no longer heard. Gogo was dead. When I had first met him he had seemed

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indestructible, not tall, but solid and broad, with the massive shoulders of a linebacker. He was born into a well-to-do family that had sent him to King’s College Lagos during the Second World War. They hoped that he would go on to university and a prestigious profession. Instead, he joined the struggle for independence and, after the war, organized students and workers against the colonial regime. That is how he became and remained a trade union leader. During my interview with him he had been hopeful that the labor movement and the Nigerian Labour Party, of which he was one of the organizers, could bridge some of Nigeria’s ethnic divisions that were tearing the country apart. He had an explosive sense of humor and a certain generosity of spirit. The night I heard that Gogo had been killed, I felt as if the twenty-some years after the Second World War had been compressed into a few minutes. The Holocaust monster was on the prowl again, and it was no use trying to escape it in Africa or elsewhere. When I realized that Ibos like Gogo were being slaughtered for no other reason than their identity, I could not help but make the connection between their experience and my own. I supported the independence of Biafra wholeheartedly and was convinced that, should it fail, there would ensue a genocide of the Ibos. Thankfully, I, and others who thought like me, were wrong. The Nigerians were not Nazis, and the Ibos were not Jews.2 When the Nigerians proved victorious, their peace terms were surprisingly generous and humane. Nevertheless, despite their original intentions, which were not to exterminate a people in the manner of the Nazis, the policies of the Nigerian military had led to mass death. In part to fulfill my professional responsibilities as a young assistant professor—I was teaching at Michigan State University by then— and in part to fight the feeling of being a helpless bystander, I joined my friend and colleague, Howard Wolpe, in a project to understand the underlying causes of the Biafran war and the ethnic hatred that had led to it.3 The Biafran war taught me that the slaughter of innocent people based on their identity was not limited to the Holocaust, and it prompted me to use my scholarly training for the purpose of understanding ethnic conflict and genocide. Comparative Genocide My contribution to the study of genocide is distinctive in that it rests on a comparative historical study of the Holocaust and the Ar-

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menian Genocide. My work aims to uncover an underlying pattern that is manifest in both instances, as well as in other cases of what I have labeled as “total domestic genocide.”4 Paradoxically, my involvement in the Biafran experience drained some of my terror of the Holocaust, and permitted me for the first time to think about it not as a victim but as an historian. The main question I asked then, and still ask, is: What are the circumstances under which ordinary people become genocidal killers? This was a question that I could formulate only after Biafra, because if ordinary Nigerians were not monsters, which I knew from experience, perhaps ordinary Germans were not either. If that were true, than there was something in the changed circumstances of their lives that had turned ordinary people into killers. My goal ever since has been to discover and identify such circumstances. Since I had been trained in the methods of comparative politics and history it seemed natural to view the Holocaust from a comparative perspective.5 I realized that mass death in Biafra was in some essential ways not comparable to the Holocaust—for one thing, the Nigerian military had no intention of exterminating the Ibos or destroying them as a collectivity. Indeed, when I tried to find instances of comparison to the Holocaust, I settled not on the Biafran war, but on the Armenian Genocide as the case that most closely resembled it. I had first heard about the Armenian Genocide from my parents. When after the war they had tried to explain the Holocaust, they had reached for some experience that might have had some parallel to it or might have been a precursor, and they pointed to what they called “the Armenian Massacres.” They had read Franz Werfel’s (1934) The Last Days of Musa Dagh, and they passed that story of extraordinary courage and miraculous salvation in the context of terrifying disaster on to me. Later I read Marjorie Housepian’s (1966) stunning article, “The Unremembered Genocide,” followed by Michael Arlen’s (1975) Passage to Ararat. The former I read before starting on my comparative project, the latter, years later, while I was in the early stages of it. Both convinced me that something like the Holocaust had once occurred to the Armenians. It was not only what Housepian and Arlen said, it was their personal tone of grief, anger, and moral gravity that evoked an echo of recognition on my part. By the early 1970s I was ready to study the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide in tandem. By then I had a general outline of

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what had happened: For centuries the Jews of Europe and the Armenians of the Ottoman empire, two peoples of ancient provenance, had been treated as despised ethno-religious minorities. During periods of European or Ottoman expansion and peace Jews or Armenians were more or less tolerated, but in times of crisis they were scapegoated and persecuted, until in the twentieth century they were nearly destroyed. This was the general conception, but it left the central question unanswered: What was the specific nature of twentieth-century crises that had led to genocide? After many false starts over fifteen years, I came to the conclusion that ideology, revolution, and war in both instances were part of the answer. Ideology had provided the initial motivations, but it was revolution and war that had created the circumstances for the mass murders and had radicalized ideology in a feedback loop from circumstances to motivations. In my analysis I emphasized revolution and war as circumstances leading to genocide because the role of ideology, especially in the Holocaust, had become part of a conventional explanation stressed by many other historians. For my part, I was struck by the fact that the ideology of racialist antisemitism had first appeared in the nineteenth century, years before the rise of the Nazis, but it was only after the collapse of Imperial Germany during the First World War that a radical antisemitic party could come to power. And it was only during the Second World War that it was able to implement its Final Solution. Similarly, although there had been massacres of Armenians before—notably in 1894-96—it was only after the Young Turks seized power in 1908 and had become Turkish nationalists that Armenians were excluded from the moral universe of Turkey. And it was in the context of the First World War that the Committee of Union and Progress ordered the deportations leading to the destruction of the Armenians. Thus it was not ideology alone, but it was ideology in the context of revolution and war that had produced genocide. I believed that the pattern I had identified for the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust, including the killings of the Gypsies, might apply to a wider range of cases labeled as “total domestic genocide.” This included the destruction of the Kulaks in the Soviet Union, the mass murder of the upper and middle classes by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the extermination of the Tutsis in Rwanda. It was apparent to me early on that some revolutions did not lead to genocide, nor did all genocides arise out of revolutionary circum-

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stances. For example, the American Revolution did not lead to genocide, and the destruction of native peoples in Africa and the New World could not be connected to revolutions. The first objection I dealt with by giving ideology due credit. Clearly only under circumstances where the leadership identifies a group as a deadly enemy can revolution lead to genocide. The second objection I dealt with by noting that in contrast to the destruction of native peoples, in which the victims were foreign strangers often defined as “heathen savages,” Armenians and Jews were domestic groups with a long history in the Ottoman Empire and Europe. Their destruction entailed the uprooting of established relationships and conceptions that had allowed these two minorities to coexist with the majority for centuries. Here racialist antisemitism and Pan-Turkism were crucial in their redefinition of Germans and Jews, Romani and other “subhumans,” on the one hand, and Turks and Armenians on the other. Such ideological labeling of the “other” was unnecessary in the case of native peoples who were viewed as existing outside of the European universe of moral obligation from the start. The insights of my work applied to cases of genocides that were total and domestic in distinction to instances that were either partial or foreign (with respect to the perpetrators) or both. Indeed the destruction of “foreign” groups by invaders and colonizers who labeled their victims “barbarians” or “savages” is beyond the ken of my work, and needs to become a major project of historians of genocide. Mentors and Companions on the Journey To do comparative historical analysis one needs to know the history of the cases to be compared. By 1977, when I started on this project, I had a general conception and some research questions to pursue. What I lacked was basic historical knowledge, since I had been trained as a political scientist and Africanist and not as a scholar of German, Ottoman, Jewish, or Armenian history. I suppose at this juncture I should have turned back from what seemed an impossible undertaking, but when I started I was oblivious of my own ignorance. Driven by the intuition that I could overcome some of my childhood dread of the Holocaust by gaining mastery over its history, and by sheer intellectual curiosity, I soldiered on for another fifteen years. However, without the help of my wife, Gail, and com-

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panions and friends all along the way, especially Jacques Kornberg and Richard Hovannisian, I could never have reached my destination. In 1977-1978, I brought my family on sabbatical to Israel—by then Gail and I had two children, Sara and Josh. My office at the splendid Harry S. Truman Institute of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem looked over the Judean desert, Jericho, and the Dead Sea. There I spent hours reading about the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide and discussing some of my work with Naomi Chazan, Victor Azaria, Moshe Ma’oz, and Zvi Schiffrin. It was a dramatic site and seemed appropriate for a project dealing with life and death. Right from the start my family and I were extraordinarily lucky. A few houses from where we lived in Beit Hakerem, near the university, there lived Jacques and Mona Kornberg and their family, who were on sabbatical from Canada. Jacques is a professor of intellectual and German history at the University of Toronto who was then writing a biography of Herzl, and Mona is a clinical psychologist. The two families became fast friends, and Jacques and I spent hours discussing our projects, often as we jogged around the Beit Hakerem campus of Hebrew University in the late afternoon after work. We called it our peripatetic seminar! I found it immensely informative, gratifying, and confidence building to have a talented historian from a prestigious university paying attention to some of my ideas this early in my undertaking. Over the years, Jacques suggested readings, commented on chapters in the manuscript, and introduced me to Professor Richard Levy (1975) at the University of Illinois whose specialized knowledge of the antisemitic movement in nineteenth-century Germany was crucial to my understanding of the Nazi phenomenon. At Truman most of my time was taken up with reading, analyzing, and note taking. Some of the works I pored over were Hannah Arendt’s On the Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews, Lucy Dawidowicz’s The War Against the Jews, George L. Mosse’s The German Ideology, Fritz Stern’s The Politics of Cultural Despair, Arnold Toynbee’s The Treatment of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, Henry J. Morgenthau’s Ambassador Morgenthau’s Diary, Bernard Lewis’s, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Stanford and Ezel Kural Shaw’s two volume History of Modern Turkey and the Ottoman Empire, Roderic Davison’s Reform in the Ottoman Empire,

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and Richard Hovannisian’s Armenia on the Road to Independence. Each reading brought new insights but also produced new questions, many of which I discussed with Jacques but also with others at the university and in Jerusalem. At Hebrew university, I met Professors Yehuda Bauer, Yisrael Gutman, Shmuel Almog, and Jacob Landau, great scholars in their own right, who questioned my assumptions about comparing the Holocaust to the Armenian Genocide or to any other event, but were kind enough to direct my reading and discuss it when they had time. Yehuda Bauer was especially helpful both in his skeptical questioning and his open-minded encouragement. Meanwhile, Jacob Landau directed me to the writings of Ziya Gokalp, the Turkish nationalist philosopher, and to the House of Commons Sessional Papers concerning the history of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. Both sources were crucial to my understanding of the events concerning the massacres of 1894-1896 and the evolution of Turkish nationalist thought. Later that year I visited the Armenian quarter where I befriended George Hintlian, secretary to the Patriarchate. There I met Professor Vahakn N. Dadrian, a true pioneer in the sociological and historical study of the Armenian Genocide, who became one of my mentors for many years to come. A year later I was back at Purdue University. I had first come to Purdue in 1971 as an associate professor of political science and African politics. There a few of us, including the late Professor Larry Axel, and Professors Fritz Cohn, Joseph Haberer, Walter Hirsch, Gordon Mork, Leonard Neufeldt, Victor Raskin, Gordon Young, and I founded the Jewish Studies Program, which evolved from a Holocaust study group that some of us had started earlier. That kind of personal and institutional support was most helpful over the long years when I felt isolated at the university and needed an encouraging word to keep me going. In the fall of 1978 I met Professor Richard Hovannisian of UCLA at a meeting of the Middle East Studies Association in Ann Arbor. When we were introduced I told him what a pleasure it was finally to meet the man whose books I had pored over back in Jerusalem. I had been singularly impressed with the range and clarity of his work, and the tone of hard-edged objectivity he brought to the Armenian experience. When I explained to him what I was about, he became intrigued and, like Jacques Kornberg, Yehuda Bauer, Jacob Landau, and others, he made invaluable suggestions concerning sources and

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interpretations. When I started to write, he must have spent hours making detailed corrections to my manuscripts. As the years went by and I proceeded with my work, I found that other scholars were similarly engaged in thinking about the Holocaust and genocide from a comparative perspective. Over the years I met and greatly profited from the insights and encouragement of Frank Chalk, Kurt Jonnasohn, Israel Charny, Helen Fein, the late Leo Kuper, Roger W. Smith, and Colin Tatz. Over the years we have met at various conferences. In 1994, in Berlin, at the “Remembering for the Future II” Holocaust conference, Israel Charny, Helen Fein, Roger Smith, and I initiated discussions that culminated a year later in the founding meeting of the Association of Genocide Scholars at the College of William and Mary. The Middle of the Journey Two years after completing my book, I resumed working on False Papers, a memoir of my parents’ and my survival during the war. It is based in large part on seventeen hours of interviews that I conducted with them in 1978, a few years before they passed away, and on my own childhood memories. The memoir has recently been completed. In retrospect I see that I was able to finish this work only after having written the book on the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. The one gave me courage to do the other. I have been able to achieve some mastery over my fear, if not of the Holocaust then of Germans and Europeans, and I have received some welcome recognition for my work. However, I feel far from triumphant. Writing a book about the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide is not the same as bringing the dead back to life nor even of understanding the wellsprings of genocide. Singling out ideology, revolution, and war as recurring patterns in certain kinds of genocide does little to explain the extraordinary cruelty that is so often manifest in mass murder. Why the gratuitous pain and humiliation inflicted on the victims? I don’t know, and I’m not sure that anyone else does either. There are other irrational motives in the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide that need explaining. I do not claim to understand the extraordinary mindset of the Nazi killers. Why were they in the grip of a fantasy that identified the Jews with all that is evil? Why did they feel justified in launching a war of extermination and purification against defenseless civilians, including children, who bore

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them no harm? Norman Cohn (1961; 1975) may have been right to seek a connection between the irrationality of the Nazi phenomenon and millenialism, on the one hand, and the fear of witchcraft on the other. By the same token it is well known that Muslims and Turkic-speaking peoples experienced massacres and victimization in Russia and the Balkans before the First World War. Many became refugees and fled into the Ottoman Empire where they were resettled in the eastern vilayets, precisely in areas of heavily Armenian concentration. I do not mean to belittle their suffering, but one needs to ask: what role did they play in the Armenian Genocide? And if they did, was their motivation based in part on revenge against Christians whom they identified with their erstwhile tormentors? There is an air of self-justification and victimization, especially in current Turkish denial of the Armenian Genocide, that needs to be examined for irrational motives that may be based on their own terrifying history. My next projects will probably deal with Rwanda—how exactly does it fit into my understanding of total domestic genocide?—or with the destruction of native peoples by European colonizers. I am disturbed that American and Australian settlers, people whose love of liberty I greatly admire, should have been able to massacre natives and to deny them the freedom that they sought for themselves. How can the founders of great democracies have perpetrated massacres and institutionalized slavery? Those of us who study genocide realize that in some inchoate way we are part of a larger worldwide movement for human rights. Like our abolitionist forebearers who struggled against slavery, we seek not only to understand genocide but abolish it from human history. In that sense we are not only scholars, but activists. We need to reach out to those brave reporters and television cameramen, who are often the first on the scene of massacre. Their reports have had more of an impact on world consciousness than libraries of our books. We also need to stay in contact with the many lawyers who have been involved in genocide trials concerning the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. We can bring them a longer and broader perspective, but they are on the front lines in the prevention and punishment of genocide. Having spent more than twenty years writing and a lifetime thinking about genocide, I wish that I could leave it behind for a while, but it keeps on tugging at me. I envy my colleagues who devote

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their lives to less freighted topics like Mozart, Auden, Frost, Hebrew poetry, or the comparative study of the Impressionists! Meanwhile mass murder continues in Bosnia and Kosovo, in Burundi and Rwanda, and we’re not done yet. Notes 1.

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4.

5.

Some of the early autobiographical material in this essay first appeared in the preface of my book. See Robert Melson, Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), xv-xxi. Following the UN definition of genocide, I view the mass destruction of Ibos during the Biafran war as a “genocide-in-part” rather than as a “genocide-in-whole.” Ibos were massacred and driven out of the Northern Region and thousands perished during the war itself, but the intent of the northern elites and later of the Federal Military Government was not the extermination of the Ibos as such. Kuper refers to the events in the Northern Region preceding the civil war as a “genocidal massacre” (75). In other contexts he labels the mass-death resulting from the Biafran secession as a “genocide” (18, 50, 69, 85, 102, 174), without making the distinction between “partial” and “total” that I do. See Leo Kuper, Genocide:Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) and my Revolution and Genocide, op.cit., 283-285. Also see note 3 below. Robert Melson and Howard Wolpe, “Modernization and the Politics of Communalism: A Theoretical Perspective.” American Political Science Review 64, 4 (December 1970): 1112-30. After the Biafran war, Howard Wolpe became a congressman from Michigan and headed the House subcommittee on Africa. He was instrumental in having Congress place economic and military sanctions on South Africa during the apartheid era. As of this writing in 1999, he is working for the National Security Council as President’s Clinton’s representative to the Great Lakes Region of southern Africa. His mission is to help prevent more bloodshed in Burundi, Congo, and Rwanda. It would seem that he, too, was powerfully influenced by our experience with Biafra. Elsewhere I defined genocide as “actions intended to destroy in part, or in whole a social collectivity or category including its culture and identity.” See “Problems in the Comparison of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust,” International Colloquium on the Armenian Genocide, Sorbonne, Paris, April 18, 1998, p. 9. This definition attempts to broaden the UN definition and have it include classes and communal groups, while it distinguishes between “genocide-in-whole” and “genocide-in-part.” The former I have labeled “total genocide.” By “collectivity” I mean a group like the Ibos that is conscious of its identity. By category I mean a group like the “Kulaks” that existed in the minds of the Stalinists but lacked a sense of separate identity. By “domestic genocide” I mean the destruction of a group that exists within the boundaries of the perpetrators’ state and differs from the destruction of foreigners, which I call “foreign genocide.” The Holocaust commenced as a “domestic” genocide that later became “foreign” as Germany invaded the rest of Europe, and, indeed, it became global as the Nazis sought to destroy Jews the world over. The destruction of native groups by European colonizers in Africa and the New World were largely instances of “foreign genocide,” some partial, some total. The comparative method was pioneered by Max Weber, especially in his classic The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. For recent influential works in this

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area see Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) and her edited book, Vision and Method in Historical Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also George M. Fredrickson, The Comparative Imagination (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).

References Arlen, Michael (1975). Passage to Ararat. New York: Ballantine Books. Cohn, Norman (1975). Europe’s Inner Demons: An Inquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt. New York: Basic Books. Cohn, Norman (1961). Pursuit of the Millenium. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Housepian, Marjorie (1966).”The Unremembered Genocide.” Commentary, September, 42(3):55-60). Levy, Richard S. (1975). The Downfall of the Anti-Semitic Political Parties in Imperial Germany. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Melson, Robert and Wolpe, Howard (1970). “Modernization and the Politics of Communalism: A Theoretical Perspective.” American Political Science Review, December 1970, 64(4):1112-1130. Stannard, David E. (1992). American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. New York: Oxford University Press. Werfel, Franz (1934). The Forty Days of Musa Dagh. New York: Viking.

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10 From the Study of War and Revolution to Democide—Power Kills R. J. Rummel My work on democide flows out and is really part of my research on violence and war, and this in turn is an outgrowth of my youth. Perhaps more so than for others in this volume, then, I have to begin at the beginning—my childhood. Born in Cleveland in 1932, I was raised by parents who simply could not get along. They fought over big and small things, until finally, when I was in my early teens they got divorced. I lived with my father for awhile, but he drank up what money he made when he worked and was sometimes gone for weeks at a time. Eventually at the age of about fourteen I found myself on the streets. Soon I quit school and spun through many manual jobs. After saving some money for tuition, I tried the Cooper School of Art in Cleveland (art had been my major while in public school), but I soon ran out of money. I then joined the Army during the Korean War in 1950. It was my escape hatch and it worked. This childhood did three things to me. It made me hate conflict— the bickering, the emotion, the yelling, the irrationality. But this hatred was unfocused until I was stationed in Japan while in the Army and saw firsthand the destruction of war, and could contrast my deeply-ingrained perception about the Japanese from wartime propaganda (I was nine when World War II broke out) and my actual experience with these people who, like anybody else, were human beings. They could laugh and cry and love each other. This led me to ask why we could kill each other in war, and, ultimately, to focus on war when I later went to college. A generalized hatred of conflict 153

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was transformed into a specific hatred of war and revulsion over the mass killing involved. This has been the source of my pacifism and years later made the study of war my career. Second, being forced to live on my own when very young, and thereby to develop a keen sense of risks and benefits—of reality— of survival instincts, it created a sense of self-reliance and an independent spirit, perhaps what some might term as ego. This was certainly the source of my nerve to try college without having gone to high school, and subsequently to work for the MA and Ph.D. This experience also empowered my willingness to do things my way, to follow my nose about theory and methodology regardless of what others, including the field’s idols, might say. While free of the normal inhibitions against creative work, this also meant that my theory and results could be too outlandish, politically incorrect, or disrespectful of the academic-intellectual establishment, to the detriment of their acceptance and dissemination. A passion to eradicate war and to end mass killing, combined with an intellectual independence, are not sufficient to explain my work. Two more influences must be mentioned. While in my early teens, alone and without a family, I became thoroughly captivated by science fiction. It occupied my free time, being to me what rock, movies, and television are to contemporary youth. I borrowed, bought, or stole whatever science fiction pulp magazines or books I could find to read; and unbeknownst to me at the time, not only got something of an education in basic science, but also developed scientific norms. I simply fell in love with science and took it as axiomatic that truth came from science, and that to be a scientist one had to learn mathematics. I also picked up a respectable vocabulary from science fiction and other incidental reading, but not having heard many of these words spoken (I knew no high school or college graduates until I joined the army), my pronunciation was so bad that later one of my professors thought I was a foreign student. When I first enrolled in college at The Ohio State University in 1954 (while in the Army I took its GED exams, the passage of which gave me the equivalent of a high school diploma, and this was accepted as such by Ohio State), it was easy to understand why I should first major in physics and mathematics. But when it came down to the hard course work, I found that as a result of my years of being stationed in Japan, my interest was more in books on Asia. For this reason, plus the need to transfer to another university to erase an

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increasingly sorry grade point average, in 1956 I transferred from The Ohio State University to the University of Hawaii. There I discovered that I could actually, as a student and later as a professional, study war (within a political science major and international relations subfield). Although I retained an interest in Asia, and throughout my career continued to do some research on it, including a book on democide in China (China’s Bloody Century), I was elated over the discovery that I could focus my study on war. From that time on I never had any doubt that this was what I would do. I ended up earning both a bachelor’s degree (1959) and a master’s degree (1961) in political science at Hawaii, and then went on to Northwestern University where I got a Ph.D. in political science (1963). A Life of Work Dedicated to the Study of the Causes and Potential Eradication of War Given my scientific “education” by science fiction, it was natural that my approach to war would be scientific and quantitative. But how could one be a hard scientist over the soft-stuff of diplomatic history and international relations? One could barely find a number. My discovery of Quincy Wright’s (1942) work and then Lewis Fry Richardson’s (1960) helped orient my efforts, but most influential were the logical positivists. The philosophy of science, especially as argued by the logical positivists and the Vienna School, gave content and meaning to science for me. What before had been a diffuse scientific approach toward war and international relations now became a specific program: define a mathematical (or at least symbolic logical) theory, derive empirically testable predictions from it, and test these against empirical data. Research on war would then involve trying to find such a theory and then testing it. If the theory could not be falsified, no matter how difficult the tests, then we could derive predictions from it about war, and especially about what should be done to control or eliminate it. I had my life’s project! As focused on war or related work, this approach dominated my research and study through the MA and Ph.D. degrees, and most of the years during which I directed the Dimensionality of Nations Project (DON), a large scale attempt to delineate the major dimensions of nations and their behavior and replicate Raymond Cattell’s (1949) seminal factor analysis. I was asked to join the project because of my mathematical background (I had taken all the math-

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ematics courses I could while an undergraduate and working for my MA), and did so in order to help define the major empirical concepts that could play a role in a mathematical theory of war. After getting my Ph.D., I became the principal investigator of DON and took it with me to my first teaching job at Indiana University (1963-1964), and subsequently to Yale University for two years (1964-1966), and then to Hawaii in 1966, where I taught until my retirement in 1995. While replicating Cattell’s work still guided some of the empirical research, my interest in a theory of war continued to dominate. By early 1970 DON’s data collection was complete and their analyses almost finished. A book giving just the initial results was to be published in 1972 (The Dimensions of Nations), but I believed that a substantive/theoretical/philosophical work should certainly conclude a project of such magnitude. Looking toward this, I turned over the everyday management of DON to an assistant director and started a broad program of reading in the basic books of philosophy, history, psychology, and the social sciences. This was truly the most enjoyable and enlightening intellectual journey of my life. As a student I had studied works in all these disciplines related to my interests in theory, international relations, and war, but I never read so widely and without any criterion other than that the works were considered great—they had survived the ages. This intensive and extensive liberal self-education over several years sharply altered my perspective and assumptions. From being a determinist, I began at first to accept and then incorporate the role of free will into my thinking. Nor, I found, could I continue to make rigorous theory the research centerpiece. My mind began to open up to a much softer view of explanation and understanding involving paradigms, perspectives, and intuitively substantive principles within which hard theory played a complementary and not dominant role. Naturally this meant that logical positivism could no longer provide the framework within which I defined the scientific effort. In retrospect, I’m surprised how a view that I had held for over a decade, that I had ardently argued and upon whose assumptions I directed the huge and ambitious DON research project, should disappear in a puff. The reality of my own existence and my research, not to mention the tough arguments of others, had created cracks in this philosophical edifice, but it took the concentrated assault of the

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Aristotles, Spinozas, Kants, Lockes, James, Sorokins, and Von Mises to bring it down. In its place has grown a view of social scientific research that still sees an important role for theory, but now also sees the importance of imagination, intuition, insight, and substantive knowledge; of melding traditionalism and behaviorism, of science and scholarship, of theory and understanding. None of this meant that the results or design of DON were inadequate or wrong, but rather that the context for explaining and understanding them had to be expanded. Finally, the ideological vision was transformed as well. Having grown up in the slums of Cleveland, having experienced real hunger and exposure, and the insecurity of not knowing whether I would eat today or tomorrow, I naturally gravitated to socialism as soon as I could think of such things. Also anti-authoritarian to a fault (I sometimes lost jobs because I could not stand being bossed); it was the democratic version that I found most attractive. Democratic socialism was my guide to Justice and the Good through my college years and well into the 1970s. But then as my reading expanded beyond the socialists and sympathetic liberals to the economists like Adam Smith, Von Mises, and Milton Friedman, and political scientists like Friedrich Hayek, I increasingly found socialism theoretically and empirically untenable. And what gradually grew in its place was a theory of voluntarism, a belief in the spontaneous society, of freedom and limited government. This new view, strongly akin to libertarianism, was theoretical, in that it fitted well into social field theory; and it was ideological in providing the instrumental values for policy. To avoid misunderstanding, I should note that there was no change, and there has been none, in my fundamental values: freedom, social justice, and peace. I had believed that democratic socialism would provide the most freedom consistent with social justice. In confronting the arguments and evidence I could no longer sustain this instrumentality. Libertarianism succeeded precisely where socialism failed—in promoting the human welfare while protecting the broadest interpretation of human freedom. Years later this libertarian perspective would help me recognize in my empirical results the role of freedom in promoting peace. By the summer of 1974 DON’s major cross-national analyses were done and the results were in line with the findings of others, and most of the field theory tests were successfully completed. But at

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this time I also became increasingly concerned about two trends in American foreign and defense policy. First, the Kissinger policy of trying to imbed the Soviet Union in a web of cooperative agreements in order to limit its “adventurism” and moderate East-West conflict—the declaratory policy of détente— seemed nothing more than an application of the widely held belief that cooperation, such as trade, cultural and scientific exchange, person-to-person contacts, etc., lessens conflict. But this was contrary to the quantitative results in the literature, and especially those now emerging from DON’s analyses. Second, I was amazed to see that, quantitatively, the Soviet Union appeared to be overtaking the United States in some and passing her in other measures of the nuclear and conventional military balance. In my view then there was a real (as opposed to unrealistic), protracted big power struggle between the two with an ever-present possibility of nuclear war. And on the basis of my knowledge and DON’s analyses, this shifting balance of power, with the revolutionary power (the Soviet Union) overtaking the status quo power (the United States), could only mean a greatly increased danger of a Soviet-American war. Gravely concerned about this (remember, the ultimate purpose of my research was to avoid war) and a foreign policy I believed bound to fail in lessening the risk of war, I decided to put aside all work on DON that I responsibly could, and threw myself into a thorough study of the military balance and détente. Aside from traditional scholarly study, I also collected a wide range of data on the military balance since 1945 and factor analyzed them, and did an analytical simulation of whether a Soviet first-strike was possible. Much of the quantitative analysis remains unpublished in professional journals. Such analyses had not been done in this area before and thus my submissions made an original methodological contribution, if nothing else. But because of the conclusion that the Soviets were catching up militarily and threatening to move dangerously ahead, readers for peace research or international relations journals found the conclusions “silly” or “biased,” while those for strategic studies journals that were more inclined to accept the conclusions found the quantitative analyses too technical, “unfathomable,” for their readers. But such professional publication problems were down the line. At the time my immediate interest was in writing a book that would communicate to the interested citizen, politician, or foreign service

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officer the gist of my results in non-technical terms. This book, Peace Endangered: The Reality of Détente, was published by Sage Publications in 1975. It did get the publicity I wanted, was read widely in Congress and studied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. What role this book actually played in subsequent policy, if any, however, cannot be determined. Although unique in methodology, it was not the only publication drawing these conclusions. But what is clear is that my attack on détente was too much for the Secretary of Defense and DON was canceled. As previously mentioned, in the early 1970s I tried to give myself a liberal education in preparation for the work that would present and interpret DON’s theory and findings. I began with the psychology and philosophy underlying the results, drew some general conclusions about conflict and violence from the theory so far developed in the book, and successfully tested them against the accumulated empirical literature on conflict. I called the resulting book The Dynamic Psychological Field (DPF) and it became subsequently Volume 1 of what became titled Understanding Conflict and War (UCW). I completed two more volumes (one mainly sociological, the other a comparative analysis of major theories of conflict) before I began the writing toward which I had for so long directed myself. I was finally able to treat international relations as a whole and present an overarching framework for understanding international processes, cooperation, and conflict. Moreover, I tried to interrelate these various aspects of international relations while treating the different phases of conflict and cooperation. In doing this, my hope was to build an understanding of conflict dynamics, the causes and conditions of conflict and war, and how such conflicts can be resolved or avoided. Throughout I also tried to compare and contrast my results to the work of others on international relations and did an exhaustive screening of the empirical literature. Because of the conceptual and empirical inclusiveness of this volume, it serves as a basic archive of results on diverse aspects of international relations. It was published as War, Power, Peace (WPP) in 1979. Most interesting of all was the conclusion of this work. I had no specific conclusion in mind when I began. But as I worked for three years on the book, making everything coherent, logically interrelating parts, and deriving propositions, it all began to point in one direction. At first unexpected, as the conclusion grew out of the work, it took on such clarity that I could only wonder how I had missed it

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years before, since in retrospective analysis the previous volumes also point to it. The conclusion was simply that the fundamental factor relating to the occurrence of international and civil war and other violence is the political rights, civil liberties, and economic freedom within nations. The less such freedom within two nations, the more likely violence is within or between them; and between democracies, war should not (and did not) occur at all. WPP concluded my theoretical and empirical work on war and I consider it my best and most basic contribution. But I could not end UCW yet, for there was still the question of social justice. While freedom promotes peace, it may also promote social injustice, as many claimed was true of democratic capitalism. Involved is a philosophical question about the nature of peace and of justice. In the next and final volume of the series, The Just Peace, I tried to analyze both questions. The analysis of peace and its variety of interpretations was straightforward and my conclusion was that peace is an active something, not passive; that it is positive, not negative; that it is a social contract based on an equilibrium of interests, capabilities and wills. This rejected the popular peace researcher’s view that positive peace is equalitarian. Trying to get at the basis of this belief, I could find nothing more than its acceptance on faith; faith that equalitarianism defined social justice; faith that equalitarianism meant the Good Life. Nowhere in this literature could I find a coherent ethical or moral analysis and justification. Moreover, to accept this view of peace, or some other like social integration or human welfare or spiritual harmony, would have built into the definition of positive peace what should come out of a fundamental ethical analysis of justice. Peace as a social contract is neutral as to the normative outcome of such analysis. The question of justice was at the heart of the philosophical dispute over the nature of ethics. After some discussion of this dispute, I finally resolved the question of justice for my purposes through a social contract approach, modeled by a science fiction like global convention of minds that insured fairness, equality, and universality, the prevalent criteria of justice. Within this convention social justice would be then defined by those principles that people freely would choose to live under, given such choice was made without any foreknowledge of how the resulting system would personally benefit them because of their abilities, sex, age, race, religion, etc. I then

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showed that under such conditions they would choose principles giving them the freedom to form their own communities (a right to self-determination) with their own governance, whatever that might be; and the freedom to exit any community for whatever reason (a right to immigration). The question about social justice and about the way to peace, the theoretical-empirical on the one hand and the ethical on the other, thus come together in the same answer. To move toward a warless and least violent world and a socially just one is to promote freedom of choice, even the freedom to choose to be unfree. Volume 5 of UCW, The Just Peace, was published in 1981. All five volumes of UCW are on my web site at http://www.hawaii.edu/ powerkills. Although I felt that my theoretical work and research that culminated in UCW provided conclusive support for the role of freedom in eradicating war, the sheer importance of this solution (which was as though we had found a cure for cancer) demanded that more be done. As a matter of course I had been collecting daily cross-national, conflict event-data since 1975, and in 1981 I used these data to more explicitly test the role of freedom. I found that in all cases, the political rights and civil liberties in nations had the predicted effect on their foreign and domestic violence and war (The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1983; Comparative Politics, 1984). In addition I turned again to the literature and carefully resurveyed all the empirical work bearing on the role of freedom in violence. Here likewise I found the predicted relationships (The Journal of Conflict Resolution, 1985). Also, I found empirically that freedom is inversely and significantly related to militarism, or the relative military investment of nations. Finally, I tested for the relationship to democide in the pilot study mentioned below and found again the predicted relationship: the less political freedom in a state, the more likely its government is to murder its citizens. At this point, in 1986, I felt that the case for freedom was as solid empirically and theoretically as I could make it. How do we promote a warless and just world? Now with heightened confidence I could answer: promote democratic freedom. Changing My Focus to Democide Lust of power is the most flagrant of all the passions—Tacitus

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Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely—Lord Acton It is not power itself, but the legitimation of the lust for power, which corrupts absolutely—Richard Howard Stafford Crossman Power kills, absolute power kills absolutely—R. J. Rummel As I did my research on war and other forms of violence, I kept running across bits and pieces of information about people killed by their governments in other than the Holocaust—in China, the Soviet Union, Turkey, Indonesia, Cuba, Haiti, Yugoslavia, Pakistan, Ethiopia, Columbia, Syria, Iran, Angola, and so on. It began to look like such murders would at least total those killed in war. So in 1985 I undertook a pilot study to roughly determine what this number might be (The Wall Street Journal, 1986; IPA Review, 1987). With utter surprise, I discovered that the people killed by governments in cold blood for ethnic, racial, tribal, religious, and political reasons in this century—at least 119,000,000—was not equal or even near the number of battle-killed in war, but almost three times the deaths from all this century’s international and civil wars, including World War I, World War II, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Russian Civil War, and the Mexican Revolution. (As described below, much further research would raise the figure murdered to about 170,000,000, over four times the battle dead in all wars.) And virtually all these murders were by authoritarian and totalitarian governments, mostly by the latter. This was incredible and few at first could believe it. The fact that war is less deadly than authoritarian and especially totalitarian governments are to their citizens was completely unknown, and among some people unbelievable. (A colleague tried to show my statistics to a political science department chairman at a major university, who, refusing to look at the data, simply dismissed it all with a wave of his hand and a disparaging remark—while Galileo is dead, the psychology underlying the refusal to look through the telescope is not.) Indeed, I found that there was virtually no attempt in the literature to aggregate the statistics for this mass killing. This type of violence and its analysis and explanation was a black hole in peace research and one that I thereafter planned to help fill. This pilot study—an intellectual and emotional shock—rechanneled my research. My career had been devoted to the study of war

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because I thought this was the most deadly scourge of mankind. Tens of millions had been killed in war in this century alone and the horror and devastation of this must be eradicated, and to this I had devoted my career. Then to find that war was much less deadly than authoritarian and especially totalitarian governments are to their own people drove me to refocus my work and key in on democide. I opposed all forms of mass violence and I now saw democide as the worst; and since by theory and fact I had found that for other forms of violence the more liberal democracy, the less violence, I simply had to thoroughly test this against democide, and well beyond what I had done in the pilot study. Moreover, there was the question as to how many in fact had been murdered and the context for this democide. Thus, in 1987 I turned all my attention to research on democide. Using the results of the pilot study I then asked for a grant from the United States Peace Institute to do an intensive and extensive global democide accounting. This was granted in 1988 for two years and subsequently renewed. Definitions As for the concept of democide, it means for governments what murder means for an individual under municipal law. It is the premeditated killing of a person in cold blood, or causing the death of a person through reckless and wanton disregard for their life. Thus, a government incarcerating people in a prison under such deadly conditions that they die in a few years is murder by the state, or democide—just as parents letting a child die from malnutrition and exposure would be murder. So would government-forced labor that kills a person within months be murder. So would government-created famines that then are ignored or knowingly aggravated by government action be murder of those who starve to death. So is purposely bombing civilians, even in time of war. And obviously, extrajudicial executions, death by torture, government massacres, and all genocidal killing are murder. However, judicial executions following a fair trial for crimes that internationally would be considered capital offenses—such as for murder or treason (as long as it is clear that these are not fabricated for the purpose of executing the accused, as in communist show trials)—is not democide. Nor is democide the killing of enemy soldiers in combat or of armed rebels, nor of noncombatants as a result of military action against military targets.

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Genocide is, then, for me, the murder of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, race, or religion. It is a form of democide. As to what I mean by freedom, it is liberal democracy where people have equal rights before the law; fundamental civil liberties like freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of association; relatively free markets; and limits on government power. Policies and leaders are determined through open, competitive elections with a secret ballot and wide franchise. These would be nations like the United States, Canada, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Sweden, and Switzerland. In 1999 there were eighty-five such nations. There are an additional thirty-four nations that are what I call procedural democracies. They are not liberal in the above meaning, although they have regular elections, competing parties, and a secret ballot. But the rule of law is shaky and fundamental civil liberties are not yet well or widely recognized. Examples of such procedural democracies are Albania, Indonesia, Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine. Nonetheless, although only partially free, the effects of the freedom factor reduces violence for these countries over what it might have been had they been authoritarian or, especially, totalitarian. My Key Findings on Democide I should say at the outset that what I came to discover in my research on democide was a mental sock on the jaw. First of all, there was the absolutely unbelievable magnitude of government murder. Aside from Elliot’s (1972) limited effort, nobody had tried to estimate it before 1986. There were many books about demographics, like total population, and the number of people who own telephones and cars. There were statistics on the number of people who die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, and accidents. There were even a great number of statistics on war dead. But until recently, there was not any reliable information on the number of people killed by governments in general. Even though many of us were aware that governments were major killers, as in the Holocaust or Armenian genocide, the overall numbers still come as a shock. I should note that there is a vast literature on the magnitude of government killing (democide), but, except for the Holocaust, it is widely scattered, comes in many different forms, and is not indexed or otherwise organized (try finding “killed,” “massacre,” “genocide,” “dead,” “murder,” or “executed” in the indexes to historical books).

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Outside of the Holocaust, there were only a few scholarly books, such as Robert Conquest’s (1968) work on Stalin’s Great Terror, estimating the number of people murdered by government. It took me about eight years to go through all the relevant books, reports, articles, chapters, clippings, and the like, dig out the statistics and relevant events, and sort the information I found. In this I determined the lowest and highest estimates of democide, and arrived at what I call a “prudent” (not average) figure depending on various factors. I concluded that, during the twentieth century, governments murdered at least 80,000,000 people and possibly as many as 300,000,000, but the most likely number is about 170,000,000. Each of fourteen governments, alone, murdered over 1,000,000 people, and it would be hard to find a scholar who could name half these governments. I should note that among the principal sources, there were usually some sympathetic to a government and some hostile to it. The low estimate for twentieth-century mass murders, 80,000,000, comes mainly from sources sympathetic to the governments carrying out the murders! But even if this low estimate turned out to be correct, it alone is more than twice as many people as have been killed in all the wars before the twentieth century. From a moral standpoint, I doubt if it matters much whether the number is 80,000,000 or 170,000,000 or 300,000,000. It’s an unprecedented human and moral catastrophe. In a few cases, governments have publicized their murders or those of a defeated government. For instance, Communist Chinese government newspapers would report speeches by officials in which one might boast, “We killed 2 million bandits in the 10th region between November and January.” The term “bandit” was standard lingo for presumed “counterrevolutionaries.” And after Vietnam invaded Cambodia in 1979, the Vietnamese justified the invasion by releasing data about Cambodian mass murders. They let Westerners see evidence of Khmer Rouge horrors. And then there were the surveys of, or reports from, the many people who escaped totalitarian governments. They were unsympathetic sources, of course, as was Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s (1974-1978) volumes documenting the murderous Soviet gulag. But I took this into account in determining the range of democide. As incredible as the democide of probably 170,000,000 may be, it may be more unbelievable as to how this killing was often done.

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For example, the Soviet Union under Stalin and China under Mao would murder by quota. They would establish that perhaps five percent of the people were counterrevolutionaries, so five percent of the people would have to be killed. Writers, entrepreneurs, you name it—kill five percent. Of course, murder by quota was the natural thing for these governments, since central planners directed their production of iron, steel, wheat, pigs, and almost everything else by quota. Why not executions, as well? Likewise, as a political scientist, I was particularly shaken by how officials at the highest levels of government would systematically plan their mass murders as though they were an army planning a military campaign. The actual killing would then be left to the appropriate officials and bureaucracy and through them delegated to humble cadres. But some governments also were like gangs of thugs, stealing, raping, torturing, and killing by desire or even on a whim. So much for the notion of a general government benevolence, or the positive functions of government beloved by political scientists. At the time I did my research, communism was considered by many intellectuals, especially in universities, as a viable alternative to liberal democracy. After all, people under such systems had universal health care, employment, housing, and the evils of greedy capitalism were no more. But there were also the anticommunists, for whom communism—Marxism-Leninism and its variants—meant, in practice, bloody terrorism, deadly purges, lethal gulags and forced labor, fatal deportations, man-made famines, extra-judicial executions and show trials, and genocide. Nonetheless, no one had tried to do an overall accounting of their democide. So I undertook this as well in the context of my overall assessment of global democide. As delineated in the resulting works such as Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder 1917-1987, China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900, and Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century, I found an unrivaled communist hecatomb. These books on communist democide are packed with figures and graphs that delineate the number of people murdered in one campaign, movement, or another; in concentration, labor, re-education, and death camps; in deportations; during intentional famines; and in war time. Of course, even though systematically determined and calculated, all the figures and their graphs are only rough approximations. Even where we have total access to, for example, all communist archives, we still would not be able to calculate precisely

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how many the communists murdered, no more than we can do so for the Holocaust. That said, we can get a probable order of magnitude and a relative approximation of these deaths within a most likely range. The apparent precision of my following figures is only due to the totals being the summation of dozens or hundreds of subtotals (as of forced labor deaths each year) and calculations (as in extrapolating scholarly estimates of executions or massacres). With this understood, the Soviet Union appears the greatest megamurderer of all, apparently killing near 61,000,000 people. Stalin himself is responsible for almost 43,000,000 of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39,000,000 are due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the cultural revolution, which alone may have seen over one million murdered, is the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser megamurderers, such as North Vietnam (1,700,000), North Korea (1,700,000), Cambodia (2,000,000), and Yugoslavia (1,000,000). Obviously, the population that is available to kill will make a big difference in the total democide, and thus the annual percentage rate of democide is revealing. By far, the most deadly of all communist countries and, indeed, of any in this century by far, has been Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. Pol Pot and his crew likely killed some 2,000,000 Cambodians from April 1975 through December 1978 out of a population of around 7,000,000. This is an annual rate of over eight percent of the population murdered, or, the odds of an average Cambodian surviving Pol Pot’s rule was slightly over just over two to one. In sum the communists have probably murdered something like 110,000,000, or near two-thirds of all those killed by all governments, quasi-governments, and guerrillas from 1900 to 1987. Of course, the world total itself is shocking. It is several times the 38,000,000 battle-dead that have been killed in all this century’s international and domestic wars. And the probable number of murders by the Soviet Union alone—just one communist country—well surpasses the battle killed of all wars in this century. All wars! Even at this writing, even after a decade since I wrote my book on the Soviet Union, I can not get over this. Nor can I get over how I went through college to the Ph.D. in political science, taught the subject for over twenty years, collected data on violence throughout my research career, and did not know this.

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How can we understand all this killing by communists? It is the marriage of an absolutist ideology with absolute power. Communists believed that they knew the truth, absolutely. The believed that they knew—through Marxism—what would bring about the greatest human welfare and happiness. And they believed that power, the dictatorship of the proletariat, must be used to tear down the old feudal or capitalist order and rebuild society and culture to realize this utopia. Nothing must stand in the way of its achievement. Government—the Communist Party—was, thus, above any law. All institutions, cultural norms, traditions, and sentiments were expendable. And the people were as though lumber and bricks, to be used in building the new world. Constructing this utopia was seen as though a war on poverty, exploitation, imperialism, and inequality. And for the greater good, as in a real war, people are killed. And, thus, this war for the communist utopia had its necessary enemy casualties, the clergy, bourgeoisie, capitalists, wreckers, counterrevolutionaries, rightists, tyrants, rich, landlords, and noncombatants that unfortunately got caught in the battle. In a war millions may die, but the cause may be well justified, as in the defeat of Hitler and an utterly racist Nazism. And to many communists, the cause of a communist utopia was such as to justify all the deaths. The irony of this is that communism in practice, even after decades of total control, did not improve the lot of the average person, but usually made their living conditions worse than before the revolution. It is not by chance that the greatest famines have occurred within the Soviet Union (about 5,000,000 dead during 1921 through 1923 and 7,000,000 during 1932-3) and communist China (about 27,000,000 dead from 1959 through 1961). In total, almost 55,000,000 people died in various communist famines and associated diseases, a little over 10,000,000 of them from democidal famine. This is as though the total population of Turkey, Iran, or Thailand had been completely wiped out. But communists could not be wrong. After all, their knowledge was scientific, based on historical materialism, an understanding of the dialectical process in nature and human society, and a materialist (and thus realistic) view of nature. Marx has shown empirically where society has been and why, and he and his interpreters proved that it was destined for a communist end. No one could prevent this, but only stand in the way and delay it at the cost of more human misery. Those who disagreed with this worldview, and even with some of

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the proper interpretations of Marx and Lenin were, without a scintilla of doubt, wrong. After all, did not Marx or Lenin or Stalin or Mao say that? In other words, communism was like a fanatical religion. It had its revealed text and chief interpreters. It had its priests and their ritualistic prose with all the answers. It had a heaven, and the proper behavior to reach it. It had its appeal to faith. And it had its crusades against nonbelievers. What made this secular religion so utterly lethal was its seizure of all the state’s instruments of force and coercion and their immediate use to destroy or control all independent sources of power, such as the church, the professions, private businesses, schools, and the family. Communism, of course, does not stand alone in such mass murder. We do have the example of Nazi Germany, which may have itself murdered some 21,000,000 Jews, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, and other nationalities (see my book Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992). Then there is the Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek, which murdered near 10,000,000 Chinese from 1928 to 1949, and the Japanese militarists who murdered almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Indochinese, Koreans, Filipinos, POWs, and others during World War II. And then we have the 1,000,000 or more Bengalis and Hindus killed in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971 by the Pakistan military. Nor should we forget the mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and German citizens from Eastern Europe at the end of World War II, particularly by the Polish government as it seized the German Eastern Territories, killing perhaps over 1,000,000 of them. Nor should we ignore the 1,000,000 plus deaths in Mexico from 1900 to 1920, many of these poor Indians and peasants being killed by forced labor on barbaric haciendas. And one could go on and on to detail various kinds of noncommunist democide. In my book, Death by Government (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), I analyzed 8,193 estimates of such government killings throughout the world and even those involving only a dozen or so murdered. I concluded that throughout history governments have killed more than 300,000,000—with more than half, or 170,000,000, killed during the twentieth century. These numbers do not include war deaths. Put another way, during this century’s wars, there were some 38,000,000 battle deaths, but almost four times more people—at least 170,000,000—were killed by govern-

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ments for ethnic, racial, tribal, religious, political reasons, or no reason at all. Many people are aware that some 60,000,000 people died during World War II. What is much less well known is that only about 16,000,000 of the World War II deaths involved combatants. Most of the remaining dead were killed in cold blood by the fascist Chinese Nationalists and Japanese militarists, the Chinese communists, the Nazis, and the Soviet Union, which alone murdered about 10,000,000 of its citizens during the war. Now, everyone knows how costly in lives and material such a war can be, and for good reason many scholars, researchers, intellectuals, and interested citizens therefore focus on how war might be prevented. Few, however, are aware of the much more deadly democide. Of course, in 1994 events in Rwanda, for a moment, riveted attention on a genocide that within a few months has cost at least 500,000 lives, a number that only the combat deaths of a few wars in history have exceeded. But if history is any guide, memory of this genocide will soon disappear and attention will refocus alone on the horrors of war. A Solution to Democide As should now be clear, for me the one factor that connects all the democides is this: as a government’s power is more unrestrained, as its power reaches into all the corners of culture and society, and as it is less democratic, then the more likely it is to kill its own citizens. There is more than a linear correlation here. As totalitarian power increases, democide multiplies until it curves sharply upward when totalitarianism is near absolute. As a governing elite has the power to do whatever it wants, whether to satisfy its most personal desires, to pursue what it believes is right and true, it may do so whatever the cost in lives. In this case power is the necessary condition for mass murder. Once an elite has it, other causes and conditions can operate to bring about the immediate genocide, terrorism, massacres, or whatever killing an elite feels is warranted. Bluntly stated, concentrated political power is the most dangerous thing on earth. Finally, at the extreme of totalitarian power we have by far the greatest extreme of democide (and war). Communist governments have almost without exception wielded the most absolute power and their greatest killing (such as during Stalin’s reign or the height of Mao’s power) has taken place when they have been in their own

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history most totalitarian. As most communist governments underwent increasing liberalization and a loosening of centralized power in the 1960s through the 1980s, the pace of killing dropped off sharply. The extent of mass killing in war, internal collective violence, and democide in our lifetime and throughout history is not only depressing, but makes eliminating it seem hopeless. After all, this killing has been the stuff of history: the Mongol invasions, Thirty Years War, Napoleonic Wars, World Wars I and II; the Mongol massacres, the slaughter of the Crusades, slave deaths in the Middle Passage, the butchery of the Teiping Rebellion. In some cases all we need is a single name to provoke images of mass murder—Genghis Khan, Ivan the Terrible, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot. All one needs to do is change the names, places, and dates in Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War to those of our century to make it recent history. How can one even presume, therefore, that there is a solution to democide? All alleged solutions must seem only the raving of idealists. “Let’s be realistic,” it is often said, “foreign and domestic violence are in our blood. They have always been with us; they will always be with us.” But note. This had also been said of slavery, which had been universal throughout history until the nineteenth century and has now been virtually eliminated. And through my research I now believe (as laid out in my concluding volumes, Power Kills, and The Miracle That Is Freedom) that the “realists” are also wrong about war. Wrong about civil collective violence. And wrong about genocide and mass murder. Mass killing and mass murder carried out by government is a result of indiscriminate, irresponsible power at the center. There is one solution to each and the solution in each case is the same. It is to foster democratic freedom and to democratize coercive power and force. Put another way, the solution is the universalization of civil and political rights, that is, the fostering of liberal democracy. More specifically, I found that in general that: z

democracies don’t wage war on each other, and they rarely commit other kinds of violence against each other either;

z

the more democratic two countries are, the less likely they will go to war against or have intense violence against each other;

z

the more democratic a country is, the less its foreign violence;

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z

the more democratic a country is, the less likely it will have domestic collective violence;

z

the more democratic a country is, the less its democide;

z

and the bottom line: democratic freedom is thus a method of nonviolence.

The major reason why liberal democracies tend to be peaceful is that power is dispersed through many different families, churches, schools, universities, corporations, partnerships, business associations, scientific societies, unions, clubs, and myriad other groups. There’s plenty of competition, and people thus have overlapping and cross-pressured interests. The social order isn’t controlled by anybody—it evolves spontaneously. And even though there might be much government interference in daily life through laws on labor, the environment, health, drugs, guns, and so on, as long as a democratic culture remains strong, government officials must still negotiate and compromise with each other as well as with private interests. Government is only one pyramid of power among many in such a free society. Democracy is then a culture of political compromise, free exchange, peaceful negotiation, toleration of differences. Because time is needed for such a democratic culture to develop and gain widespread acceptance, I stress that the peace dividend is achieved as a democracy becomes well established. By contrast, in the most centralized governments, the most aggressive, domineering personalities are the most likely to gain power, often through force. Once in power they have no or weak countervailing sources of power, such as the church or corporations, to restrain or check them. They are free to exploit their power as they wish, whether by murdering those who are real or imagined threats to their power, by exterminating root and branch those ethnic or religious groups they hate or stand in the way of their vision, or by attacking weaker countries. Historically, governments with such power have been the most internally and externally violent. Influences and the Evolution of My Thinking and Work on Democide As for any research or individual influencing my quantitative work on democide, at least consciously, there was none (unlike my work on war for which I could name a dozen or so who highly influenced

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me). This was a lonely undertaking, since at the time I started there was no one that had tried to do a total accounting, with the exception of Gil Elliot’s (1972) Twentieth Century Book of The Dead. But Elliot’s focus was on all sources of violent death, including war, and his treatment of democide was limited. Of course, as I worked on specific countries, there were particular scholars (such as Conquest on the USSR) and works (such as The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn) that influenced and impressed me, but in my overall endeavor, I had to work from scratch. So, has my thinking on democide evolved over time? Yes, from a belief that the Holocaust was the worst example of government murder, to a realization that murder by governments was not only widespread, but much greater in number than those killed in war. It was not “Never Again,” but always again, and again. And as I increasingly and consistently found how crucial democratic freedom was to the numbers, my thinking evolved from “perhaps,” to “probably,” to “yes.” In writing, it was from the usual social science “it seems that,” to “probably,” and finally to simply “power kills.” The evidence was just so strong. As to how my work has evolved in practical terms, when I confirmed what I thought would be the case with democratic freedom, I then shifted to writing summary and policy-oriented books and articles. The solution overall, as noted above, was democracy. My role was no longer research, but educational. Thus my web site, which I continue to maintain, and the book The Miracle That Is Freedom (placed on the website at: http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/ NOTE7.HTM). Obstacles I Confronted in My Work in This Field The major obstacle was the lack of any general statistical, comparative, or historical work on global democide. There were several works that dealt with a number of “genocides,” but they were not comprehensive, nor were there any criteria for what was included or excluded. Also, except for the Holocaust, for any given democide, what statistics there were usually were of poor quality and, except for some case studies by those writing about genocide, the historical treatments sparse. As already indicated, historians in general have a decided lack of concern over the numbers killed in one democidal episode or another (e.g., “all were killed,” “few survived,” “most were put to the sword”).

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Most democide occurs during international or domestic wars, but few historians bother to separate those killed in military action from those noncombatants directly targeted or civilians murdered. They all are often treated as casualties. In many cases, therefore, to determine the actual democide requires that one become an historian himself, sifting through the documentation, memoirs, and histories to comb out the nature and extent of democide. Fortunately, the study of war had been my career and I found this easier to do than would most students starting fresh. I am now glad to see that today we are increasingly sensitive to war crimes and crimes against humanity during military action, and presumably this will be reflected in our future histories. Another problem, to be further discussed below, was the terminological confusion in the literature over the meaning of genocide. I often found it difficult to know what was meant by calling an event or episode genocide. Was it mass murder? Was it a case of cultural deprivation? Was this of a racial, ethnic, or religious group? Were people killed regardless of group identity or its lack? Finally, there is the problem of educating the public about democide. There was and is the unwillingness of opinion leaders, policymakers, and educators to face the sheer mass of murders by governments; and for those that do, to recognize or admit that we have a solution. Regarding educators, at least one would think that the Holocaust, if no other democide, would be well covered in textbooks at high school level and in colleges. But sadly, even for the Holocaust this is not the case. Of course, there may be references or a paragraph or two, but usually absent is the social and political depth of meaning, the moral implications for our age and for government, of such mass murder of millions in cold blood. There is a widespread turning away, a refusal to look at the facts of democide, to accept that governments can and do commit mass murder, that must be confronted by all deeply concerned about this abomination of our species. What is required, clearly, is a concerted movement to overcome this, and I believe such is now developing. The State of the Field of Democide Studies The field is growing rapidly, research is diversifying, and our knowledge of individual democides is multiplying and deepening. Many related institutes are now at work on democide and a variety of websites have been constructed. There are very good people at

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work on one form of democide or another and there soon should be the methods and works to justify democide as an independent, academic discipline. Still, comparative works on global democide are rare and usually follow the cafeteria approach, unsystematically picking and choosing among democides according to the interest of the writers. But I have no doubt that this will change in the next decade or so. I look forward to the time when all this work can be connected by a web ring: a reciprocal linking of Internet websites presenting the major research for those involved in the field, as well as for practitioners, students, and the general public. Given the state of genocide research two decades ago, the field of democide studies has undergone revolutionary growth and such a web ring is now overdue (I am not writing about cross-linking sites per se, but about interlinking sites containing full research results, reports, and books). But with such a fast growth the field must now undergo integration and rationalization. And this is hampered by multiple and confusing uses of the term genocide (on this see my essay at http:// www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/GENOCIDE.HTM). To call all government murder genocide is to leave us without a concept for the killing of people because of their indelible group membership. To call attempts to destroy a culture without killing its members genocide is also to leave us without a clear concept for killing people because of their group membership. I believe it best to limit the term to such killing, but if we do we must also recognize that genocide so understood is a small percentage (even considering the Holocaust) of those murdered by government for other reasons (about 38,000,000 of the total near 170,000,000 murdered 1900-1987). To avoid this confusion in my own work and to be clear about what I was analyzing, I invented the term democide. This then fills the void created by necessarily limiting genocide to killing by virtue of group membership. What do we call murder by quota, then? Democide. What about killing political opponents? Democide (or politicide as a type of democide). And the Holocaust? Genocide (as another type of democide). Besides the conceptual issue, the field is also retarded by a lack of concern with research methods and quantitative analysis. A few, such as Helen Fein, have done quantitative research, but if hypotheses and theories about democide or genocide are to be tested and such research accumulated, then methodology and quantitative techniques

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must be in the field’s toolbox. This is not to say that historical scholarship, case studies, and sociological analysis are to be ignored. No. These are essential, and I have done many myself. I am only saying that we must add to them—complement them—if well-rounded research is to be accomplished on democide. Even simple statistics can be most helpful and qualitatively important. Just consider the monumental significance of just two numbers: the 170,000,000 people probably murdered by government compared to the near 38,000,000 combat dead in all wars over the same period. Conclusion The persistent and consistent focus of my thinking and writing about genocide has been the role of freedom versus lack of freedom, of liberal democracy versus totalitarianism. And my primary aim in this work, as with war, has been to eliminate all forms of such mass murder. Operationally, it has been to determine the numbers and develop the historical case studies to test my democracy-based theory about violence. My ultimate conclusion is that nobody can be trusted with unlimited power. The more power a government has, the more likely people will be killed. Not only in democide, but in domestic and foreign violence and war. This is a, if not the, major reason for promoting freedom. If three decades ago someone had given a speech claiming that freedom is what promotes peace, and tyranny is what promotes violence, I would have argued that this was irresponsibly simplistic and could not possibly hold up under analysis and empirical research. Much of my career, I had believed that social behavior is intrinsically complex and thus can only be the effect of numerous interrelated conditions and causes. The surprise was that when I did the research and theory, freedom emerges as the single most important factor for peace and nonviolence. That freedom so preserves and secures life I now call it the miracle that is freedom. To stand Marx on his head: People of the world, throw off your chains and be free. And secure in your lives. References Cattell, Raymond B. (1949). “The Dimensions of Culture Patterns by Factorization of National Characters.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 44: 443-469. Conquest, Robert (1968). The Great Terror: Stalin’s Purge of the Thirties. New York: Macmillan.

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Elliot, Gil (1972). Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. London: The Penguin Press. Richardson, Lewis Fry (1960). Statistics of Deadly Quarrels. Pittsburgh, PA: The Boxwood Press. Rummel, R. J. (1970). Applied Factor Analysis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Rummel, R. J. (1991). China’s Bloody Century: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rummel, R. J. (1991). The Conflict Helix: Principles and Practices of Interpersonal, Social, and International Conflict and Cooperation. NewBrunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rummel, R.J. (1987). “Deadlier Than War.” IPA Review, 41(2):24-30. Rummel, R.J. (1994). Death by Government: Genocide and Mass Murder in the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rummel, R. J. (1992). Democide: Nazi Genocide and Mass Murder. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rummel, R.J. (1976). Dimensions of Nations. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1976. Rummel, R. J. (1990). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocides and Mass Murders 1917-1987. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rummel, R. J. (1983). “Libertarianism and International Violence.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, March, 27: 27-71. Rummel, R. J. (1984). “Libertarianism, Violence within States, and the Polarity Principle.” Comparative Politics, July, 16: 443-462. Rummel, R.J. (1985). “Libertarian Propositions on Violence within and between Nations: A Test Against Published Research Results.” Journal of Conflict Resolution, September, 29: 419-55. Rummel, R. J. (1996). The Miracle That Is Freedom. Moscow, ID: The Martin Institute, University of Idaho. Rummel, R.J. (1976). Peace Endangered: The Reality of Détente. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. Rummel, R. J. (1997). Power Kills. New Brunwick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Rummel, R. J. (1976). “Roots of Faith.” In James N. Rosenau (Ed.) In Search of Global Patterns. New York: The Free Press, pp. 10-30. Rummel, R. J. (1988). “Roots of Faith II.” In Joseph Kruzel and James N. Rosenau (Eds.) Journeys Through World Politics: Autobiographical Reflections of Thirty-Four Academic Travelers. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, pp. 311-328. Rummel, R. J. (1997). Statistics of Democide. Charlotte, VA: Center on National Security and Law, University of Virginia. Rummel, R.J. (1975-1981). Understanding Conflict and War, Vol. 1-5, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications. (This series is comprised of: Volume 1: The Dynamic Psychological Field, 1975; Volume 2: The Conflict Helix, 1976; Volume 3: Conflict in Perspective, 1977; Volume 4: War, Power, Peace, 1979; and Volume 5, The Just Peace, 1981.) Rummel, R.J. (July 7, 1986). “War Isn’t this Century’s Biggest Killer.” The Wall Street Journal, np. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr I. (1974-1978). The Gulag Archipelago. 3 Vols. New York: Harper & Row. Wright, Quincy (1942). A Study of War, Vol. 1-2. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

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11 Who is My Neighbor? Roger W. Smith “Why did you decide to study genocide?” That is the question that genocide scholars are asked again and again. The public’s assumption appears to be that we must be either mad or saints. Mad, because how else could one stand the horror? A saint, in that apparently we seek understanding of the horror in order to save lives in the future. There is also perplexity over why a person would be concerned with genocide except in the case of his or her own group. For a long time I would reply to the question by saying that I did not know. Or that my interest in genocide started when I was nineteen: I was in a tutorial at Harvard on Hitler’s Germany, reading books like The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt, 1951), and listening to the professor explain (what now seems incredible) that The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, & Sanford, 1950) provided the explanation for the Holocaust. I am not sure what I learned from the course, but it did prompt me to pose a question: “Why do groups of human beings at times seek to eliminate other groups of human beings?” That question was very important to me, and I remember even now that it came to me as I rode the subway in Boston along the Back Bay. There was also a partial answer: that before the killing begins the perpetrators have to dehumanize members of the victim group. A deeper understanding of why I chose to study genocide had to wait until 1995. I had been invited to Armenia to participate with a group of scholars from Armenia, Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Turkey, and the United States in a conference on “The Problems of Genocide.” In addition to the conference, there were tours of histori179

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cal sites, such as the fourth-century Armenian cathedral in Etchmiadzin. Yehuda Bauer, a Israeli scholar of the Holocaust, and I were sitting next to each other on the bus returning from the cathedral, when he quietly asked how I had come to the study of genocide. I replied that it grew out of the question of why human groups harm other groups. His response was that intellectual curiosity would not be strong enough, that there must be a moral reason as well. As we continued to talk, I realized that what had led me to the study of genocide, in addition to curiosity about how people can commit such atrocities, was a commitment to equality, a commitment rooted in my childhood. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1936, the youngest of three children. Although I did not know it then, for we had mainly what we needed, we were poor. My mother had finished high school and my father grammar school. He went to work at sixteen, at which time his father threw him out of the house because he joined a union. My father and mother knew many things, and had taught themselves for the most part. I remember asking my eighth grade teacher if she didn’t think it was possible for people to teach themselves. She did not, but I did. My parents were strong, humane, and, to me, inspiring. I saw them as the equal of anyone, but knew that society had its own hierarchies and valuations. Out of a love for my parents came a deep commitment to equality, not of money or things, but of the fundamental worth of human beings. Genocide, whatever else it is, is the ultimate denial of equality. There was another aspect to my life: a deeply segregated South. For blacks, separate schools, churches, drinking fountains; the back of the bus; socially-enforced poverty. My neighborhood bordered on a black community, and thus, I saw daily many of the conditions that blacks had to put up with, especially the poverty, poor housing, and various socially sanctioned indignities (“boy,” back of the bus, “whites only.”) At ten years old, I saw the plight of the blacks not in terms of race (and here I was wildly mistaken), but of class. I promised myself that when I grew up I would be in Congress and change all that: a childish dream, childishly executed. But again, a commitment to equality that came from personal experience. On the other hand, in the 1940s, about all that came of it was that I would eat canned tomatoes along the creek bank with the young blacks my age. One can never be sure about one’s motivations. As the philosopher Kierkegaard reportedly said, “We live forward and understand

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backwards.” It is possible that I have misunderstood what pulled me toward trying to understand and prevent the politically imposed mass death that is now called genocide. As I turned my research and teaching toward genocide, I was not thinking about why; it just seemed to be something that had interested me for many years, and was of obvious importance. What is striking, however, is that most of us who have helped to create the field of genocide studies, especially the comparative study of genocide, all began around the same time, that is, about twenty years ago. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I studied political theory and comparative politics; in graduate school at Berkeley, I studied more of the same. In this sense, the comparative approach to genocide came naturally; I find that I can understand one thing only by understanding other things. But it was not until 1982 at the College of William and Mary that I taught a course on genocide—it was called “Human Destructiveness and Politics.” It was comparative and thematic in nature, and was emotionally exhausting. I have continued to teach the seminar annually since then, adding new cases, and new themes, especially gender and genocide, early-warning, and genocide and the moral imagination. The course basically deals with four questions: What is genocide (not just in terms of definition or law, but in an extended human sense)? Why does genocide occur? Who, if anyone, is responsible for genocide? How can genocide be prevented? In 1983 I participated in the panel on genocide that Herbert Hirsch organized for the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association. For an association that offers many hundreds of panels on all aspects of political science, this was the first ever held on genocide. There were ten people in the audience. But those who were there (Barbara Harff and Ted Gurr) began a collaboration and planned for future programs on genocide that have borne fruit. Still, we all wondered why so few political scientists were interested in genocide. But then it turned out that not many historians, psychologists, sociologists, etc. were interested in what morally, politically, and intellectually is one of the most challenging problems of the twentieth century. Even now one meets many persons who think that genocide is a crime that is committed by people who are mad, bestial, primitive, or evil, and thus no search for an explanation need go further. I never accepted that way of thinking, both because of the evidence

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to the contrary and my personal experience in the army. When in 1960 I arrived at the infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia for training as a platoon leader, I was young, idealistic, and, except as a matter of self-defense, strongly opposed to violence. I had been reading Camus on rebellion against politically-imposed death, and while not a pacifist, thought there had to be better solutions than killing our fellows. Within a short time, one of our instructors, his voice rising to a crescendo, informed us that we were being trained to kill. I felt betrayed as a person, and hated any government that would place men in this position. A week or so later, we were undergoing training in using the bayonet to disembowel our fellow beings; I became ill at the very thought, and barely managed to get through the session. But, then, one night we went into some highly realistic training, with demolitions going off around us, all kinds of sounds supposedly emanating from the “enemy” were projected, and in various ways we were made to feel that the enemy was firing at us. Under the circumstances, we all began to fire live ammunition at those who were threatening us. The army had succeeded in turning me into a person who would kill; worse, I took pride in my newfound capacity. If I, who had so much opposed violence, could be turned into a killer within weeks, who could not? And if I were prepared to kill in war, how can I say with assurance that I would not participate in genocide? If it is odd that so few scholars have concentrated their research on genocide, then there are also some advantages. With so small a circle of scholars in the field, we have generally come to know each other, have collaborated in various projects, and have been able to offer both support and criticism of work in progress. The exchange of ideas, then, has helped to bring into being the field of genocide studies, and to lay solid foundations for those who come after. And there are signs that young scholars are turning to genocide studies from a variety of perspectives. The development of the field of genocide scholarship has also been a matter of developing institutions and associations that can put scholars in touch with one another, provide conference forums for extended discussion of genocide, provide information to the public, and take principled stands on issues such as denial of genocide, the need to create stronger international laws and institutions to prevent and punish genocide, and the continued assault on indigenous peoples. The latest of these groups, with members from five conti-

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nents, is the Association of Genocide Scholars, founded in Berlin in 1994 by Israel Charny, Helen Fein, Robert Melson, and myself. My own work has consisted of research, critical reviews, teaching, community outreach, working with various genocide organizations, and more recently, political activism involving radio broadcasts, petitions, letter writing, and campaigns to expose the Turkish government’s attempt to create a number of Turkish chairs in American universities to further the denial of the Armenian genocide. UCLA and Berkeley did turn down the chairs because of the conditions attached to them, and because of ethical concerns about accepting money from a regime with such a terrible human rights record, but others (including Princeton, Georgetown, and the University of Washington) have accepted Turkey’s “deeds of gift.” This brings me to the question of how I became involved with the Armenians and the body of my work that focuses on Turkey’s denial of the genocide. There were several steps along the way. First, when I began to teach the course on genocide, there was very little material on the Armenian genocide that I could assign to students; moreover, few persons outside the Armenian community seemed to know anything about the genocide. It was with dismay and sadness that I asked, “How can a million and a half persons be killed in a brutal genocide and no one remembers?” But then I learned that not only had the first large-scale genocide of the twentieth century been forgotten, it had been systematically denied by the Turkish perpetrators and the successor regimes. Millions of dollars were being poured by the Turkish government into denying that the Armenians had been killed, that Turks bore any responsibility, and that, whatever happened and whoever did it, there was no genocide, but rather civil war and wartime relocations. In short, denial went hand-in-hand with blaming the victims. Sadness and perplexity now turned to anger. Then in 1985 I attended a conference at Bentley College in Waltham, Massachusetts, on “Genocide and Human Rights: Lessons from the Armenian Experience.” At the time, I did not personally know any Armenians. Further, I went to the conference as a relative innocent, though perhaps I was not “wholly innocent,” since I later received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States rebuking my scholarship. My “mistake” was that I had mentioned the Armenian genocide, something, he said, that never happened. It was there that I met Helen Fein, Israel Charny, and Richard Hovannisian, scholars whom I hold in the highest regard. It was

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there, too, that I met, for the first time, survivors of the genocide, their children and grandchildren, all of whom shared their stories with me, bearing witness to a proud and tragic history. And it was there, at the first evening of the conference, that I sat at the banquet table with a group of Armenians who began to sing in Armenian, a language that I had never heard before, songs of home and long ago, songs sad yet sweet, coming from the heart, and accompanied with tears. Little did I know then, that, on April 24, 1990, I would stand before the Martyrs’ Memorial in Yerevan, Armenia, and I too would weep. But, in the end, tears of sadness and anger are not enough; they must also become tears of resolution and action. In 1987 I was invited by the minister of the St. James Armenian Church in Richmond, Virginia, to speak at their memorial service for the victims of the Armenian genocide. By then I had written a long essay on “Genocide and Denial: The Armenian Case and Its Implications” (Smith, 1989). In it, I had attempted to clarify the concept of denial, examine the political and psychological reasons for Turkey’s denial, show the structure of the argument, which had not changed over the years, and delineate the changing tactics that have been used by Turkey to deny the genocide. In the end, I came to the conclusion that Turkey is not likely to change its position, but that by others of us telling the truth, and showing solidarity with the victims, that the injustice and burden of denial could be lifted in part from the Armenian community. My themes in this part of the essay were truth, justice, and healing. But these were abstractions in comparison to what would take place on April 24, 1987, in Richmond. First, there was the mass, with lighted candles held by everyone in remembrance of the victims; then a luncheon that included foods that were special for the occasion; and then a speech in Armenian by the oldest (he was then eighty) male survivor in the community. Then I was to speak on the importance of remembrance, and I did, but there was an elderly Armenian woman (I later learned that she was ninety-two) sitting at a table a few feet away, and she was muttering the whole time. At first, I was a bit unnerved, thinking that perhaps she was saying: “Who is this odar (outsider) to tell us about our suffering?” But then I realized that she was reliving the events of seventy years earlier, and I was deeply moved and humbled to be in her presence. When the program was over, she told me that she was the only member of her extended family of forty-two to survive! She encouraged me to con-

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tinue to speak out, and I promised her that I would. Sometimes when I am tired of having to try yet again to combat the Turkish assault on historical reality, I remember her and am called to my better self. The following year I presented “Genocide and Denial” to a conference at Princeton. Later that evening after the banquet that closed the assembly, several of us went off to what might be described as a watering hole. Sitting next to me was a young professor of education, who had given a sensitive paper on class in public schools in America. She had walked out on my presentation, and now looked at me (blond hair, green eyes, Smith) and said, “Are you Armenian?” I replied that I was not, but inquired why she had asked. She then responded, “If you are not Armenian, why do you care about what happened to them?” There were many answers that I could have given: that genocide is a crime against humanity, that one of the conditions for genocide is bystanders who refuse to get involved. But I could tell she was not interested: if you are not a member of the tribe, it doesn’t matter. Indeed, a professor with whom I taught a course in the religion department at William and Mary on “The Holocaust and the Moral Imagination” took the same position. He told the children’s parable of a forest with many kinds of animals. One day, men with trucks and large nets came and began to take away the lions. The animals got together and decided that what had happened was sad, but they were not lions. The next day, it was the birds, and the animals concluded that, too bad, but we are not birds. Eventually, of course, all of the animals disappeared. He then asked the class to interpret the story. My own view was one of solidarity, partly out of sympathy and partly because where a group claims a right to determine who belongs (who is human), then no one is safe. The inscription on the door of the Protestant church in the French village of Le Chambon, where Jews were protected during the Holocaust by the whole community, speaks to this differently, and for some, more powerfully: “We must love one another” (Hallie, 1979). But my colleague’s view was that every group must look to its own defense since no other group will come to its aid. Unfortunately, there is much truth to this claim: too often tribal and national interests preclude solidarity and intervention. But since many groups are not strong enough to defend themselves, the interpretation he gives condemns them to destruction. In fact, he is only

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a small step away from saying, with Thucydides’s Athenians at Melos, that the world is divided into the strong and the weak, and the weak deserve what they get. The recognition of genocide for what it is, and the exposure of the attempts at denial, can have important consequences for the survivors and their descendants and also for the general public’s awareness of otherwise forgotten genocides. The essay I co-authored with Eric Markusen and Robert Jay Lifton on “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide” (1995) led to letters and phone calls from Armenians telling us how our exposure of the Turkish efforts at denial had helped to “heal” (their word invariably) the wounds denial had kept raw for generations. But the essay also raised the question of scholarly and educational integrity. The New York Times (Honan, 1996), the Boston Globe (Yemma, 1995) and the Chronicle of Higher Education (Rubin, 1995), among other papers, interviewed us about how an academic, Heath Lowry, who had helped to further Turkish propaganda, ended up with the Ataturk Chair in Turkish Studies at Princeton, a chair funded in large part by the Turkish government. In 1990 Robert Jay Lifton received a letter from the Turkish Ambassador to the United States that attempted to intimidate Lifton from referring in print again to the Armenian genocide. But the same envelope, by mistake, contained a letter to Lifton drafted by Lowry for the Ambassador’s signature, and Lowry’s memorandum to the Ambassador analyzing Lifton’s work and how to discredit scholarship on the Armenian genocide. This gave us the opportunity in our essay (1995) to expose the relationship between a historian, the supposedly neutral Institute of Turkish Studies in Washington, D.C. that he headed from 1982 to 1994, and the denial efforts of the Turkish government. It also raised serious questions about the Turkish government’s funding of chairs at major American universities, and why academics would lend themselves to denying known genocides. Over one hundred prominent scholars and writers signed a petition denouncing the attempts of the Turkish government to deny the killing of the Armenians and the continuing efforts to distort the past, and to bias scholarship within American universities. Copies of the petition appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education (“Taking a Stand,” 1996) and the New York Times (“To Honor,” 1998), and have been sent to universities that were offered, with strings attached, academic chairs funded in large part by the Turkish government.

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If the theme of denial is prominent in my work, it does not stand alone. As I look again at the writings of the past fifteen years, other themes emerge: the nature and history of genocide, responsibility for genocide, the relationships between gender and genocide, the political economy of genocide, and the prevention of genocide. These themes sometimes appear separately, but most often two or more of them are brought together in an attempt to illuminate each theme more fully. For example, in “Women and Genocide: Notes on An Unwritten History” (Smith, 1994) I argue that, in many ways, the experience of women with genocide has differed in important respects from that of men, and that in order to understand the nature, history, forms of victimization, and consequences of genocide, the experience of women must not be submerged in a human (masculine) story of genocide. Women have seldom participated directly in genocide, though this has begun to change in the twentieth century (Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Rwanda); women have been victimized in ways different from men (rape and enslavement); and the consequences of genocide for women (incorporation into the perpetrators’ society, ostracism of victims of rape) have often been different as well. All of these differences can be explained in terms of (1) the attributes of women (sexuality, reproductive capacity, and maternity) that historically made them both vulnerable and valuable and, (2) the assumptions of partriarchal society that insisted that women are weak, dependent, and the sexual property of a male, who may appropriate her body, labor, and reproductive power. But one must also account for why these experiences and patterns have begun to change in the twentieth century. Two possible explanations are that, in a crowded world, reproductive capacities may appear less valuable; and that, as modern forms of technology and organization reduce the need for strength, traditional assumptions about the capacity of women to take life may be weakened. My first essay on genocide, however, was on the twentieth century as a unique age of genocide (Smith, 1987). There had been other ages of genocide, but the present century seemed to me to be set apart in terms of scale, range of victims, technology, variety of genocidal forms, and motives. I called attention to the common features of genocide, but also suggested that genocidal motives to a large extent vary not only with perpetrators, but with historical period. The motives for genocide were commonly revenge, conquest,

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gain, power, and purification/salvation. Arranged in terms of a grammar of motives, the pure types of genocide were retributive, institutional (ancient warfare was generally genocidal), utilitarian, monopolistic, and ideological. A distinguishing feature of the twentieth century, however, is that all of these forms of genocide have converged to produce the most murderous century on record. But to call it a unique age of genocide was also to call attention to the acute need for prevention of genocide. Current approaches to the prevention of genocide tend to be “institutional,” with emphasis on genocide early warning systems, the expansion of international legal institutions, the use of economic sanctions, and the threat of humanitarian intervention. A “moral” approach is also necessary, one that first and foremost encourages governments to broaden their understanding of “national interest” to include the prevention of genocide (Smith, 1992). Without this change in understanding and commitment, it is unlikely that the actions contemplated by the institutional approach will be undertaken. The moral approach also emphasizes education and the maintenance of normative integration within society (Smith, 1991). The latter would attempt to preserve social stability and normative order by avoiding, in Isaiah Berlin’s (1988) words, “desperate situations” and “extremes of suffering” that encourage the growth of ideological movements seeking salvation through extermination (p. 18). The form of education I have in mind would encourage a skeptical view of ideology, with its sweeping generalizations about nature, history, and society, and its willingness to set a speculative, perfect future above the concrete death and suffering to which it lends itself in the present. It would also attempt to subvert the apocalyptic style by promoting tolerance, respect for individuals, and a less rigid, Manichean view of morality and the world. But since mass killing typically takes place only where it has the sanction of government, education would have to encourage the questioning of authority, helping us to recognize that law is not always the same as justice, and that obedience to order is not always a social virtue, but must be squared with the individual’s conscience. In this way, individuals would be encouraged to accept responsibility for their actions, and, where government condoned mass violence against innocent groups, to refuse to support such actions, breaking any links between oneself and governmental crime.

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Genocide is facilitated to a large extent by public indifference to the violation of the rights of minorities. Ways would have to be found to increase a sense of solidarity between and among human groups— a solidarity that recognizes differences, but in matters of life and death transcends them; a solidarity in which any person whose life is threatened by a genocidal state is our neighbor. We are back to the parable of the animals. The goal of this kind of education would be to banish the acceptability of the claim, “I was only obeying orders,” and to undermine the propensity of too many persons to be bystanders (Elie Wiesel [1982] refers to them as “spectators” and “faces in the window”) who look on in silence as fellow human beings are led to the slaughter in the name of history, God, biology, or peasant simplicity (pp. 150-151, 160). Issues of responsibility seem to be a recurring theme in my work, whether it is in the essays on denial, prevention, or the thirty-five year struggle for the United States Senate to ratify the Genocide Convention. The many ways in which it is possible to neutralize a sense of guilt and responsibility have been of particular interest to me: through language, ideology, bureaucracy, technology, the commitment to knowledge at any price, even the use of alcohol to deaden one’s moral awareness. I have also been concerned that too often sweeping moral judgments are made with little attempt to ascertain the facts or understand the complexity of the human situation in times of crisis. Similarly, I have rejected the pious notions that wipe out individual guilt through a condemnation of whole nations; or even all of humankind (“there is an Eichmann in everyone of us”). In particular, I have found the account of moral responsibility in Goldhagen’s (1996) Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust to be indefensible (Smith, 1997). A theory of responsibility must meet several minimum requirements. It must be clear, consistent, make appropriate moral distinctions, avoid collective judgment of whole groups, judge individuals, but, at the same time, not rob them of personhood through demonization, and indicate what must be done for the sake of justice once the slaughter has ceased. Karl Jasper’s (1947) The Question of German Guilt largely met these requirements. Goldhagen’s account, however, fails to meet any of them. Finally, I have tried to develop an approach to questions of guilt and responsibility that allows us to describe more adequately the

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differing relationships that may be present. This is done by looking at the “circles of responsibility” and the “modes of responsibility.” The first deals with the question of who is responsible. These include perpetrators, bystanders, and, sometimes, victims. Further distinctions need to be made within each group, but especially within the perpetrator group, a term that ranges from those who initiate the genocide to those, like some of Browning’s (1992) “ordinary Germans,” who carry out acts of killing but avoid doing so when they think they can get away with it. The modes of responsibility could be described in terms of the form of moral violation that has been committed. Although there are different ways to describe the moral forms, Jaspers spoke of criminal guilt, moral guilt, political liability (a form of collective responsibility), and metaphysical guilt (an acknowledgment that we ourselves could, under certain circumstances, be killers or victims). The place to assess criminal guilt is in a court of law, but this is complicated by questions about which jurisdiction and which code of law is to be invoked. Moral guilt must be assessed by the individual, political liability by those who have defeated the genocidal regime or through an organization such as the United Nations, and metaphysical guilt by the individual, who, facing up to the reality of the human condition, undergoes an inner transformation that turns him or her away from human destructiveness and toward solidarity with the victims of genocide. The most recent theme that I have taken up is that of the political economy of genocide, specifically, the relationships, if any, between scarcity and genocide (Smith, 1998). I point out that “scarcity” can be relative or absolute, and that scarcity can arise from three different sources: material, psychological, and political. Material scarcity involves a scarcity of resources—lack of land, fresh water, fuel— and is sometimes partly a result of over-population. Psychological scarcity arises where desire is confused with need; it is one of the driving forces for “development” that threatens the existence of indigenous peoples. Political scarcity occurs within the context of material scarcity, but involves the allocation of resources to favor certain groups. Such scarcity often exists in ethnically divided societies and helps drive demands for equal treatment, demands that may be met with repression and, if the conflict persists, with an attempt at partial or total genocide. It seems to me that, on the whole, the relationships between genocide and scarcity fall into five broad patterns.

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1.

Genocide that leads to scarcity. The scarcity is unintended but is the consequence of genocide.

2.

Genocide and direct conflict over resources.

3.

Genocide as “advertent omission,” where the intent is to take advantage of a natural disaster such as famine or disease to reduce the population of the despised group.

4.

Genocide that takes place largely through the creation of scarcity, most commonly by depriving the victims of food.

5.

Scarcity as a contributing factor in the decision to resort to genocide.

Each pattern is fairly distinct, but, in the end, there are only two ways to remove the relationship between scarcity and genocide: either the scarcity (and we are dealing with three types of scarcity) must be removed or mitigated, or the genocide itself must be prevented. Given the kind of world that has already experienced so much genocide in the twentieth century, where efforts at prevention are still in doubt, and where within the next fifty years or so world population will double as resources disappear, the future of genocide seems linked to the problem of scarcity. I began by discussing the past, namely, my childhood and the influence it had on my eventual (though not inevitable) study of genocide. Let me conclude by looking to the future of genocide studies and some of the challenges that will have to be faced. A major focus in the future will be on those groups that are most likely to be subject to genocide. In general, these are indigenous peoples and minority ethnic groups in plural societies. The emphasis here has to be two-fold: to identify the particular groups most at risk (Gurr, 1993, has begun a global exploration to do this) and to find means of building constituencies that can exert pressure to prevent their destruction. We also need to pay more attention to the consequences of genocide. At present, we focus almost entirely on why genocide occurs, but the effects of genocide do not end with the last atrocity; they go on for generations. What lingering effects does genocide have on the politics, economy, and social structure of the country in which it takes place? How does a genocidal society rehabilitate itself? What is the impact of genocide, not only on those who have been dispossessed of a homeland, but on international politics, culture and thought? Does a genocide, as Hannah Arendt (1964) thought, make the next one more likely?

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There are other important questions that we cannot presently answer. We have useful theories about why state-initiated genocides occur, but know very little about genocidal societies. Much of the destruction of indigenous populations was carried out by social groups rather than by government; in other instances, governments have been able to harness genocidal attitudes among members of society and involve many thousands of persons in direct acts of killing. Further, there has been a relative neglect of the role of political leadership in accounting for genocide, though this has begun to change given the examples of Bosnia and Rwanda. Finally, as mentioned earlier, anticipated shortages of food, water, and industrial resources in the twenty-first century necessitate research on the relationships between scarcity and genocide. Beyond this, I think that attempts to understand the political economy of genocide more broadly may represent the last major theoretical advance in genocide studies. Finally, I want to call attention to a type of research that is actionoriented. This involves research that is directed toward finding: effective forms of organizational structure that increase the likelihood that human rights will be defended; strategies to publicize events before they turn into mass slaughter; ways to make potential victims more visible and, hence, somewhat less vulnerable; and effective means to educate both the young and old about human rights and genocide. All of these present viable opportunities for research, though they are perhaps not the kinds of topics social scientists and historians have to any extent studied in the past. Above all, we must help create the atmosphere in which men and women (and, one hopes, governments) will recognize genocide for the radical evil it is, and will thus oppose every manifestation of it, including denial. References Adorno, T. W.; Frenkel-Brunswik, E.; Levenson, D. J.; and Sanford, R. N. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Norton. Arendt, Hannah (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. Berlin, Isaiah (1988). “On the Pursuit of the Ideal.” The New York Review of Books, March 17, p. 18. Browning, Christopher R. (1992). Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. New York: HarperCollins. The Chronicle of Higher Education Staff (1996). “Taking a Stand Against the Turkish Government’s Denial of the Armenian Genocide and Scholarly Corruption in the Academy,” February 2, The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A 30.

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Goldhagen, Daniel J. (1996). Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. New York: Knopf. Gurr, Ted Robert (1993). Minorities: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts. Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press. Hallie, P. P. (1979). Lest Innocent Blood be Shed. New York: Harper & Row. Honan, W. H. (1996, May 22). “Princeton Accused of Fronting for the Turkish Government.” The New York Times, pp. B 1, 8. Jaspers, Karl (1947). The Question of German Guilt. New York: Capricorn Books. The New York Times Editorial Staff (1998). “To Honor the 50th Anniversary of the U.N. Genocide Convention We Commemorate the Armenian Genocide of 1915 and Condemn the Turkish Government’s Denial of this Crime Against Humanity.” April 24, The New York Times, p. A 16. Rubin, A. M. (1995, October 27). “Critics Accuse Turkish Government of Manipulating Scholarship.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A 44. Smith, Roger W. (1987). “Human Destructiveness and Politics: The Twentieth Century as an Age of Genocide,” pp. 21-39. In I. Wallimann and M. Dobkowski (Eds) Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Smith, Roger W. (1989). “Genocide and Denial. The Armenian Case and Its Implications.” Armenian Review, 42, 1-38. Smith, Roger W. (1991). “Fantasy, Purity, Destruction: Norman Cohn’s Complex Witness to the Holocaust,” pp. 115-126. In Alan Berger (Ed.) Bearing Witness to the Holocaust, 1939-1989. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press. Smith, Roger W. (1992). “Exploring the United States’ Thirty-five Year Reluctance to Ratify the Genocide Convention.” Harvard Human Rights Journal, 5: 227-233. Smith, R. W. (1994). “Women and Genocide: Notes on an Unwritten History.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 8: 315-334. Smith, R. W. (1997). “‘Ordinary Germans,’ the Holocaust, and Responsibility: Hitler’s Willing Executioners in Moral Perspective,” pp. 48-57. In Franklin Littell (Ed.) Hyping the Holocaust: Scholars Answer Goldhagen. East Rockaway, NY: Cummings & Hathaway. Smith, Roger W. (1998). “Scarcity and Genocide,” pp. 199-219. In Michael Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (Eds.) The Coming Age of Scarcity: Preventing Mass Death and Genocide in the Twentieth-first Century. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Smith, Roger W.; Markusen, Eric; and Lifton, Robert Jay (1995). “Professional Ethics and the Denial of the Armenian Genocide.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 9: 1-22. Wiesel, E. (1982). The Town Beyond the Wall. New York: Schocken Books. Yemma, J. (1995). “Turkish Largess Raises Questions.” The Boston Globe, November 25, pp. 1, 12.

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12 Breaking the Membrane Colin Tatz Formative Years This title derives from a memorable line of Alexander Baron, a British novelist (Baron, 1980, pp. 66-72). What impact did the destruction of European Jewry have on your work, he was asked. A personal incident, he replied, “broke through whatever membrane of resistance had formed in my mind,” and thereafter he was “completely invaded by the knowledge of what had happened. Not a single day passes without some thought or picture of the Churban assailing me.” 1 The membrane metaphor resonates with me: a tough fibrous tissue that both divides and serves to connect other structures. As a child during the Second World War, I was both separated from, yet sharply connected to, the world of Nazis. We, in racist South Africa, were good at division. There was a galaxy of “thems” and “usses.” Three kinds of whites—Afrikaners, English-speaking goyim, and Jews of essentially Lithuanian origin; and three kinds of blacks— Cape Coloreds, Indians, and Africans (variously, Kaffirs, natives, Bantu, schvartzes), the great majority. Languages abounded amongst abundant servants: Tswana, Venda, Sotho, Zulu. Sixty rather than six degrees of separation in all things: bus stops, train carriages, trams, schools, lines at post offices, the football and cricket grounds, elevators, cinemas, cafes, blood banks, ambulances, hospitals, entrances, exits. School enemies lived in their areas, we in ours. Schoolyard games took on racist tones: more playing of “cowboys and Indians” than “good guys versus bad guys,” the only good In195

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dian a dead Indian as we echoed the John Wayne or Gary Cooper frontier philosophy. There was also “Allies and Axis,” though Axis meant Nazis, always jackbooted, black-clad SS ghouls with Alsatians, courtesy of Hollywood B-grade propaganda movies. Japan, a world too far away, we simply didn’t know, or care, about. Living with an immigrant grandmother meant being her interpreter, especially of the English-language press. How well can a nine-year old elaborate the June 1944 Normandy beach landings in Yiddish? Not very. But a compartment began to grow. We had a Pears’ Cyclopaedia, complete with gazetteer. Each day, following the BBC World News on radio, she would ask me to show her where the Nazis were on the map of Lithuania, Poland or Russia. I’d show her Vilna, or Kovno, or Ponevezh, Shadove, Telz. She’d weep. “What’s wrong?” I’d ask. “Our family is gone,” she’d cry. Gone? One didn’t comprehend “gone” at that age. April-May 1945, the usual Saturday movie matinee at what South Africans curiously call “the bioscope”: adverts, animal cartoon, serial (Zorro, Superman), newsreel (Movietone News, Pathe News), singalong with the wurlitzer, interval ice cream and candy floss, the movie. But this time a voice-over asked all children under 14 to leave or “cover your eyes” when the newsreel came on. This tenyear old stayed, fingers splayed to peek at whatever it was. Bulldozing corpses at Belsen was what it was. The end of near-innocence— near because between Pears’, the BBC and the tears, one sensed that something was particularly amiss for Jews. But even then the newsreels didn’t quite convey “Jews” to me: musselmänner, a term I learned much later, corpses but yet not corpses, for these dehumanized, skeletal “things” were not human enough to identify with. That compartment was still there, growing a little. The years 1939 to 1945 were crushed between Crown and Swastika (Furlong, 1991). White South Africa was grossly divided between those who supported Deputy Prime Minister General Jan Smuts’ pro-war position and those who stood by the Prime Minister, General J.B.M. Hertzog, vigorously opposed to this “foreign war.” Smuts won a slim parliamentary majority and assumed power, leaving some forty per cent of white Afrikaners violently anti-war, or supportive of a Nazi victory. Hertzog retired but flirted with ultraright politics. His minister of justice, and then of defense, Oswald Pirow, founded the New Order, based, he claimed, not on Franco’s Spanish but on Salazar’s Portuguese national socialism. It was the

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same Pirow to whom Hitler said in November of 1938 that he knew how to deal with the race “problem”: “one day the Jews will disappear from Europe.” Others formed Blackshirts, Greyshirts, the South African Fascists, the Gentile National-Socialist Movement. The most dangerous organization was the Ossewabrandwag, the Watchers of the Ox-Wagon (or the Ox-Wagon Guard) led by J.F.J. (Hans) van Rensburg. Its “active” pro-Axis wing was called, not surprisingly, the Stormjaers (Storm troopers). Known by their abbreviation as the O.B., these men—and the other “shirts”—attacked synagogues, Jewish shops, and soldiers in uniform, blew up post offices and railways, and printed and distributed Nazi leaflets and propaganda. I watched, in awe, as Jewish teenagers formed vigilante groups to protect prayer and property, as we walked to Friday night services in the “safety” of large groups. Here, indeed, was a special kind of alienation, of belonging but not quite belonging, Jews hoping, believing, even preaching, that they were mainstream but somehow sensing that none of this was really their place. Their whiteness was just barely salvation or redemption in a society suffused by hate. The year 1945 again, and the beginning of the end of a primary schooling taught solely by old men and women: all able-bodied men were “up north” (as active service was always called), somewhere between Abyssinia and Egypt and Libya, and women were in the armed support services or in munitions factories. A new deputy principal, a giant of a man, not yet demobbed, in full major’s gear, Sam Browne belt, insignia, medals, glory—Phil Green. We begged him to tell us about the war, the “Allies and the Axis,” the heroes, the RAF pilots, and the Spitfires, Hurricanes and Mosquito bombers. Instead, for six weeks he regaled us about the bastardries that men commit upon men in the name of race. Our little ceremony of innocence was drowned. Membranes were rupturing a little: my grandmother’s shibboleth that “the worst of ours were better than the best of theirs,” as I thirsted for more from Green, my first mentor in humanism; that something was very much awry in my own and my family’s views about the hier- and lower-archy of the races; that there was a world of horror out there that no one else would talk about, not at home, not in cheder, after-hours Hebrew school, or in shul, the synagogue. High school in 1946 gave few explanations about yesterday’s world. Perhaps two teachers, like Green, had courage enough to question South Africa in the light of the past decade. But, again, the

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school was drawn, quartered, sequestered. The Jewish boys from Yeoville Boys’ primary were kept in separate forms at King Edwards until the third year of high school, maintaining the cloister of the war years. We had compulsory physical education till fifth (and final) form, each session replete with indoor ball games, and boxing or wrestling matches, between Christian A and Jewish A, and Christian B and Jewish B. In third form in 1948, we believed the creation of Israel would give us a little more respect, perhaps lessen such crudities as some teachers calling all Jewish boys “Lazarus”—but it didn’t. “We’ll send you back to Palestine,” crowed several Afrikaner Nationalist Party supporting teachers as their Dr. Daniel Francois Malan, antisemitic theologian, took office on a crude, or rather, even cruder racist ticket. Yet in all youthful naiveté one could still maintain a strange, not quite rational, loyalty, as in rooting for national cricket and rugby teams, for expatriate soccer players in the English League, for golfers like the great Bobby Locke. All white, of course. Perhaps the strong focus on sport allowed an ideal (of sorts) to survive: that the national motto “united we stand” might just have some meaning; that somehow, somewhere, some day, all that overt antisemitism, that ugly, often murderous racism, that cosmic divide of class and color, would go away; that Phil Green could find place and space for his humanity. University Life University life was bizarre, at least for this young Jew from Johannesburg. I went to Natal University, in distant hilly Pietermaritzburg, a city of some 30,000 whites, about 200 Jews, and 30,000 Indians and Africans. A major flashpoint of racial violence from the mid-1960s to the present, in the 1950s it was very much “Sleepy Hollow,” described by a tourist as half the size of a New York cemetery and twice as dead. A segregated university in every sense: the main campus with the “big” professional faculties was in coastal Durban; Maritzburg was essentially agriculture and science, with law and arts relatively minor. Whites only, of course, though Durban had an Indian “facility,” Shastri College; later, I was to tutor a white political science class for an hour, then dash down the road to repeat the class to Indian students. As an arts/law student, I majored in political science, English literature, and Roman Law. The law people were absurdly frigid about

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their “neutrality,” claiming views neither “for” nor “against” as South Africa attempted to subvert the constitutional decisions of the Appellate Division, the country’s highest court, which refused to sanction disfranchisement of Cape Colored people unless by the prescribed amending machinery. The 1910 constitution decreed that the African common roll vote in the Cape Province, the Cape Colored people’s vote in that province, and the constitution’s special amending machinery for these two clauses were “entrenched”; that is, they could only be altered by a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Parliament at a joint sitting. No one ever expected such change. Yet by 1936 the Cape Africans had lost their precious vote, and finally, in 1954, the Colored population lost theirs. The English literature staff were eloquent opponents of apartheid. But it was the history and political science men who were, in a real sense, to enlighten my life. Senator Edgar H. Brookes was a prodigy, achieving a full professorship at the Transvaal University College, later Pretoria University, at twenty-three. He later headed Adams Teacher Training College, a famous training facility for Africans. From 1937 to 1950, he represented the Zulu people of Natal in the national Senate. In 1936, Cape Africans were given a fourfold quid pro quo for their disfranchisement: henceforth all Africans could vote, albeit on a separate voters roll; through that separate roll they would elect three white members of the House of Assembly and four white senators to represent their interests; they would have an elected Natives Representative Council to advise the national parliament; and they would finally be given land; never to amount to more than thirteen per cent of the country’s land space where they could live and develop along their own lines. Edgar Brookes was senator, international scholar, teacher, poet, ordained minister in the Anglican Church, principal of Adams, chairman of the short-lived Liberal Party which professed a universal franchise philosophy and a full place in the sun for “non-whites.” His texts, many still in use, are marvels of scholarship, brilliant style and profound Christian integrity (Brookes, 1927; Brookes, 1934; Brookes, 1974; Brookes, 1964; Brookes, 1966; and Brookes and Macaulay,1958). Following heart illness, Professor Brookes came to Pietermaritzburg in 1951 to head the political science section of a department headed by another remarkable South African, Arthur KeppelJones, who later had a very long and fine career at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. In 1947 he published what was hailed as a

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masterly satire on South African politics, When Smuts Goes: A History of South Africa from 1952-2010, First Published in 2015 (Keppel-Jones, 1947). He foresaw the Nationalist Party winning office in 1952, not, as it so happened, in 1948. But everything else he got right, including the very names of statutes that were to resound with abhorrence around the Western World. Both men taught me as an undergraduate, but 1955 was to be perhaps the most memorable year of my life. That year I did an additional, fourth year, called B.A. Honors, as the only student in the course, with these two men as my sole teachers. I once asked Keppel-Jones if he was a seer, because by then so much of his prediction had been realized. No, he replied, simply a good historian who follows South Africa’s train lines to the terminus. I was to remember that phrase and that notion, especially when later I read Lord Vansittart’s (1943) Lessons of My Life. He too saw himself as a sound student of German history, following the trains to their termini even in 1943, when the book was published. The former British diplomat saw a degree of specificity and methodology that a great many others didn’t or couldn’t see in mid-to-late 1942. Described as an “extreme Germanaphobe,” he nevertheless was one of few intellects to argue that German militarism and nationalism had always had the full support of the German people, a notion that haunted me then, and now. My Honors year was also informed by listening to guest lectures from Hilda and Leo Kuper, both in Durban, and from the university’s vice-chancellor [president], Dr. E.G. Malherbe, former director of military intelligence, an educationist and humanist. He stood in sharp contrast to the University Councillor and College Warden in Maritzburg, Dr. Oswald Black. That man disliked me. As a devoted Nationalist and supporter (or member) of the Broederbond (the secret Afrikaner society, the Band of Brothers), he disliked my Jewishness, my Johannesburg urbaness, my devotion to Edgar Brookes. He did do me one favor: when I applied for a scholarship to do the Honors program, he called me aside and whispered that if I wanted the bursary I would need at least a fifteen per cent better grade than the next candidate: that, he explained, was the Jewish entrance fee to life—another good lesson. I got the marks, and from him, a knowing smile and a pat. On graduation, I returned to Johannesburg in 1956, to teach at the private school where I had matriculated. Still in awe of Brookes, in 1958 I began a two-year Master of Arts degree, my research the-

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sis. The topic was an attempt, successful in the end, to show how the Colored and African franchise provisions in South Africa had always been directly related to land. Thus, whites urged blacks to surrender the “shadow” of the vote for the “substance” of the land (“where they could live and develop along their own lines”), while black leaders contended that the substance of the vote was of infinitely greater value than the chimera of the land. My thesis was later published as Shadow and Substance in South Africa: A Study in Land and Franchise Policies Affecting Africans, 1910-1960 (Tatz, 1962). It was, in effect, a continuation of Brookes’ (1927) History of Native Policy in South Africa, taking his analysis forward from 1910 and stopping at 1960. Teaching senior school was a joy, especially as our private school was able to enroll Chinese students. I taught English literature and language, mercantile law, commerce, geography and history. History was the problem. The syllabus of one of the matriculation examinations allowed for discussion of “the Native Question and Native Policy”—but, for all the enlightenment of the school’s directors, grades were grades and they were not to be jeopardized by antagonizing examiners who admired and/or enshrined “the South African way of life.” For me, the issues seemed, and were, huge. Family strain about attitudes to race; difficulties with good friends who didn’t share my “Green” views; never really a joiner, standing a little distant from friends who, variously, joined the Liberal Party, the Communist Party, the Congress of Democrats, whatever; sharing a staff room with Julian Visser, a former O.B. officer sentenced to death for blowing up a post office in the town of Benoni, then commuted to a life sentence, then pardoned when the Nationalists came to power; reluctant but nevertheless intrusive censorship of what I could teach and from which textbooks. All this, plus that long-standing feeling that somehow I didn’t fit, didn’t belong, couldn’t belong to that milieu, was about to lead to a major decision. In the paranoia and the horrors immediately post-Sharpeville in early 1960—the killing by police, using dum-dum bullets, of sixtynine unarmed Africans and wounding 186 because they refused to carry their “pass books,” the I.D. booklet that only black Africans were required to carry—it seemed to me that there were five choices facing a young political scientist-lawyer-historian. First, identify with mainstream Afrikaner nationalism and ideology. Impossible. Second, identify fully with someone else’s nationalism, in those days

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black nationalism rather than specifically Inkatha or African National Congress or Colored or Indian nationalism or liberation. Not possible. I wasn’t a joiner and I didn’t have the guts, if that’s what it was, to be a Baruch Hirson or a Ben Turok—eminent (and imprisoned) opponents of the apartheid regime—sacrificing marriage and children for a cause not fully my own. Third, put on blinkers and pretend there was nothing amiss around me. Out of the question. Fourth, write critiques of the racial system while still being—if not complicit in it, then at least a companion to it. That, of course, was what I was doing: attempting to teach “the Native Question” as part of the matriculation syllabus, writing my Shadow and Substance while living in a rent-controlled flat in Hillbrow, boasting of being servantless while paying a mere eighteen pounds a month—conveniently ignoring that the rent included a man called Moses, a “boy” aged 60, who cleaned, swept, polished five days a week. It was that kind of rationalized complicity or companionship that led me to the next alternative: to remove myself from that environment altogether. Which is what I did, at the end of 1960. But this sense of companionship to a system of evil even while deploring it, left me with an indelible discomfort about the complicity of others—of all Germans, or some Germans, or specific Germans, of all white South Africans, some white South Africans, or specific white South Africans. A Move to Australia A scholarship to the Australian National University in Canberra led to a three-year doctoral study of Aboriginal administration in northern Australia—an anthropology of white bureaucracy, perhaps, looking at why fine-sounding policy precepts never came to fruition, or wound up in practice being the antithesis of what was intended in theory. I looked at health, nutrition, housing, education, employment, wages and training, and Aborigines being subjected to the criminal law. Some of what I had to say was listened to; several procedures were changed; several laws—including the administration of all “full-blood” Aborigines as legal wards of the state, minors in the eyes of the law—were abolished as a result of this work. Australians, I found, were capable of some pretty deep-seated racist notions and practices, but there was none of that South African messianic ideological imperative which said that their God had given their Dutch Reformed Church adherents a “divine mission” in life to bring blacks to civilization through apartheid.

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My first paid job was at Monash University in Melbourne, in 1964, as a lowly lecturer in politics. That year, through the good offices of several senior professors (in zoology, medicine, economics, law— not politics or history), I persuaded the university to create the Aboriginal Research Centre (now the Koori Research Centre). This was to be an action and applied research unit, one looking at contemporary issues: land rights, ill-health, gross arrest and imprisonment rates, forced removals from reserves, equal pay claims, and the like. I founded it because the federal government was then creating the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, a statutory body in Canberra, with vast staff and resources, to “record the disappearing aspects of Aboriginal life before it is too late.” I had no quibble about language rescue, but I was enraged at the Institute’s total prohibition of any research that “touched on welfare, policy and the contemporary life of Aborigines.” Later, under Dr. Peter Ucko, a London archaeologist, as principal, the Institute came full circle: I became a councillor and executive member of the Institute and, between us, we got the Institute involved in land rights cases before the courts, and, of particular interest to me, in monitoring the social impact of uranium mining on Aborigines in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory (Tatz, 1982). In 1968-1969 Arthur Keppel-Jones arranged sabbatical leave for me at Queen’s University. A grant from Queen’s and the then Bureau of Indian and Inuit Affairs took me across the length and breadth of Canada for five months, visiting Indian communities and looking at proposed changes in the Indian Act. Strange, but not so strange, the Canadian government embargoed my report, even refusing permission to send copies to the thirty-seven Indian chiefs who had been my hosts (Tatz, 1970). As if I didn’t know it, race relations in the colonies was touchy stuff. A year earlier, I had had a long stint of fieldwork in New Zealand, again looking at the usual array of social and political indicators and the extent to which racism underlay the maldistribution of “rights” between the races. The Kiwis were inordinately proud of having “the best race relations in the world.” I had some grimmer news for them, but relative to what I had seen elsewhere, the claim wasn’t too far-fetched. Appointed foundation professor of politics, I moved to the University of New England in 1971. Located in Armidale, northern New South Wales, midway between Brisbane and Sydney, it was then Australia’s only rural university. My inaugural professorial lecture

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compared race politics in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa (Tatz, 1972). Here was a culmination of a decade in Australia, one very much involved in doing what I couldn’t or wasn’t allowed to do in South Africa—namely, influence change in racial oppression. The lecture helped me come to terms with the value of comparison: the search for similarities and differences, the finding of common origins in race politics, the development of what sociologist George Homans would have called “high order” and “low order” propositions. I was also teaching courses, year in, year out, on “Race Politics” and “The Politics of Racism.” I distinctly remember one leaking membrane in Armidale: that here I was, pontificating about racism, its origins, its evolution over centuries, its “scientific” phase in the nineteenth century, and at no time was I talking about Jews and antisemitism as integral to race politics. Slowly I got there, learning and teaching about antisemitism, but always stopping at or about 1941. I remember the tough tissue that stopped me from passing through to 1942 and beyond—those pictures of the naked women at the edge of the pits in pathetic clasp of dignity in their ultimate indignity, the distorted features of those medically experimented on, Primo Levi’s “the drowned ones,” the pajama-striped ones hanging on the wire. By now I knew very well where the relatives from Ponevezh and Shadove had gone, but I couldn’t articulate any of this. Suppression of images was almost a full-time thing. I’d say to the students: you read the 1942 to 1945 materials, and I’ll meet you again at the Nuremberg Trials, and beyond. In 1982, I was appointed to the chair of politics at Macquarie University in Sydney. I taught Aboriginal politics, race politics, South African politics, politics and sport—but still the death factory domain of the Holocaust remained in a too-hard box. In 1985, I went to Israel to play golf for Australia in the Maccabiah Games. I stayed there on sabbatical after the sport and visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s official memorial site and research center on the Holocaust, perhaps a half-dozen times. This was either exorcism or “in-orcism”: whichever, I was having to stare down the barrels of those years that began with mobile gas vans in Chelmno. I met Shalmi Barmore, then director of education at Yad Vashem: we talked, he listened, he urged me to come to Israel in July 1986 to attend their three-week long, very intense seminar on Holocaust and Antisemitism. If ever there was “a best thing I ever did,” it was to attend that course, one that broke my membranes of resistance and allowed everything from

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Pears’ Gazetteer, Belsen footage, Phil Green, the Watchers of the Oxwagon, Christian A versus Jewish A, Edgar Brookes, Oswald Black, black Australia, New Zealand, and Canada to merge into a stream of Holocaust consciousness. Yad Vashem Yad Vashem in 1986—the place where, after so many years of being teacher and preacher, I could become student again, absorbing the lessons of Yehuda Bauer, Emil Fackenheim, Shmuel Ettinger, Yitzhak Arad, George Mosse, Ezra Mendelssohn, David Bankier, Pesach Schindler, Franklin Littell, Shalmi Barmore, and two former South African colleagues, Steve Ascheim and Zeíev Mankowitz, who doubtless had many similar formative forces in their lives. For inquiring South Africans, the Holocaust was a missing part of our lives: there were no refugees after 1936, specifically forbidden by law, and there were none after 1945. Apart from those distant or vicariously felt losses in the Gazetteer, the Holocaust didn’t touch South Africa the way it did, for example, Australians of my generation. I was to return to Jerusalem, to learn and to teach, on six occasions. By the decade’s end, we had organized a winter course at Yad Vashem for Australians and I went as leader of the Down Under group. Yad Vashem was, and is, exhilaration: a strange word, indeed, about the Churban but apt because of the reconstruction of events, actors, times, dates, motives, memos, because of the almost forensic dissection of what Bauer called an historical event occasioned by real people and, hence, explicable. Myths fell away, every preconception a wrong conception. They helped me reach the heart of darkness and the images, the ideas, the ordinary and the extraordinary men and women assail me, daily—no longer as nightmare, but as part of the search for that minuscule pinpoint of malignancy that sets a genocide in motion, and for the surrounding tissue that makes for fertile growth. That search began, in effect, as an Honors student. It started with having to read Churchill’s Second World War memoirs and an episode he described there set off bells about the system in South Africa. At Teheran at the end of 1943, he, Stalin and Roosevelt were dining in the context, inter alia, of a decision on unconditional surrender. What, asked Roosevelt of Stalin, “Should we do when we get to Berlin?” Unhesitatingly, “Uncle Joe” replied: “Fifty thousand must be shot,” referring to Hitler’s SS and military “technicians.” Churchill was enraged, muttering darkly that

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he would rather be taken out into the garden there and then and be shot “than sully my own and my country’s honor by such infamy” (Churchill, 1952, pp. 293-294 and p. 543). What appealed to me was not British justice but Stalin’s (and Roosevelt’s) sharp specificity of who was responsible. Not much later I read Dwight MacDonald’s (1957) collection of essays on the “responsibility of peoples.” The first essay, written pretty much white-hot in March 1945, apportioned blame to the specially-trained SS: “a particular kind of Germans, specialists in torture and murder, whom it would be as erroneous to confuse with the general run of Germans as it would be to confuse the brutality-specialists who form so conspicuous a part of our own local police force with the average run of Americans.” He was very much against a collective German guilt, disparaging “Teutonophobes” like Vansittart and the crime writer, Rex Stout, and contending that if everyone is guilty, then no one is guilty. But, curiously, there followed chapters that involved “comparative trivialization.” (This is the term used when people attempt to flatten the singularity of the Holocaust by referring to other events as if of equal magnitude. For example, Ernst Nolte, the contemporary German historian, asserts that what the Germans did at Auschwitz was no different in genre from what the Americans, or specifically Lieutenant William Calley, did at My Lai in Vietnam. If we allow this “comparative trivilization,” then we acquiesce in the demise of genocide and its meaning: if everything that results in killing more than a handful of people is genocide, then nothing is genocide. There is then no need of the word, the idea, the crime and its analysis.) Among the issues he addressed were: the bombing of Dresden and some brutal stuff about Belgian bastardry among the pygmy peoples of the Congo. In turn, I asked nearly all lecturers at Yad Vashem where they located “responsibility.” Each had a different view, ranging from one-man theory, to forty or fifty ideological “true believers” in the Nazi hierarchy, to MacDonald’s and Stalin’s specially trained 50,000. No one said Germany, or the German people. I also asked many questions about other genocides, particularly the Armenian. No one answered, claiming headache and preoccupation enough with trying to understand the Holocaust. Yehuda Bauer commented, more strongly as each year went by, about the Armenian genocide being “a cousin,” and then a “half-brother,” to the Judeocide. My colleagues in the School of History, Philosophy and Politics didn’t demur when in 1988 I sought approval to introduce a new

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third-year undergraduate course, entitled The Politics of Genocide (POL 340). But one senior professor wanted assurance, in the politest possible way, that the course would have “balance.” I replied that if that meant I would invite an ex-camp commandant to present an alternative point of view, the answer was no, and accordingly the course had no such “balance.” Within forty-eight hours of a national newspaper story that genocide, as such, was to be taught for the first time in Australia, the Turkish Ambassador sought “audience.” After federal police had “cased” my office, His Excellency arrived—to ask, very politely, why he shouldn’t tell the world that Macquarie was running a propaganda outfit, unworthy of a major university. We agreed that he should send an English-speaking academic, who had seen the archives of the Ottoman Empire (said to have been opened to the public), to give a two-hour presentation, for “balance.” The Turks sent a specialist in post-war Turkish foreign policy who hadn’t seen any archives (even those that turned out to be pre-1894 only). The man had two restaurants in San Diego and we exchanged some delightful recipes. The students traduced him, very politely, and his last-ditch defense was that all that couldn’t have been genocide because the word wasn’t invented until 1944 (Lemkin, 1944).2 POL 340 is alive and well a decade later. So is the Turkish Consul General, now complaining to the university administration that the Center for Comparative Genocide Studies, which I direct, has (unfairly, unwisely?) allowed the Greek community to fund a research unit devoted to the genocide of the Pontian Greeks, by the Turks, after World War I. The Center, founded by me at the end of 1993, has its somewhat clumsy title because the senior professor above, the one who wanted “balance,” was a little anxious at the University Council meeting, which has the power to establish Centers, that plain “Genocide Studies” could be a little unbalanced—”You know, a little too, ah, you know...” We know. There is, of course, a very strong case for the visibility of “comparative”: it allows us to develop a model of gradations of genocide, to avoid the obvious trap of flattening all genocides, of allowing scholars to get away with blatant misuse of the term when they seek to highlight a wrong by reaching for the ultimate cannon in the armory. The undergraduate course takes students through both the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide, Yad Vashem style. A major essay on these two events gives them the background, the ingredients and the tools for analysis to allow for examination of one of at least

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thirty other case studies. These range from the fate of the people of Melos in 416 BCE to the Kurds at risk today. In between, the Bahai in Iran, the fate of Gypsies, Russian prisoners of war and the Polish intelligentsia at the hands of the Nazis, the fate of Tasmania’s Aborigines last century and the forcible removal of Aboriginal children this century, Stalin’s efforts with the Ingush and Chechens, and so on. Responsibility and accountability loom large in all this teaching and research. I recall an influential essay by Jack Bemporad, on “The Concept of Man After Auschwitz” (cited in Albert H. Friedlander’s Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader in Holocaust Literature, pp. 480-481, New York, Doubleday). He quotes Eric Kahler’s The Tower and the Abyss, in which Kahler “explains” the actions of the Elite Guards who first played with children outside the church at Oradour-sur-Glane, then burned them alive, as the “consummate schizophrenia.” It always strikes me that psychiatry seeks not so much to explain as to absolve the guilty on grounds such as these. The search for these difficult and very elusive concepts doubtless stems from one’s own socialization, from one’s own sense of guilt or “guilt” about living as companion yet antagonist, or antagonist yet companion, of racially oppressive systems, from continuing rage at the manner in which corporate men and women cocoon themselves against accountability for what they do. Impunity in genocide, on the eve of the establishment of a permanent international war crimes tribunal, remains a passion: to turn Dwight MacDonald around a little, if every perpetrator gets away with genocide, more will get away with it. We live in an age where retributive justice is pronounced as if it was something unclean. I insist on its place and value. Which is why I find myself so angry about the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Admittedly, caught in a cleft stuck between those who sought a Nuremberg type trial and those who wanted nothing, this is, at best, a reasonable compromise. But the spectacle of men admitting to gross murder as “confession” before the Archbishop and being given “absolution” on the grounds that it was all politically motivated (“those infants could have grown into terrorists”) doesn’t sit well. It is a very Christian notion: guilt, admission, absolution, expiation and, never forget, a prohibition on any criminal or civil action against the confessed perpetrator by family of the deceased! Not my concept of justice, any kind of justice. But at least we now know who some of the perpetrators are. [South Af-

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rica was never a genocidal society in our scholarly sense: murderous, torturing, disrespectful of life, oppressive, repressive, despotic, cruel, a landscape of death, in the phrase of Afrikaner poet Breyten Breytenbach—but not genocidal.] Here, in Australia, we have a steadfast refusal to examine any of the activity that resulted in perhaps 100,000 children being forcibly removed from their natural parents, to assimilate them because they were thought to have sufficient “white blood” in them to make them salvageable for Christendom and civilization. What we did by way of “genograms” and “color-grading” was supposedly “for their own good” (Beresford and Omaji, 1998, pp. 29-60; Tatz, 1998). Genocide Studies Macquarie University senior students have been heavily engaged in debate about the definition of genocide. In the end, we urge students to use the only legally valid instrument, namely, Article II of the international convention on genocide. New or redefinitions by lawyers and social scientists are of interest, and value, but our emphasis on accountability leads us to a more forensic approach. However, for my own work in Aboriginal affairs, and especially in the matter of the “stolen generations” of children, I have come to value, and use, the ideas asserted by Christian Pross (1994) in Cleansing the Fatherland (pp. 1-17). While disclaiming the inability of the book to “develop new definitions of the Nazi program and the Nazi perpetrator,” Pross summarizes nineteenth-century race theory in a way that I would want to define genocide, namely, as ideological tools or ideological justification for recourse to biological solutions to social or political problems. On the one hand, we have the terse legal Article II(e) “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”—which is what Australia did, until the 1980s, with the intention (irrespective of how well or badly motivated) of causing these children to cease being Aboriginal. On the other, the Aly-ChroustPross approach encourages a delving into the whole ragbag of racial hygiene, the entire panoply of “scientific” thought about race hierarchy as a justification for resorting to, variously, elimination or assimilation, to resolve the perceived “problem.” My students tend to express impatience with my friend Israel Charny. He sees genocide, in the generic sense, as the “mass killing of substantial numbers of human beings, when not in the course of military action...under conditions of the essential defenselessness and helplessness of the vic-

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tims” (Charny, 1994, pp. 75-94). They understand his concerns about the victimness of essentially “defenseless and helpless” people, but he insists on mass killing of substantial numbers—which applies well to Australia’s nineteenth-century private settlers’ killing of Aborigines but not to the “sophisticated” state removal of children. Many refuse to share his vision that the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor was “genocide resulting from ecological destruction and abuse.” More important to us than wording is the emergence, from comparative study, of the ingredients and/or prerequisites of genocide. Yehuda Bauer (in his annual lectures at Yad Vashem) and Richard Dekmejian (1982) have listed the essentials to be found in an analysis of the two “big” twentieth-century cases. But, as is so often the case, the analysis relates to Europe. So when they talk about ancient hatreds or ideological imperatives, war settings, brutal dictatorships, organizational specificity, bureaucratic compliancy and efficiency, and technological capability, (Dekmejian, 1982, pp. 8596) one must ask whether these factors or features are universal. Do they occur in Rwanda, Burundi or Bangladesh? The comparative approach, in teaching and research, is not simply a need to appease other victim groups through an anthology of tolerance (or intolerance). At Yad Vashem it is quite acceptable to assert the uniqueness of the Holocaust—audiences there don’t demur. Sydney is something else. In an essentially non-Jewish milieu, one has to demonstrate the singularity of that event—and, in the end, having traversed an array of ghastly case studies, the students know pretty well what the gradations of genocide are and how those differentials can be articulated. Melbourne University and Edith Cowan University in Perth have now adopted our approach. Our Center’s work focuses on the history of antisemitism, including the centuries-long saga of blood libels; Nazi war crimes trials, including analysis of the materials used in the three Australian cases this decade; on killing units in Lithuania; the treatment of the Romani peoples by the Nazis; appropriation of the Holocaust (particularly by Polish politicians and officials who seek to equate the death of three million Poles with the six million Jews), and the emergence of fraudulent claims about Australian involvement as victims3 ; the great similarities between the Armenian and Jewish genocides; the fate of the Pontian Greeks, especially in Smyrna in 1923; the issue of defining East Timor as genocide or not; the “autogenocide” in Cambodia; and, not least, genocide in Australia during the past two centuries.

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My own research has been on genocide and the politics of memory. In a long essay of that title, my concern is to show that the assassins of memory are not confined to Holocaust or Turkish denialists (Tatz, 1997). In Australia, what appears as liberal, democratic humanism is often a sophisticated form of racism. We have a conservative federal government that insists on a “level playing field” philosophy. It argues that there can be no more rights for one group over the mainstream (One Australia), that concentration on the Aboriginal past and present is a “black armband view of history” that should be eradicated (in the press and in school texts); and that rights accorded Aborigines by the High Court for past depredations and dispossessions should be legislated against—in the name of equality for all. In a real sense, that essay is the culmination of my thinking and writing about race, racism, antisemitism, and genocide. It is also built on a long essay entitled “Confronting the Holocaust,” which is really a series of thirty-three mini-essays on issues that arose, and remain, for me during my years at Yad Vashem (Tatz, 1991). It is essentially an exercise in moral philosophy, education, and religion. My most recent book, Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport, is a sports book that isn’t a sports book (Tatz, 1995). It is the story of the Aboriginal experience, at least since the 1830s, as told through the metaphor of sport. That experience, in the last century, was one of physical genocide: various chapters examine how impossible it was, with rare exceptions, for Aborigines to play cricket, run professionally, box, row and engage in any of the football codes during the slaughter. Fascinating, indeed, to follow the exploits of mission cricket teams near Brisbane as the colony of Queensland was forced to pass the world’s first statute to protect a human species from genocide, the Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act in 1897. Has there been a consistent focus in my writing and teaching these past ten or twelve years? Yes, a huge canvas of genocide as the ultimate form of racism. In Australia, at present, the rate of Aboriginal youth suicide is probably the highest on the planet. My present research is towards a model of explanation and alleviation. Both missions impossible, but there is no doubt about the way the Holocaust and genocide echoes in this fieldwork. Many of the suicides are either removed children, or descendants of those forcibly removed. The themes of destruction of culture and language, the “relocations” of people in wholesale numbers, the confinement to reserves and mission stations, the

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physical and economic abuse, the destruction of religious sites of significance, the solace in alcohol: all resonate here, at century’s end. There is now an international organization of genocide scholars (Association of Genocide Scholars), of which I am a member. There is also a regular “Lessons and Legacies” seminar in the United States, focusing essentially on the Holocaust. There have been four “Lessons and Legacies” seminars in the United States to date. The one I attended was held at the University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana, in November 1996. As a sometime, part-time sports historian, the image of two teams playing in different leagues comes to mind. Why don’t the major Holocaust historians—Bauer, Hilberg, Cesarani, Bankier, et al—attend the genocide scholars meetings? And why do so few of the latter attend Holocaust seminars? I’m not suggesting schism, or anything remotely like it. But it does seem to me that several genocide scholars seem determined to pursue their case studies without reference to or reliance on the Holocaust. I have heard at least one scholar who, in arguing for Gypsy attention, attack not just the Holocaust scholars but seemingly the Holocaust itself. I do not name names. My comment is but an observation while making a point and is not meant to launch an academic debate or attack. The Holocaust overwhelms: its literature, resources, scholars, organizations, museums, research centers dwarf all else. There are, of course, explanations for all this—but it is hardly helpful to denigrate that vast reservoir in order to find a place for one’s own, different area of interest. Zygmunt Bauman said that the Holocaust is not necessarily the model of what must never happen again but perhaps more the textbook for anyone bent on wreaking a genocide. For better, and for worse, the Holocaust must overlay, even suffuse, all other genocide studies—because it is the most dissected, x-rayed, meticulously researched, thought about and written about genocide in history. What remains as an ambition is to introduce genocide studies into the high school and university curriculum. For schools, I don’t believe anyone here will accept a new subject called genocide studies. But it is probable that education authorities will sanction a movable module that can be slotted, as appropriate, into everything from English literature, biology, geography, history, religious studies, society and culture to Aboriginal Studies. As to tertiary level, my hope

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is that one day professional courses will allow at least one or two lectures on how their professions—medicine, psychiatry in particular, nursing, law, biology, chemistry, pharmacology, architecture, engineering, music, art—have behaved, or been allowed to behave, in the world of genocide. Most notable is the achievement of something that seemed unlikely at our Center’s inception, namely, that a southern hemisphere university could make a major contribution to genocide studies, given the locus of European, African, and Asian killing fields and the focus of American university and museum money and activity. That the Center is sought after as a clearing house, a place of advice, information, research, teaching models, and a vehicle of publication astounds us: either there is a dearth of centers of excellence, or this Center has done it well—or both. There are few academic, intellectual, and emotional obstacles to our work. Yet there is a major obstacle—money. Australia has no culture of major academic endowment, at least not in humanities and social sciences, no ethos of “alma materness,” no visionaries who see the need of continuing research and education about genocide. People understand commemorations, shrines, memorials of a physical nature: but in the more enduring sense of what really matters—study, analysis, diagnosis, prognosis, even prevention—people in this “lucky country” don’t invest in death. Reflection Looking back, I have to say that the journey to genocide was a slow one, initially—some forty years from the Belsen newsreels to profound enlightenment in Jerusalem. It was also, initially, an essentially Jewish journey, pivoting on the Holocaust while teaching about other dimensions of race relations almost as if in a separate universe. The conceptual wholeness, the bringing together of tributaries that are very much part of the essential river, has enhanced me and, I believe, my students. Despite the relative “speed” of my interests over the past thirteen years, it dawns that each new set of discoveries, treatments, and approaches produces yet another set. One begins with (attempted) comprehension of the motives, intent, scale, implementation, and operation of the Holocaust. To understand, it is necessary to look at similar phenomena, and so one attempts an unravelling of the Armenian, Pontian Greek, Rwandan, Burundian, and Aboriginal experiences. All cases produce their particular brand

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of denialism, and the need to find appropriate methods for combating it. All cases produce a struggle for memory, what Czech novelist Milan Kundera calls “the bloody years” which “have turned into mere words, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one.” In most instances, memory—however grim—is a social cement that enables a people to cohere: it is part of what I call both their inside and their outside history. Memory is also their internal narrative, their chronology in time, of what befell them. In that important sense, memory is what they need, or want, to commemorate, revere, pass on. With denial, or negation, or disparagement of that memory there comes a need, even a demand, for apology. “Apologetics,” the latest sub-field of genocide, is significant. For perpetrators, or their descendants, it can be “a relatively low-level piece of Western manners and morals” (Minogue, 1998, pp. 11-20). The Vatican has apologized for its “tepid” response during the Holocaust, East Germany said “sorry” to the Jews minutes before reunification and Poland followed suit. “One cannot dwell constantly on memories and resentments,” intoned Francois Mitterand in 1994, as he was haunted by his labors for Vichy and by his friendship with the infamous secretary-general of the Vichy Police, Rene Bousquet. Even so, Mitterand found the flowers to half-atone for the deportation of so much of French Jewry. The sincerity, depth of feeling, or the tenor of what Minogue (1998) calls “a curious kind of moral sentiment among white Europeans, one that demands purging by apology” (p. 11) is not important. Apology is not always about a slide from moral considerations into political and economic demands for reparation. For the victim groups, it is about acknowledgment that something happened. For the perpetrator societies, it is about a regret, however passing, that we are the sort of people we did not wish to be at those points in time. Notes 1. 2.

3.

Churban, or Shoah, are the Hebrew words for the Destruction [of European Jewry]. In his Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Raphael Lemkin defined genocide as the systematic attempt to destroy a national, racial, or religious group by attacks on physical, biological, economic, religious, and cultural life. Eleven years earlier, at the International Conference on the Unification of Criminal Law, held in Madrid in 1933, he sought a declaration that the destruction of racial, religious, or social collectivities was “a crime of barbarity.” For example, Donald Watt, an Australian soldier in World War II, who published his memoir, Stoker: The Story of an Australian Soldier Who Survived AuschwitzBirkenau (Sydney: Simon and Schuster, 1996), claimed, inter alia, that he was a

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stoker of furnaces. Acclaimed by many, the book is nevertheless an “appropriation,” perhaps a misappropriation, albeit a well-intentioned one. Darren O’Brien has demonstrated that he simply could not have been where he was, doing what he claimed to be doing—see his “Donald Watt’s “Stoker: The Perils of Testimony,” Newsletter, Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University, March-April 1997, 3(3):pp. 4-9.

References Baron, Alexander (1980). “Jewish Preoccupations,” pp. 66-72. In Jacob Sonntag (Ed.) Jewish Perspectives: 25 Years of Jewish Writing, a Jewish Quarterly Omnibus. London: Secker & Warburg. Beresford, Quentin and Omaji, Paul (1998). Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations. Fremantle, Western Australia: Fremantle Arts Centre Press. (See, Chapter 1, “Fear of the Half-Caste,” pp. 29-60.) Brookes, Edgar H. (1964). The City of God and the City of Man in Africa. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Brookes, Edgar H., and Macaulay, J.B. (1958). Civil Liberty in South Africa. Cape Town: Oxford University Press. Brookes, Edgar H. (1934). The Colour Problems of South Africa. Lovedale, Cape Province: Lovedale Press. Brookes, Edgar H. (1966). Freedom, Faith and the Twenty-First Century. Toronto: Ryerson Press. Brookes, Edgar H. (1927). The History of Native Policy in South Africa from 1830 to the Present Day. Pretoria: J. L. van Schaik Ltd. Brookes, Edgar H. (1974). White Rule in South Africa 1830 -1910. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. (Note: Reprint of The History of Native Policy in South Africa from 1830 to the Present Day, with an introduction explaining his earlier years as a segregationist but relating his recantation from any form of separateness in 1927.) Charny, Israel W. (1994). “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide,” pp. 75-94. In George Andreopoulos (Ed.) Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Churchill, Winston (1952). The Second World War, Volume V, Closing the Ring. London: The Reprint Society. Dekmejian, R. Hrair (1982). “Determinants of Genocide: Armenians and Jews as Case Studies,” pp. 85-96. In Richard Hovannisian (Ed.) The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers. Friedlander, Albert H. (Ed.) (1968). Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader in Holocaust Literature. New York, Doubleday. Furlong, Patrick J. (1991). Between Crown and Swastika: The Impact of the Radical Right on the Afrikaner Nationalist Movement in the Fascist Era. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press. (Note: This is an excellent book, inter alia, on the opposition to South Africa’s entry into the Second World War and the virulent antisemitism of Afrikaner nationalism and the right wing movements.) Gotz, Aly; Chroust, Peter; and Pross, Christian (1994). Cleansing the Fatherland: Nazi Medicine and Racial Hygiene. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Keppel-Jones, Arthur (1947). When Smuts Goes: A History of South Africa from 19522010, First Published in 2015. Pietermaritzburg: Shuter & Shooter. Lemkin, Raphael (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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MacDonald, Dwight (1957). The Responsibility of Peoples and Other Essays in Political Criticism. London: Victor Gollancz. Minogue, Kenneth (1998). “Aborigines and Australian Apologetics.” Quadrant, September, pp. 11-20. Tatz, Colin (1982). Aborigines and Uranium & Other Essays. Melbourne: Heinemann Educational. Tatz, Colin (1991). “Confronted by the Holocaust.” Australian Journal of Jewish Studies, 5(2):6-34. Tatz, Colin (1970). Consulting Indians, a Review of the Canadian Government’s Consultation with Indians on Proposed Changes in Policy and Legislation, 1968-1969. Submitted to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Tatz, Colin (1972). Four Kinds of Dominion: Comparative Race Politics in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Armidale: University of New England. Tatz, Colin (1998). “Genocide in Australia.” Discussion Paper No. X. Canberra: Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Tatz, Colin (1997). “Genocide and the Politics of Memory.” Genocide Perspectives I: Essays in Comparative Genocide. Sydney: Centre for Comparative Genocide Studies, Macquarie University. Tatz, Colin (1995). Obstacle Race: Aborigines in Sport. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Tatz, Colin (1962). Shadow and Substance in South Africa: A Study in Land and Franchise Policies Affecting Africans, 1910-1960. Pietermaritzburg: Natal University Press. Vansittart, Lord (1943). Lessons of My Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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13 From Social Action to Social Theory and Back: Paths and Circles Helen Fein The Prologue: Columbia, India, and Israel My professional career was renewed in mid-life after a ten-year hiatus following receipt of my master’s degree in sociology from Brooklyn College in 1958. I returned to graduate school in sociology at Columbia University in the fall of 1968, a tense and tangled time and place, rife with controversy. In the spring, the building housing the sociology department had been occupied by students in a protest partially instigated by the anti-Vietnam War movement; in the fall, the same students challenged departmental requirements. At the time, my life was both enriched and complicated by having two young children, by activity in a local peace movement against the Vietnam war, and by commuting eighty miles from New Paltz, New York to New York City to attend Columbia. My dissatisfaction with my life prior to this decision was both personal and political. I felt that my career—I had been working part-time for three years as a teacher and later as an interviewer—and role as a political activist was inadequate and unintegrated. Obtaining professional tools for analysis and legitimation and clarifying political problems were key factors in pulling me back to the university. In 1968, I wanted to sketch a theory of nonviolence not based on pacifist assumptions—which could unify only true believers—and to evaluate (or show) its effectiveness. I was opposed to the New Left’s negative identification with “Amerika,” their ideali219

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zation of violence and arrogant and disruptive tactics that, it seemed to me, alienated the American people and prolonged the war. Later, I found out that Gene Sharp (who appears later in this tale) had been working on this for two decades. Within a year at Columbia, I had gone from studying nonviolence to focusing on collective violence. In my first paper (in political sociology) exploring theories and research on nonviolence, I found that Gandhi’s mobilizations had regularly led to collective violence, most often between Hindus and Muslims. I followed up the original sources cited in the footnotes by Joan Bondurant (1958) in Conquest of Violence on the Amritsar massacre of 1919—all of which were in the Columbia University Library—and found myself in a historical and theoretical gold mine. For my dissertation (fortunately planned and half-written when my advisor was out of the country), I devised a theory and a method to test its assumptions, and wrote a narrative placing these events in historical context and also in the context of riots and their interpretation—a critical question on the sociological agenda in the late 1960s and 1970s. The massacre in 1919 at Jallianwala Bagh (Amritsar, Punjab), ordered by General Dyer against a crowd of seated Indians convened at an illegally-held protest meeting—the order probably unknown to the participants—is considered by A. J. P. Taylor (1965) in English History 1914-1945 to be “the worst bloodshed since the Mutiny, and the decisive moment when Indians were alienated from British rule” (p. 152). How and why did it happen? How was it understood at the time? What were the differences between the members of Parliament who defended General Dyer and those who favored upholding the sanction against him and condemned the massacre? With the aid of Emile Durkheim (extrapolating from his theory of solidarity in The Division of Labour (1933 [1894]) and content-analysis, I devised and tested a theory of how ethnoclass stratification and collective violence are related. The guiding question was: how do members of a collectivity commit and justify acts that would be deemed crimes if committed against members of their collectivity? My key deductions were that “13. Offenses against persons outside the universe of obligation will not be socially recognized and labeled as crime....[and that] 19. Collective violence is an offense against a class whose members are outside the universe of obligation” (Fein 1977, pp. 18-19). The concept of “the universe of obligation” (Fein 1979, p. 4), best known to

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readers of my book, Accounting for Genocide, is derived from this work. A few days after filing my dissertation in 1971 (to my classmates and to myself at that time, my greatest achievement was getting out of Columbia with a degree in three years despite the department’s notorious unhelpfulness), I flew to India with my family. My husband had been offered a Fulbright appointment in American literature at the University of Madras. After a few months of cultureshock—intense perceptions of odors, poverty, heat, class, color— and the challenge of resettlement, I discovered to my dismay that I could not get a job in Madras, although I had been told by a Fulbright officer that I could get a position at any institution once I got there. Once there, the officer informed me that I was ineligible for employment because I had not been admitted on a work visa. So I settled down to do independent research on nonviolence and the Indian independence movement. In the course of this sojourn, I experienced a renewed identification as a Jew, discovering for myself the link between Judaism and human equality as contrasted to Hinduism and the legitimation of gross inequality. Yet this was a diffuse feeling, a self-discovery in reaction to discerning the likenesses and differences among all kinds of Others, including some other Americans there, Europeans, and Indians, whose culture and assumptions also intrigued me. The Holocaust seeped through in several ways. In one library, in the course of researching British reaction to the suppressed Indian revolt of 1942 in The Times (London), I noted on p. 6 a two-inch story relating that 600,000 Jews had been murdered in Poland. So that’s the way it was, I thought: out-of-the way, taken for granted, just one of those things. During a social evening in the garden of the estate of the former Anglican Bishop of Madras, now lived in by Indian Jewish friends, I met Lydia Aron, an Israeli sociologist whose husband was acting as a temporary and unofficial Israeli representative to India—India did not recognize Israel at the time. We began talking of many things—ashrams, Vietnam, Israel, India, and Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, published in 1963. Although an admirer of Arendt, I believed then (and later proved in Accounting for Genocide, Chapter 5) that Arendt’s thesis was incorrect. Someone should do a study, I said, on what accounts for variations in the survival of Jews in different countries during the Holocaust. She suggested that

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I contact Yehuda Bauer, then head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at Hebrew University. My availability to do this study was reinforced by finding myself unemployed when I returned to New Paltz in 1972—an expected appointment promised in 1971 did not work out. This was an abrupt and jarring experience, for I had never been unemployed before for more than two months and expected to have an ordinary career as a college teacher. Instead, I taught briefly in an experimental program located at State University of New York at New Paltz, and mentored a young man studying the Holocaust whose eyes were opened to the history of the Jews as an oppressed people. This opened my eyes also to the rewards and difficulties of a study for which my training had not prepared me. Kai Ericson observed in 1989, reviewing a new Handbook of Sociology that readers “would find nothing at all in the pages of the Handbook about happenings that the rest of the world called ‘historic,’ events that helped shape the character of our age. Nothing about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Holocaust, Vietnam, Bhopal and Chernobyl. That should not surprise them, considering how deeply American sociology has invested in the study of the ‘general’ as opposed to the study of the ‘particular’.... (see Preface in Genocide: A Sociological Perspective [1993d, p. vii]). Accounting for Genocide and the Decade After After rounds of correspondence with Yehuda Bauer, head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry, and an application in 1973 for a teaching job at City College directed to Irving Greenberg (then chairman of the department of Jewish Studies there), I met with both men for the first time in 1973. Yehuda Bauer indicated his confidence that I would fulfill the proposed project but predicted that it would take four years, rather than the two I estimated. Of course, he was right. Professor Greenberg offered me a modest fellowship at the Department to pursue a project initially called “The Calculus of Genocide...” Greenberg and Elie Wiesel (then a member of the department) were responsible for the support of this project for two years. During that time, its intellectual range, depth, and methods expanded. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust first set out to explain why the percent of Jews who became victims in states occupied by or allied to Nazi Germany varied so greatly—the range was from under one

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percent to over 99 percent—testing three competing hypotheses. In the course of its exposition, it considered both an accounting of underlying causes and an accounting of moral responsibility and the effects of state and church leadership (among German-occupied and allied countries), of the Allies, of dominant churches, and of Jewish leadership or Judenräte. My aims also expanded to consider the underlying causes of twentieth-century ideological genocide. The book included a comparison with the Armenian genocide, a proposed theoretical and historically grounded explanation, and was also noted for the recognition of the Gypsies as victims of genocide (Chapter 1). What seemed straightforward to me was radical to my colleagues. At the First International Scholars’ Conference on the Holocaust in 1975, convened by Yehuda Bauer at the Biltmore Hotel in New York, the dominant position was that the Holocaust was unique, noncomparable and to some, non-explicable as a historical event— viewed as a mystifying or transcendent event. Both the theory and methods I started with were seen as a new development. Although Accounting for Genocide has often been viewed as innovative because of its use of quantitative methods, I used a range of methods: comparative historical, statistical, and interpretive; retelling the experience of victims from first-person documents in Part 2. Part 2 complemented the macrosociological approach of Part 1 and enabled people to understand the rationality of the victims’ behavior in three communities of high victimization. This was in contrast to previous idealized depictions of the victims as “heroes and martyrs”—and brought in background from Jewish historical experience, disaster research, and social psychology. Accounting for Genocide was generally well-received, and the unanimous winner of the Sorokin Award of the American Sociological Association in 1979 “for a brilliantly original interpretation of a complex and singular historical process, that has until now defied comprehensive social analysis.” Most reviews (by historians, sociologists, psychologists, survivors and others) were excellent or good. The period after the publication of Accounting for Genocide was bleak. The academic job-market had declined and I had little teaching experience as I had been almost completely occupied with research since 1972. But new causes and commitment beckoned.

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In 1979, I accepted a year’s appointment as director of the Indochinese Refugee Sponsorship Development Project of the Dutchess Interfaith Council (DIC). The invitation to apply was sparked by an interview I had given to a local newspaper, comparing the world’s reactions to the “boat people” to its response to Jewish refugees in 1938. At the same time as I worked in Dutchess County, I organized an interfaith sponsorship in New Paltz and became president of New Paltz Citizens Concerned About Indochinese Refugees (CAIR). Both of these were very fulfilling experiences. I left the DIC post (the grant ended) with a send-off (celebration, inscribed plaque, and vase) by the local Vietnamese community who appreciated the fact that I had instigated them to organize themselves, rather than continuing the Council’s practice of organizing the annual Tet (New Year) celebration for the refugees. Focusing on Genocide, Collective Violence and Collective Altruism after the Holocaust From 1977 (when I handed in the manuscript for Accounting for Genocide) onward, I was increasingly preoccupied with genocide after the Holocaust, and worked by assessing cases (based on the experience of staffers in human rights groups primarily) and world response. Little had changed with regard to the complicity of the great powers in overlooking genocide—found in every instance. This increased both my impatience and awareness this was going to be a long-term commitment, for I was tired of accounting for genocide; I wanted to stop it. Besides accounting for why people cooperate in destroying others, we need to understand why people cooperate in helping others. Unemployment spurred me to consider my experience with refugee sponsors. Intending to write a brief monograph for a scholarly contest sponsored by the American Sociological Association, I asked myself what led people to help others to whom they had no role obligations. This led to a study based on participant-observation and interviews with sponsorship committee leaders, which began by comparing responses to the Indochinese refugee crisis of 1978 to the Jewish refugee crisis of 1938 and developed a theory of collective altruism (Fein 1987a). In 1983-84, I was invited to spend a year as a guest professor at West Berlin’s Technical University Institute for Research in

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Antisemitism and this led to my book (part of a series sponsored by the Institute), The Persisting Question: Social Contexts and Sociological Perspectives on Modern Antisemitism (Fein 1987b). My book on refugee sponsorship, Congregational Sponsors of Indochinese Refugees in the United States, 1979-1981 (Fein 1987a) and The Persisting Question (Fein 1987b) came out of differing opportunities which enabled me to refine my vision of my vocation as a sociologist, a vision which transcends methods used. The central question that concerns me is: what accounts for collective altruism and collective violence? I view the sociological imagination as a lens to focus on how both collective good and collective evil can arise from social organization. Although the late 1960s was a period of disputation about theory and objectives in sociology, this question was not addressed in any historical context. But many sociologists affirmed (then and earlier) that we were responsible for the social aims and uses of our craft. Ideas, Theory, and Definitions To begin with, I did not have a definition of genocide; I was working inductively as a historical sociologist from well-documented cases—the Final Solution and other Nazi genocides, and the genocide of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. My method has been to derive grounded theory both from individual cases and from the sociological tradition, testing it further by probing how well it explains particular cases, drawing on a range of methods. The earliest theory I derived in Accounting for Genocide to explain the German and Ottoman genocides was that “modern premeditated genocide is a rational function of the choice by a ruling elite of a myth or ‘political formula’ (as Mosca [1939, 70-72] put it) legitimating the existence of the state as the vehicle for the destiny of the dominant group, a group whose members share an underlying likeness from which the victim is excluded by definition” (Fein 1979, 8). At the same time, I recognized there were different types of genocides and a variety of motives triggering recent genocides (as in Pakistan 1971, Burundi 1972, Paraguay 1976), and observed that “What is common to all these types is that the victims were previously excluded from the universe of obligation of the dominant group and stigmatized” (Fein 1979, p. 7). It is evident that I drew on many sociological theorists: Durkheim (previously discussed), Weber, Simmel, and favored explanation on the level of social organization rather than

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collective social psychology, stressing the rational and often malign choices of leaders, the problems of the state, political opportunities, national myths, and collective definitions of the Other. Later, I elaborated this and sketched a grounded theory of genocide for a plenary talk at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv in 1982: Genocide is the calculated murder of a segment or all of a group defined outside of the universe of obligation of the perpetrator by a government, elite, staff or crowd representing the perpetrator in response to a crisis or opportunity perceived to be caused by or impeded by the victims... Crises and opportunities may be a result of war, challenges to the structure of domination, the threat of internal breakdown or social revolution and economic development (Fein, 1984, pp. 4-5).

This theory sketch—and simplified and expanded versions thereof—has been fruitful in explanations of genocide in Afghanistan, Indonesia, Kampuchea, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, and a more comprehensive examination of genocides from 1948 to 1988 (Fein 1993a, b, and c; 1994a). My later analyses stressed both underlying problems of solidarity and legitimacy and the role of patrons whose tolerance of genocide reassured the perpetrators that they could get away with murder. While more theoretical, such analysis implied practical potential checks. The analysis of genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia drew on this theory, was confirmed by area experts, and led to an ISG Working Paper, The Prevention of Genocide (Fein, 1994a), distributed to members of Congress by the Congressional Human Rights Caucus. In 1982, I illustrated the range of types of genocides by fictive depictions of ideal-types in Amerinda, Nutopia, Amerindustan, Traverstia, Amazia/Zenomia, Altenuland/Bianu, Frankenriven, and the Iron Empire (Fein, 1984). My decision to cast ideal types (and potential cases) as fictive templates—a good analytic and heuristic tool—was in part a response to a few angry denunciations of a paper I gave, “Predict and Dread,” at an international invitational conference on genocide in La Napoule, France in 1980. In that paper, I suggested (while exploring futurist scenarios in a number of situations) that preconditions for genocide by Israelis as well as by Palestinians existed in hypothetical situations. Two Israeli critics, who angrily attacked my methods and conclusions, evoked a vigorous defense of my competence and right to speak by other conferees,

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including Israeli conferees who were prominent in research on genocide. Since my aim from 1979 to the present was to find a way to anticipate and prevent genocide, the problem of definition and gaps in the United Nations Genocide Convention did not trouble me as much as the inability of the victims to invoke the Convention: only states could invoke it and the primary responsibility to execute it was granted to the signatories—including states which were the perpetrators. I came to agree with two statements made at the conference convened by the Institute for the Study of Genocide in 1989: “Genocide Watch: How to Detect and Deter Genocide” (Fein, 1992). Mort Winston, a philosopher and later chair of the board of the Amnesty International US section, stressed that genocide was inherently a “fuzzy concept”—disputes persist about when an individual’s life and death starts and ends, let alone the nature of a group and its demise. David Hawk, then chair of the Cambodian Documentation Commission, asserted that the Convention definition was adequate; one could not get a better definition by putting a roomful of social scientists together. After being in at least a dozen roomfuls of social scientists in the past twenty years, I agree. It was more important to begin to enforce the Convention than to argue about its shortcomings. In response to an invitation to a panel of the International Studies Association in 1988, I first suggested a definition in a paper, moved by my colleagues’ debates and misinterpretations of my writings to clarify my position. Because I never rewrote that paper and submitted it for publication, it was not published. An invitation to do a review article on genocide from the International Sociological Association for its journal, Current Sociology (Spring 1990 issue), prompted me to address the controversy publicly and propose a sociological definition: “Genocide is sustained purposeful action by a perpetrator to physically destroy a collectivity directly or indirectly, through interdiction of the biological and social reproduction of group members, sustained regardless of the surrender or lack of threat offered by the victim” (Fein, 1993d, p. 24). I showed how this embraced diverse groups and conformed to the more explicit terms of the convention. I have consistently defined genocide as a concept of the middle-range—it does not encompass all state killings—both distinguishing it from and relating it to war crimes and gross violations of human rights (Fein, 1994b). However, whenever possible,

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especially when discussing contemporary cases, I refer to the terms of the UN Genocide Convention. To my surprise, this review, “Genocide: A Sociological Perspective,” drew great interest from colleagues who wrote to the copyright holder asking for it to be reprinted as a book so they could use it in classes, and it was republished (Fein, 1993d). It also evoked the interest of PIOOM (an acronym in Dutch for a Leiden-based research institute for an “Interdisciplinary Program of Research on Root Causes of Human Rights Violations”) which gave it its first international award in 1991. Peter Baehr, chairman of the PIOOM Foundation, observed: “Helen Fein aims for, and succeeds in, dispassionate analysis of the phenomenon of genocide. Yet, paradoxically, the book is also filled with empathy and passion—as the author calls it, ‘a passion to understand.’ It is a penetrating, intelligent and highly original contribution that should be read by all who seek to comprehend the sources of genocide.” Since 1990, I have been involved with two lines of research— genocide and human rights (later discussed). The former involves (a) analyses of underlying conditions in which genocides are most likely; (b) showing how we can detect genocides in progress through use of a paradigm (Fein, 1993c); (c) analyzing genocides in the 1990s, tracing how they could have been prevented (Fein, 1994a); and (d) showing how we can, if we have the will, prevent genocide and that it is in our national interest to do so (Fein, 1999a). Several appointments described below helped to spread interest in genocide beyond the handful of scholars focussing on genocide in the 1980s. Appointments and Activities 1987-1998 In 1987, I was appointed research director and then executive director of the Institute for the Study of Genocide (ISG), an independent not-for-profit educational organization established at the John Jay College for Criminal Justice by faculty members five years earlier with the assistance of Simon Wiesenthal. Unfortunately, it had neither obtained support from the City University (or another source of funding) nor devised an agenda. Inviting a largely new board, I opened the Institute out to draw people in from diverse backgrounds outside the City University and initiated an educational program linking genocide with the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, and contemporary events, drawing in members of human rights groups and others besides academics.

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In 1988, I was invited to give a seminar at the Program for Nonviolent Sanctions (PNS) (at Harvard University’s Center for International Affairs) by Gene Sharp, whose work on nonviolence I had read avidly while a student at Columbia in 1968. His suggestion led me to apply for and be awarded a Social Science Research Council MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in the Program in International Peace and Security. My project involved the linkage between war and genocide and necessitated residence in PNS at Harvard (198991). This led to a series of papers (Fein, 1993a, 1993b, 1993c). Between 1991 and the present, I have had different affiliations with Harvard University: the Human Rights Program of Harvard Law School (1991-1993), the Francois-Xavier Bagnound Institute for Health and Human Rights (1994-1997), and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs of the Kennedy School of Government (1997-present). This has enabled me to appreciate the professional paradigms and concerns of different fields and to understand the conventional wisdom (or realpolitik) taken for granted in international studies: i.e., the national interest does not include preventing genocide or justify humanitarian intervention—a view beginning to be challenged. During the latter part of the 1980s, I expanded my agenda to include scrutiny of all the violations preceding genocide that might offer clues to its later occurence. Lives at Risk (Fein, 1990) linked genocide conceptually with a range of violations of life-integrity, devising a new method to index violations. This led to a larger study of human rights throughout the world in 1987 that probed critical questions on the relation between gross violations of human rights, democratization, and internal conflicts. “More Murder in the Middle...” (Fein, 1995) has often been cited by students of human rights and democratization. Increasingly, I see my work as having several directions: (a) an explanation of violations of life-integrity or gross violations of human rights, (b) new directions in genocide studies, including genocide by attrition (Fein, 1997) and gender (Fein, 1999b), and (c) strategic studies (Fein, 1999a) and mobilization to show that genocide can be prevented. In the latter, I have reached out to a larger community, forging bonds with people in different fields, especially human rights. One unplanned consequence of my work was to help institutionalize the study of genocide in mainstream academic life. This was

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not one of my goals, having given up on sociology in the mid-1980s after publishing an article, “Does Sociology Recognize Genocide?” in 1979—the answer was negative (see also Fein, 1993d, vii., 3234). For this accomplishment, I must credit colleagues who prodded me to undertake projects I initially resisted. Kurt Jonassohn suggested to the International Sociological Association that they ask me to do a review article on genocide for Current Sociology (1990, Fein 1993d)—the kind of project which I had always vowed to avoid. At a Berlin conference on the Holocaust in 1993, Robert Melson, Roger Smith, and Israel Charny instigated me to start the Association of Genocide Scholars (AGS), begun in 1995 by the ISG as an autonomous association affiliated with the Institute. The AGS grew beyond my expectations, largely, I suspect, because of the salience of genocide after Bosnia and Rwanda. William Gamson, president of the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 1995, influenced by my concerns and concepts, started an ASA Initiative on Genocide and Politicide and a permanent committee on this—now part of the ASA Peace and War Section, which has stimulated many panels at professional meetings. Gamson’s thoughtful and engaged ASA Presidential Address in 1994 incorporated these concerns (Gamson 1995). The ASA has continued to be helpful in distributing and re-publishing in 1998 Teaching About Genocide: A Guidebook for College Teachers (Fein and Apsel, 1998). A Concluding Note on Scholarship and Social Responsibility In the last two years, I have concluded, based on contacts with graduate students writing dissertations in political science and international relations (many of whom seem either unaware or uninterested in earlier work), that genocide has hit the main line of disciplinary concerns. Genocide studies have expanded, but are uneven in quality and focus. I have no idea where such studies are going, but suspect as the concept of genocide is assimilated in different disciplines, the imposition of disciplinary standards will tend to produce both better work on the part of some and flatter work by others, as students with no immersion in any genocide, lacking interdisciplinary skills, draw on methods that enable them to compare cases from data-sets. It seems to me that genocide scholars should try to draw in scholars from Holocaust studies—as well as scholars of other civilizations or

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regions that have experienced genocide—to enable them to understand the relevance of comparative studies, regardless of whether they choose to do them or not. Further, there is a need to relate genocide studies to studies of other gross violations of human rights— torture, terror, crimes against humanity, and slavery. Most genocide scholars acknowledge universalistic values and social responsibility but few consider what this implies about genocide-in-the-making. In the past few years, we have seen some social scientists evade the recognition of genocide in the midst of the Bosnian war, refuse to judge parties or damn all parties, or demonize the intrinsic nature (rather than behavior) of one party. I find these responses disingenuous and dishonest, subverting the social responsibility of scholars. We have to learn to work under the pressure of events and to operate with greater reflexivity, methodological and self-criticism, maintaining universalistic values and a commitment to truth. Further, we must respond to a new paradigm of implicated rather than innocent victims which upsets naive expectations based on over generalization from the Holocaust. Reflecting on the Holocaust as a model, both genocide scholars and the public have viewed victims of genocide as innocent victims who posed no real threat to their murderers. Yet, in some contemporary cases—e.g., Bosnia, Rwanda— victims of genocide belong to groups involved in conflict and may be seen as implicated victims. Many observers who deny genocide in these situations offer an alternative frame—bilateral ethnic or tribal conflict—in which no party is culpable or all are equally guilty. Rather than recognize a planned international crime, they view this as attributable to “age old hatreds.” This is both a trap and a cop-out. I do not think that we can avoid the dilemma of judgment of genocide-in-the-making because the victims are flawed and their parties have distinctive political objectives; nor can we wait until the conditions for impersonal historiography improve. Objectivity is not the same as moral neutrality; we are obliged to be objective to be effective scholars but we are also obliged as committed intellectuals to label genocide when we see it. We tried to go beyond victimization at an ISG conference in 1993, “The Path Beyond Genocide in Bosnia,” which, despite considerable inter-personal and inter-group tension, managed to reach a consensus among participants from all religio-ethnic groups and communities of former Yugoslavia. Unfortunately, our recommen-

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dation to use military force to protect safe havens was not heeded, leading to the genocide at Srebenica in 1995. My own agenda is to continue to do practical work, whenever possible, in order to deter and stop genocide (Fein 1999a) and to extend my work to a theoretical study of human rights and human wrongs. In order to consider how to make the Convention work, the ISG convened another conference, “Ever Again? Evaluating the United Nations Genocide Convention on its 50th Anniversary and Proposals to Activate the Convention” in December 1998 (Brugnola, Fein, and Spirer, 1999). On the second front, I am beginning a book that I have put off repeatedly over the last decade on the social assumptions and purposes behind gross violations of human rights, focusing on the twentieth century, with an empirical survey of lifeintegrity violations in 1987 and 1997. This is weary but not hopeless work, and the work is steady. As Rabbi Tarphon said, “It is not your task to finish the job but neither can you desist from starting it.” Another sage and rabbi, Hillel, said, “If I am for myself only what am I? And if not now, when?” Many teachers in this field think that their major responsibility is to sensitize their students so that they—their generation—can prevent genocide. But my view is: “if not now, when?” References Brugnola, Orlanda; Fein, Helen; and Spirer, Louise (Eds.) (1999). Ever Again? Evaluating the United Nations Genocide Convention on Its 50th Anniversary and Proposals to Activate the Convention. New York: Institute for the Study of Genocide. Durkheim, Emil (1933). The Division of Labor in Society [1894]. New York: Free Press. Fein, Helen (1993b). “Accounting for Genocide after 1945: Theories and Some Findings.” International Journal of Group Rights, 1(1):79-106. Fein, Helen. Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: Free Press, 1979 [University of Chicago Paperback Edition, 1984]. Fein, Helen (1987a). Congregational Sponsors of Indochinese Refugees in the U.S., 19791981: Helping Beyond Borders. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Fein, Helen (1993c). “Discriminating Genocide from War Crimes: Vietnam and Afghanistan Reconsidered.” Denver Journal of International Law, Fall, 22 (1): 29-62. Fein, Helen (1999b). “Genocide and Gender: The Uses of Women and Group Destiny.” Journal of Genocide Research, March, 1 (1):43-63. Fein, Helen. “Genocide: A Sociological Perspective.” (From Current Sociology, Spring 1990, 38 (1):1-126, with a new introduction). London: Sage Publications, 1993. Fein, Helen (1997). “Genocide by Attrition 1939-1993: The Warsaw Ghetto, Cambodia, and Sudan.” Health and Human Rights, 2 (2):10-45. Fein, Helen (1994b). “Genocide, Terror, Life-Integrity and War Crimes: The Case for Discrimination.” In George J. Andreopoulos (Ed). Genocide: The Conceptual and

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Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 95107. Fein, Helen (1992) (Ed.). Genocide Watch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Fein, Helen (1977). Imperial Crime and Punishment: The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre and British Judgment, 1919-1920. Honolulu, HI: University Press of Hawaii. Fein, Helen (1990). Lives at Risk: A Study of Life Integrity Violations in 50 States in 1987. New York: Institute for the Study of Genocide. (Reprinted in Alex Schmid and Albert J. Jongeman (Eds.) Beyond Fact-Finding: Monitoring as a Tool to Improve Human Rights Performance. Leiden, Netherlands: COMT/Center for the Study of Social Conflicts: 1991, pp. 11-45). Fein, Helen (1995). “More Murder in the Middle: Life-Integrity Violations and Democracy in the World, 1987.” Human Rights Quarterly, February, 17 (1): 170-191. Fein, Helen (1987b). The Persisting Question: Social Contexts and Sociological Perspectives of Modern Antisemitism. Berlin, Germany: de Gruyter. Fein, Helen (1994a) (Ed.). The Prevention of Genocide: Rwanda and Yugoslavia Reconsidered. New York: Institute for the Study of Genocide. Fein, Helen (1993a). “Revolutionary and Antirevolutionary Genocides: A Comparison of State Murders in Democratic Kampuchea (1975-79) and in Indonesia (1965-66).” Comparative Studies in Society and History, October, 35(4): 794-821. Fein, Helen (1984). “Scenarios of Genocide: Models of Genocide and Critical Responses.” In Israel W. Charny (Ed.). Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 3-31. Fein, Helen (1999a). “The Three P’s of Genocide Prevention: With Application to a Genocide Foretold.” In Neil Reimer (Ed.). Protection Against Genocide: Mission Impossible. New York: Praeger, pp. 41-66. Fein, Helen, and Freedman-Apsel, Joyce (Eds.) (1998). Teaching About Genocide: A Guidebook for College Teachers. Washington, DC: American Sociological Teaching Resource Center. Gamson, William (1995). “Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the Politics of Exclusion.” American Sociological Review, February, 60 (2): 1-20. Taylor, A. J. P. (1965). English History 1914-1945. New York: Oxford University Press.

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14 The Quest for Scholarship in My Pathos for the Armenian Tragedy and Its Victims Vahakn N. Dadrian I belong to a generation of Armenians who were born in Istanbul, Turkey, and raised in the aftermath of the World War I Armenian Genocide. As in the case of many others of my generation, my life bore the brunt of the impact of many of the devastations associated with that genocide. Apart from losing several family members, mainly paternal and maternal grandparents, I had to vicariously experience the unabating anguishes stemming from the trauma the surviving members of my family had to endure for the rest of their lives. The despair of these survivors was further aggravated by the fact that from the pre-war station of relative wealth they abruptly were cast into the abyss of abject poverty. Unable to cope with the hardships issuing from this debilitating condition, many of them languished in misery and bitterness. My childhood memories are punctuated by images of scenes where groups of female survivors on certain occasions would gather together and the conversations would always revolve around “the massacres.” Reliving the horrors of the genocide, they then would burst forth with loud sobbing and lapse into uncontrollable bewailments. One of these survivors related a particularly gruesome detail of massacre. After liquidating the men of her village, the women and children were taken to a nearby wood where they were lined up at the edge of a large grave dug up beforehand. A Kurd, using the stump of a tree as a resting place, would chop off their heads one by one. When her turn came, to everyone’s surprise, this butcher threw off his axe in a wild scream and ran off. It was believed that he was losing his mind as he could not take it 235

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any more and decided to halt abruptly. The grimness of the butchery and the ghastliness of the spectacle of the carnage had impacted upon his mind and nerves. So, the remaining victims-to-be escaped slaughter through decapitation. These images are indelibly etched in my mind. Yet, being in a formative stage of childhood and adolescence, I could not fully comprehend the significance of all these lived experiences. Nor did I possess the requisite maturity to ponder and reflect on them. Thus, however ineradicable, these experiences somehow remained submerged in the inner recesses of my subconscious. However, there was another and more potent force looming large on the horizon that was meant to restrict the boundaries of my budding inquisitiveness concerning the root causes of all this pervasive sorrow and wretchedness; my natural propensities to identify too much and too openly with the plight and emotions of these survivors were considerably inhibited as a result. The reference is to the oppressive atmosphere of the newly established Kemalist regime in Turkey. The successive governments of that regime were not only dismissive of the facts of the freshly consummated genocide against the minority Armenian population, but by their harsh strictures they also imposed silence on the subject. Still under the haunting spell of the terror that the wartime deportations and the attendant massacres generated, the surviving victim population was reduced to an utterly cowed and frightened collection of people. No Armenian could or would dare to ignore the prohibitions implicit in this postwar Turkish culture of denial and taboo. The inhibitions of the Armenians relative to the need to delve into the details and to probe the causes of the genocide were exceeded only by their pervasive fears of incurring the respective wrath of the Turks. In brief, apart from some vague and nebulous notion on that subject, I was forced to remain ignorant about the specifics of the nature, scope, and outcome of the great calamity that had befallen the Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire in the 1915-1923 period. These were the general conditions under which I grew up in Turkey, went to school, and socialized with family members and friends. This exigent ignorance gradually dissipated, however, when I came to America and enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1950 for training in sociology, a training which led to my receiving a Ph.D. in that field in 1954. By concentrating on the area of dominant groupminority relations in heterogeneous social systems, for example, I

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became acutely aware of the phenomenon of conflict as being more or less endemic in such relations. By examining further the outcomes of such conflicts which, more often than not, resulted in the victimization in one form or another of the minorities involved, I became fully appreciative of the importance of power relations in the study of such conflicts. After all, domination is a condition that not only presupposes, but requires, superior power. Also, I became cognizant of the fact that the instances of prejudice, discrimination, and exclusion applied against the members of a dominated minority group are actual derivatives of such superior power. Within such broad parameters, I was thus able to establish, in a rudimentary form, a conceptual, connecting link to the study of the Armenian Genocide. This realization prompts me to pay homage at this juncture to my great sociology teacher at Chicago, the late Professor Louis Wirth. Through his own doctoral dissertation, Wirth had already established conceptual linkages between Jewish ghetto life in Frankfurth-amMain in Germany in the 1930s and subsequent victimization of Jews in that country. Throughout his courses and seminars, Wirth kept exploring the unabating problems associated with dominant groupminority relations, always underscoring the fact that these twin terms had less to do with numbers but more with power: a numerically inferior group with access to the resources of power could be dominant, and, conversely, a numerically superior group could be reduced to a minority group status. Through exposure to another brilliant teacher at Chicago, the late Professor Herbert Blumer, I became fully sensitized to the intriguing but highly elusive aspect of the problems of conflict intensification and conflict escalation. As a conflict begins to evolve, it often undergoes a process of differentiation whereby the rudimentary elements of the conflict are overwhelmed with new, emerging elements; these elements invest the conflict with fresh purposes and channel it into new directions. Through the adoption and further elaboration of George Herbert Mead’s notion of symbolic interaction, Blumer established a social-psychological framework of analysis to account for this process of conflict transformation. According to this framework, conflicts acquire their own dynamics as they evolve. The controlling mechanism in this process of transformation is described as symbolism in interactive behavior. As in interindividual relations, so in the interactive behavior of groups embroiled in conflict with one

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another, people in various ways interpret the meaning of the act of other people before responding to that act. The response is not to the act per se, but to the symbol, or meaning, they attach to it. As another Chicago social psychologist, W. I Thomas, postulated in his time, when people define situations as real, they are real in consequence. Thus, all other things being equal, the stages of a conflict are more or less regulated by the interactive mechanisms of symbolistic behavior involving an ongoing process of meaning-attachments. Once more, a conceptual bridge to the study of the escalating aspects of the Turko-Armenian conflict is discernible here. One has only to think of the episodes when the Armenians, defined as Turkey’s “internal foe,” were vilified in a variety of ways, and broadly accused of having provoked the Turks. Here superior power is seen as affording all the requisite leverages to indulge in simplistic, preemptory, and imperious definitions through which to target the victim group. Given the complex and gigantic dimensions of the task of annihilating the bulk of a certain minority population, large masses of the dominant population have to be indoctrinated, energized, agitated and motivated for approval and participation in mass murder. Professor Blumer’s courses and seminar in collective behavior were edifying in this respect. By focusing on two seminal sub-topics, i.e., elementary forms of collective behavior and the rise of social movements, Blumer provided cogent perspectives for the examination of ways and means by which groups are forged into cohesive, militant, confrontational, and violent-prone instruments for the lethal consummation of brewing conflicts with other groups. His depiction of specific factors in this regard included ideology, agitation, heightened suggestibility, and circular reaction in crowd behavior. A parallel development in the series of events that drove me to revisit the World War I Armenian experience as a potential subject for research and scholarship concerns my exposure to certain books treating that subject. Foremost among these was the two-volume novel Forty Days of Musa Dagh by the Austrian-Jewish novelist Franz Werfel; I read it in its original German twice and was stupefied by it. Even though a literary masterpiece where the events are more or less dramatized, the Forty Days of Musa Dagh is essentially predicated on factuality. Werfel not only had conducted extensive interviews with Armenian survivors in Syria, but had obtained authentic material from Johannes Lepsius, who had traveled to Turkey during

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the war in a futile attempt to induce the Young Turk leaders to stop the mass murder against the Armenians. Lepsius subsequently published the massive compilation of German official documents attesting to the centrally organized character of it. In this work, Werfel punctuates the effects of lasting persecution on a minority, the eruption during the war of the fury of accumulated hatred by the dominant Turks targeting the minority, that is, the Armenians, and the latter’s attendant despair. Through an overall concretization of such abstract terms as atrocity, butchery, massacre, and extermination, Werfel also provided a context for the emergence of a death-defying but ethno-centric rather than an individualized bravery by the victim group. That surge of acute ethno-centrism is a reflection of the frightful perception that the danger looming large on the horizon represented nothing less than a peril for the Armenians as an ethnicnational entity. The scenes in Werfel’s work of the heroic resistance of the Armenians, pitted against overwhelming odds, are stupefying indeed in terms of their epic proportions. Raya Cohen (1998), a professor at Tel-Aviv University, in a recent article argued that, in this sense, Werfel’s novel is “profoundly Jewish.” Cohen further maintains that the resonance of Musa Dagh would lend itself to association with the myth of Masada that was stirred up during World War II by Jewish nationalists in Palestine. When contemplating mounting a resistance on Mount Carmel against an eventual Nazi invasion, the latter would adopt “Musa Dagh” as a code name for the drawing of a military plan in this respect. However, the book that overwhelmed me emotionally, and, at the same time excited my intellect was the memoirs, Hai Koghkota (The Armenian Golgotha), of an Armenian priest who bore witness to the most unimaginable and fiendish atrocities of the genocide and miraculously had survived to recount them. Unlike Werfel’s literary texture dominating the organization of his Musa Dagh, this Armenian priest’s work is an out and out narrative recounting in plain language the raw details of the genocidal atrocities he had experienced. Unspeakable horrors about which American Ambassador Morgenthau (1919) averred that they “can never be printed in an American publication” (p. 321), are graphically described. Especially harrowing were the details of the slaughter of 6,400 Yozgat’s Armenian children, young girls and women at a vast promontory located at some distance from the city of Yozgad. To save shell and powder, the gendarmerie commander in charge of this large convoy

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had gathered together 10,000-12,000 Turkish peasants and other villagers, and, armed with “hatchets, meat cleavers, saddler’s knives, cudgels, axes, pickaxes, shovels,” the latter attacked and for 4-5 hours mercilessly butchered the victims while crying “Oh, God, Oh, God” (Allah, Allah). In a moment of rare candor, this gendarmerie commander confided to the priest-author, whom he did not expect to survive the mass murder, that, after each massacre episode, he spread his little prayer rug and performed the namaz, the ritual of worship, centered on prayer, with a great sense of redemption in the service of Almighty God. These books shook me to such an extent that I could not escape their unhinging impact upon me. When I reflect upon the significance of this development, two interrelated observations come to the fore of attention: (1) It is still possible to be critically influenced by books and that ideas can still have consequences; (2) Such influence presupposes, however, a type of sensitivity or a degree of vulnerability that is a function of one’s temperament but also is reflective of one’s formative life experiences. It appears that I had a suitable temperament to be consciously as well as subconsciously conditioned in my formative years to identify with the victims of cruelty and injustice that had become the common destiny of my family and, by extension, of the Armenian people. It was inconceivable to me that a capital crime of such gigantic proportions as the Armenian Genocide could so easily be perpetrated, so expediently accorded the reward of impunity, and so readily consigned to oblivion by the rest of the world. But mere rebelliousness is a lapse into intellectual paralysis. In order to yield desirable results it has to be harnessed to the rigors of optimally detached scholarship. One can only try and it is, of course, a given that the extent of desirable results is something that only others may assess. My actual initiation into research on the Armenian Genocide coincides with an encounter with an Armenian Catholic priest, the late Father Gregor Guergerian (his pen-name was Krieger) in Beirut, Lebanon, in the summer of 1965. In anticipation of the 50th Anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, I had published an article in The New York Times one year earlier, that is, 1964. The priest wrote me a letter saying that he had been engaged in research on that topic for a long time and that he would appreciate meeting me. He said that he himself was a survivor. During my own research trip in the regions of the Near East and Middle East, I arranged an appointment with

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him in his residence in Beirut. That meeting was both macabre in nature, and, at the same time, very edifying. For the first time, I became aware of the existence of authentic documents pertaining to the Armenian Genocide, as he became my guidepost at this initial stage of my involvement in genocide research. He not only offered me an overview on the main problems involved in the task of documenting that genocide, but directed my attention to the Archive of Jerusalem’s Armenian Patriarchate. Moreover, he made available to me several pieces of documentary evidence he had culled from the depositories of that Archive prior to 1965. Through several visits to this Archive in the 1960s and 1970s, I myself secured a large mass of data originating from the residual Archive of the Turkish Military Tribunal. In the 1918-1921 period, this tribunal had been court-marshalling the authors of “the Armenian deportations and massacres.” In the meantime, I began exploring auxiliary sources for the same purpose. Given their wartime military alliance with Ottoman Turkey, Germany’s and Austria’s state archives were deemed to be the most promising in this respect. Consequently, I did such research in Bonn, Koblenz, Freiburg i. Breisgau and Potsdam where the state documents, political and military, of the German Federal Republic and the former German Democratic Republic were located. Likewise, I did research in the archives of the Foreign and War Ministries of Austria. In the 1965-1982 period, altogether I undertook twentyone trips to these archives, of these, eleven to Bonn only. This major effort to focus on the documentary aspect of the Armenian Genocide and thereby emphasize the official, authentic character of the documentation is intimately connected with a distinct feature of that genocide: its denial by the perpetrators and by the array of people identified with Turkish interests. Moreover, I recognized the importance of the fact that this denial was, and is, not a perfunctory denial. Rather, it is persistent, vehement, and often truculent. As such, it has acquired the character of a post-genocide culture for the preservation and promotion of which presently an industry is being created. The dual cornerstones of that industry are (1) the reliance on a cultivation of political assets through alliance ties (NATO) and public relations devices; and (2) the engagement of academics in the Western world, especially in the United States, through massive investments in endowment funds attempting to establish special Turkish Studies Chairs, as, for example, at Princeton University and the University of California at Los Angeles. This resolutely denialist Turk-

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ish and pro-Turkish endeavor is a fact that considerably reinforced my decision to confront head on the problem and tackle it; my sense of despair about the whole situation was now supplanted by a pervasive sense of rebelliousness against injustice. I simply could not acquiesce to this brazen perversion of the truth of a major historical cataclysm. A large part of my indignation was directed to those historians in the West who, with what I consider to be a remarkable callousness, allowed themselves to be co-opted by the officials and agents of the Turkish government and have become advocates of “the Turkish point of view.” The main question now was: how to harness and convert these negative sentiments of mine into instruments for the development of reliable and acceptable knowledge. I had to select proper venues of research and, try, as much as I could, to abide by the established canons of scholarship. When a crime is committed and the corpus delicti is there for all to see (the massive evidence of lethal violence resulting in the swift disappearance of an entire population from its ancestral territories), but the prime suspect persists in denying the crime, the first basic step to deal with the problem is the locating and marshalling of evidentiary material. In other words, one has first to assume the functions of a detective. It would be no exaggeration to state that a large part of my research relative to the Armenian Genocide involved painstaking detective work, especially in connection with the task of securing authentic Ottoman-Turkish documents. The vast dimensions of the Armenian disaster were such as to preclude the possibility of completely eliminating all pertinent documents. The perpetrators therefore failed in their effort to make every shred of incriminating evidence disappear. No matter how careful or skillful one may be in this regard, a scant number of randomly surviving documents are always a possibility. This is the area in which the requisite detective work needs to be concentrated and this is the area I explored in my research described above. The obstinate nature of the Turkish denials, past and present, by necessity requires, first and foremost, that the evidence to be marshaled is to be as compelling as possible in order to decisively surmount the problems of uncertainty, doubt and obfuscation which such denials are bound to create. (Depending on how compelling it is, such evidence may even preempt the perpetrator’s urge to indulge in denials—if one can count on the latter’s reliance on a measure of rationality.) Presently, the concept of compelling evidence in

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my framework of analysis as envisaged for the task of documenting the Armenian Genocide revolves around four elements: (1) reliable, (2) explicit, (3) incontestable, and (4) verifiable. Material that is deficient in any of these elements will have to be discounted strictly for methodological considerations. To illustrate the point, reference may be made to the documents contained in the depositories of the state archives of Great Britain, France, and Russia. Since all three of these countries were in the camp of the Entente Powers that opposed the Central Powers, of which the Ottoman Empire was a constituent member, material issuing from that camp could readily be degraded, if not outright dismissed, by the Turks as wartime propaganda or disinformation. In fact, this is what many Turkish authors and their friends in the West are stating in an effort to disqualify a vast corpus of primary sources assembled by the functionaries of these states during and after World War I. It is only natural that some of that material may be tinged with propaganda or embellishments, but a substantial part of it is still undeniably valuable source material. Nevertheless, to obviate such disparagements and criticisms, I decided to exclude from my research, as much as possible, material emanating from British, French, and Russian archives. By the same token, reliance on Armenian survivor accounts has been reduced to a minimum in order to avert the resort by the deniers to the argument of “victim bias.” Having set forth the methodological parameters of my study of the Armenian Genocide, I directed my attention to the type of source material that not only qualifies as primary but that more or less meets also the standard of compelling evidence I stipulated above. As a result, three categories of such material were located and are being explored by me for documentary research: I. The archives of the Turkish Military Tribunal, investigating in the Armistice period “the wartime deportations and massacres” against the Armenians, could not be entirely removed or eliminated by the Kemalist authorities that had replaced the Sultan’s government and established the Turkish Republic. Indeed, it would be and is virtually impossible to remove every shred of evidence in the case of such a gigantic crime, no matter how determined and resourceful the perpetrators may be. Following a series of military and political successes they had scored in connection with their insurgency movement against both the victorious Allies and the Sultan’s government in the 1919-1922 period, these Kemalists set out to establish the

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Turkish Republic, and, at the same time, jettisoned the Turkish Military Tribunal’s courts martial which they defiantly dismissed as an infamy besmirching the good reputation of Turkey. What is compelling about many of the documents introduced as exhibits in several of the trial series is the fact that each one of them was authenticated by competent ministerial officials who thereafter affixed to them the official notation, “It conforms to the original.” II. During about the same time, the Ottoman Parliament, especially the Lower House, i.e., the Chamber of Deputies, conducted its own investigation through its Fifth Committee Inquiry Commission. In the course of that investigation a number of wartime Cabinet Ministers, including two Sheik-ul-Islams and a Grand Vizier, made a number of revelations and even confessions relative to the crimes perpetrated against the Armenians. Prior to these Hearings, held by the Parliamentary Inquiry Commission, there were parliamentary debates in both Houses of the Parliament regarding “the Armenian deportations and massacres” in the course of which a number of deputies and senators explicitly admitted of the exterminatory nature of the deportations. III. Whereas the evidence provided by the Turks to Turkish authorities is almost always terse, laconic, and highly fragmentary, perhaps on account of a compulsion to be careful and defensive, the evidence provided by the official representatives of Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Empire’s committed wartime allies, is ample, thorough, and conclusive. These functionaries, stationed in wartime Turkey for various duties, had to overcome their strong concerns for the supreme interests of the alliance before proceeding to supply to their superiors, in a stream of “confidential,” “secret,” and “top secret” reports, the details of the unfolding genocide. In doing so, they not only reluctantly exposed the distortions, half-truths, and many of the falsehoods disseminated by the Turkish authorities during the war, but also compiled the type of documentary evidence that is at once reliable, explicit, incontestable, and verifiable. That evidence is especially compelling on account of two facts: (1) its provenance is identified not only with the perpetrator camp but with the two totally committed wartime political and military allies of that perpetrator; and (2) the material evidence was compiled for internal use only, i.e., in-house examination and evaluation by the respective Foreign Offices of Imperial Germany and Imperial Austria, and, therefore, was not intended, at least at the time, for public consumption.

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In brief, the documentation of the Armenian Genocide is realized through the availability of authentic Turkish, German, and Austrian evidence that has a distinctly compelling character and thrust. It is against this overall backdrop that I have no hesitation to declare that the research and scholarship in which I have been engaged has successfully tackled the problem of documenting the Armenian Genocide on several levels. Thanks to that documentation, it is possible to discern and explore in detail the four major determinants of that Genocide through the method of reconstruction. These are (1) Premeditation, (2) Genocidal Intent and Decisionmaking, (3) Organization, and (4) Implementation. Thus far, most of my efforts have been concentrated on this task of documentation—to counter and invalidate the manifestations of the phenomenon called the “denial syndrome.” This drive to document was also propelled by an empathy for the multitudes of victims of that genocide whose memory was being cruelly desecrated by the spread of those falsehoods. I am persuaded that it is possible to be initially driven or motivated by sentiments or values when embarking upon a research but subsequently ultimately obtain relatively value-free results through the exercise of rigor in methodology and of intellectual discipline. The prominent German sociologist Max Weber had this problem in mind when he postulated the dichotomy of value-relatedness (Wertbezogenheit) and freedom-from-values (Wertfreiheit); the former motivates us to select a topic for research, the latter mandates that we divest ourselves from the initial values once we embark upon research. It is all too obvious that for committed deniers, scholarship has very limited usefulness relative to the goal of “setting the record straight.” Despite the cumulative weight of documentary evidence assembled in the course of decades, the Turks and their advocates are persisting in the corrosive exercise of self-deception and denial. In this sense, truth is kept in bondage to forces that should be an anathema to those respecting the canons of detached scholarship. This fact is in itself of sufficient importance to reflect upon the nature of these forces. It would be too simplistic to inject here the term “politics” to account for these forces. Politics is merely the outward manifestation of the problem; as such it is but a symptom rather than a decisive causative factor. My personal experience with a few of these deniers suggests that their main concern attaches to a set of consequences they anticipate in case of a governmental admission

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of guilt—the consequences which they seem to be presently determined to avoid under all circumstances. These include (1) a powerful dose of self-incrimination on account of eight decades of lies and denials, (2) the legal ramifications, especially with respect to the prospect of massive reparation claims, (3) the stigma of the label of genocide, and the inevitable comparison with the Nazis, and (4) the widespread upheavals in Turkey, given the total unpreparedness of the public, that since the founding of the Republic has been more or less conditioned, if not brainwashed, in the direction of denialism, not to speak of the pervasive taboos against the public or academic discussion of the topic. To be considered in this respect is, of course, the multiple power leverages Turkey continues to enjoy not only as a strategically prominent NATO ally but, equally important, as a fastgrowing economic vantage ground. As a result, to the affirmation of the Genocide, a variety of alternatives is being offered by Turkish historians and by a number of partisan historians in the West who, for a variety of expedient reasons, have embraced “the Turkish point of view.” The recurrent arguments contained in these alternative views include: the intent of the Ottoman government was only deportation and relocation; only the Armenians in and around the theatres of war were deported; the resulting casualties were largely due to unintended consequences such as poor administration in the handling of the deportations, privations, exposure to the elements, disease, and epidemics; wherever massacres occurred they were byproducts of “intercommunal clashes” and, therefore, were neither ordered by the government, nor controlled by it. Examples of the most bizarre arguments in this regard are: the deportations were in part ordered to protect the Armenian deportees from their local Muslim enemies; there was no genocide but a civil war within the larger context of a global war where both Armenians and Turks sustained heavy casualties; and the Turks at the end of World War I sustained several times more casualties than the Armenians.1 These and many other similar and ancillary assertions are fully elaborated and reemphasized in a recent publication put out by the Turkish Foreign Ministry in Ankara. That Ministry found it necessary to create a special office to disseminate the Turkish point of view in order to counter “Armenian claims of genocide.” The office is called The Center for Strategic Studies of the Turkish Foreign Ministry [Turk Disisleri Bakanligi Stratejik Arastirmalar Merkezi]. The publication is titled Armenian Claims and Historical Realities [Ermeni

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Iddialar ve Tarihi Gercekler]. This new undertaking is being supported and amplified by the medium of the Turkish Republic’s official website which recently released voluminous denial material under the heading “The Armenian Issue in Nine Questions and Answers.” Despite the fact that the bulk of these arguments are untenable and some of them are absurd enough to suggest the incidence of blatant frivolity, influential venues of the media in the West are echoing these arguments in part from a desire to appear impartial but in large part from a desire to be accommodative to the Turks. The leverages of power are such that, generally speaking, they cause people to reorder their priorities and consequently generate expedient behavior. The relative success of the Turkish effort in reducing the Armenian Genocide to a mere controversial issue, while at the same time flooding worldwide governmental agencies, the media, and institutions of higher learning with dubious and propagandistic literature denying that genocide, is not only a function of Turkish power but is also a byproduct of Armenian impotency vis-a-vis that power. That impotency is best reflected in the fact that the governments of the foremost democracies of the world, Great Britain, the United States, and France, and not necessarily their legislative bodies, i.e., the Parliaments, still prefer to attach the adjective “alleged” to the world genocide when referring to the World War I Armenian cataclysm; or they insist on claiming that there are “ambiguities” surrounding the origin and nature of the cataclysm. In other words, they support the Turkish claims, or are prone to identifying with “the Turkish viewpoint.” This is particularly remarkable when one considers the cardinal fact that the state archives of these countries abound with official documents indisputably attesting to the crime of the Armenian Genocide. My Definition of Genocide To sum up, the most striking lesson to be derived from the reality of the Armenian Genocide is the paramount fact that both its perpetration and its ensuing denial is a function of one and the same condition, namely, overwhelming power. It is a kind of power that is sustained before, during, and in the aftermath of the crime vis-a-vis a relatively weak and, therefore, vulnerable victim group. Denial is seen here as the logical extension of the very same conditions and processes that produced the genocide itself. At the editors’ request, I would propose my concept of genocide in the delineation of which the following four components emerge.

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A conflict between a potential perpetrator group and a potential victim group. At issue are here these subcomponents: a.

Origin of the conflict;

b.

History of the conflict;

c.

The escalation phases of the conflict;

d.

A conflict that defies resolution through mediation or otherwise through peaceful means, and tends to linger with a potential to escalate and explode.

2.

Power Relations. A critical disparity in the respective power positions of the potential perpetrator and the potential victim groups. The resulting power differential yields what might be called the vulnerability factor affecting the fate of the victim group.

3.

The Opportunity Structure. No matter how powerful, how tempted a potential perpetrator may be, it cannot, and most likely will not, proceed from a level of contemplation to that of actual enactment of genocide unless there is an opportunity that it deems to be propitious or suitable. An external war, a civil war, or a global war, are likely to be considered optimal opportunities in this respect. But certain actual national crises such as revolutions, overthrow of an existing government, or sudden economic collapse, may trigger genocidal outbursts by groups gaining the upper hand in the course of these crises.

4.

The Resolution of the Conflict by Resort to Massive Lethal Violence. Such a resort is preceded by a.

Extreme vilification and subsequent outlawing of the targeted group;

b.

The conflict is, therefore, irrevocably radicalized;

c.

All available levers of overwhelming power are utilized for the purpose of maximal decimation of the victim group.

Conclusion One may be able to reflect in general on the nightmares of a massive tragedy, ponder the conditions of the perpetrators and the victims, develop concepts and frameworks of analysis, and, in the end, attempt to contribute to the respective field of knowledge. But a problem tends to haunt the aspiring scholar if that scholar’s personal history one way or another, directly or indirectly, is bound up with

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that tragedy. For no amount of conceptualization and theorizing can be redeeming enough to allow such a scholar to permanently divest himself, to jar loose, from the lasting impact of such a tragedy. The severity of this problem is in direct proportion to the intensity with which such a scholar is identified with and, accordingly, is affected by the tragedy. In this case, scholarship, to the extent that it is reasonably detached, or dispassionate, becomes a form of exercise in compartmentalization, a goal-directed effort, and often an act of temporary de-coupling. Sentiment and sensitivity are consciously smothered as they are rendered separate from, if not subsidiary to, the exertions of intellect and reason. Moving from this general overview of the phenomenon of tragedy, to the special purview of the tragedy of the Armenian Genocide, certain distinct features involved may be depicted as being particularly relevant for the present discussion. These are features that, I must confess, haunt me as a student of the Armenian Genocide, all the felicity issuing from my cumulative research and publications on the subject notwithstanding. Conceivably, I might be less affected by these features if there had been no persistent denial of what has been called “The Great Crime,” and if there had been some closure. The denial is a potent force for generating a pathos for the tragedy and its victims whose memory inevitably continues to suffer desecration by that denial. My personal pathos in this respect is primarily stirred by what I consider to be the following unique features of the Armenian Genocide: (1)

Given the relatively (technologically) primitive conditions of World War I Turkey and, equally, if not more important, given the non-negligible scope of the popular participation in the butchery involved, a considerable segment of the victim population suffered a protracted and harrowing death because the perpetrators relied, according to Ambassador Morgenthau (1919), on such blunt instruments as “clubs, hammers, axes, scythes, spades, and saws” as a result of which the victims “bodies (were) horribly mutilated.” Since most of the Armenian male population were early on separated and summarily and quickly dispatched to death, these agonizing murders were inflicted almost entirely upon children, women, and old men who were subject to tortuous treks of deportations in the hope of exacting thereby heavy tolls through attrition caused by hunger, disease, exhaustion, exposure and epidemics. The awareness of this grim and macabre fact continues to haunt me, at the same time forging in my psyche powerful emotional bonds with the victims.

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(2)

These atrocities, in the main, especially in Turkey’s eastern provinces, were perpetrated by tens of thousands of “blood-thirsty, convicted criminals” who were released from the many prisons of the Ottoman Empire for the express purpose of massacre duty. Nowhere in the annals of human history is it recorded that a state and its government organized the mass murder of a sizable portion of its citizens through the enlistment and mobilization of large numbers of imprisoned convicts. It is impossible for me not to be haunted by the realization that the only purpose of this arrangement was to preempt the possibility of the selected murderers showing any mercy or compassion toward the victims targeted for wholesale annihilation. The authorities needed totally savage and bloodthirsty felons to achieve swift and maximal results.

(3)

The architects of this ghastly arrangement were two physicians, Drs. Nazim and Sakir. Both of them were in part educated and trained in Paris, with Dr. Sakir for a time acting as professor of medical ethics at the Medical School of Istanbul University. They were the ones who, during the prolonged deliberations in the secret councils of the Ittihad Party’s Supreme Directorate (Merkezi Umumi), insisted on the use of convicted criminals to optimize the results of the genocidal scheme. It is impossible for me to gloss over this paramount fact and not to be appalled by the monstrosity of the imagery flowing from it.

In conclusion, I should like to restate that my pathos for the Armenian tragedy and its victims is not the only animus motivating me. Equally, if not more, important is my quest for a reasonable remedy against the condition of enduring injustice that is even more accented by the ignorance and non-chalance of the rest of the civilized world. I propose to continue to try to harness these incentives to a binding commitment to scholarship with a view to promoting a measure of truth as it may result from it. Irrespective of the enormous odds, I have faith that such truth is bound to help generate some day its appropriate justice, and thereby also rescue from oblivion the memory of the multitudes of the victims of the first major genocide of the twentieth century by consecrating that memory thereby. Note 1.

Upon the request of New Jersey Congressman Steven Rothman, I have prepared and published a booklet, The Key Elements in the Turkish Denial of the Armenian Genocide: A Case Study of Distortion and Falsification (Toronto: Zoryan Institute, 1999), with extensive documentary references and endnotes, refuting one by one these allegations and claims. This initiative was in response to a twelve-page memo-

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randum the Turkish Ambassador in Washington, DC distributed to 560 United States Congressmen in an effort to block the passing of a Resolution introduced by sixty Congressmen. That Resolution mandated that the President of the United States assemble together all the Armenian Genocide-related documents in the possession of the United States Government and place them at the disposal of the House International Relations Committee, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan, Armenia.

References Cohen, Raya (1998). “Le Génocide Arménien dans la Memoire Collective Juive,”Les Cahiers du Judaisme, Fall, 3: 15-116, 119. Morgenthau, Henry (1919). Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story . New York: Doubleday.

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15 Gauging Genocide: Social Science Dimensions and Dilemmas Irving Louis Horowitz The study of the arbitrary taking of life is not exactly equivalent to being a pioneer in the invention of a new learning field or even the discovery of a new way of bottling old wine. Indeed, to be a “pioneer” in the study of collective death says much about the dark side of this extraordinary century, and about the vanity of those who attempt to make sense of it all. Perhaps it would better if we admitted that what we “study” is not an “area” but the culmination of a century in which invention has been matched, discovery by discovery, by the machinery and technology of death. Genocide is not an area of study that can be bracketed within well-defined boundaries. Such concerns are the common property of humanity. It is no less a characteristic of our age than welfare. The twentieth century has mastered the art of destruction and construction. These are not exactly specific areas of study so much as facts of life that we all share in common. Still, I confess to serious concern with the dark arts of mass murder. I came to the study of genocide in an attempt to define a primary social indicator that can help provide sociology with a quantitative equivalent of voting for politics and money for economics. In doing so, in seeking some quantitative, that is numerical, measure for the quality of life unique to our times, I hoped to contribute something positive to the sciences of mass emancipation, and not just the anti-sciences of mass destruction. These remarks are not intended to summarize my lebenswerke, only to provide the private undercoating that makes possible a contribution to the public enterprise. 253

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I grew to young manhood in the bowels of World War Two. Because of deep family roots in Russia on both my paternal and maternal side, my first interest was in the fate of the people of the Kiev Basin during the Second World War, where most of my family remained. I followed the course of the war on a daily basis. My room was filled with maps and pins detailing the movement of Wehrmacht troops on one side and Red Army troops on the other. Seeing the film Alexander Nevsky, the great Russian nationalist classic directed by Sergei Eisenstein, formed my imagery. Evil was blue eyed and blond and adorned in white, Good was etched in darker, Slavic colors of the Russian defenders of the faith. I have never have forgotten this reversal in values between black and white. Having grown up on a diet of Westerns at the Sunset and Luxor theaters in Harlem, New York, where I spent my childhood, violence and death were my constant companions, but so, too, were the wonderful and varied life of a unique and fascinating neighborhood. Living at the edge was the denominator, shared by us all. More of these early experiences were detailed in my autobiography Daydreams and Nightmares (Horowitz, 1990) and need not be labored further. My earliest concerns were of war overseas and war in the streets, not of state power and mass murder. Indeed, although I had a keen sense of being Jewish, having been largely among the last generation educated in the Yiddish culture of the secular socialist Workmen’s Circle and Sholom Aleichem schools at the fringes of Harlem, my focus was less on the tragic fate of the Jewish communities of Europe than on the participation of Jewish communities of American and Russia in the struggle for democracy and anti-fascism. In retrospect, this may appear naive and even foolish. In the context of the times, 1941-1945, this seemed a natural posture for a very young Jewish teenager. My greatest linkage to the Jewish community was a basketball court at the Jewish Center in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where the Horowitz family moved after leaving Harlem. It was my religious friend from Harlem, Arthur Grumberger, whose family migrated from Budapest, Hungary, who first alerted me to the tragedy that was befalling the Jewish People. Having been reared in Jewish socialist (Workman’s Circle schools), the emphasis was less on European Jewry than American class wars. It was Arthur who introduced me to religious ritual and observance. He shared with me his Hebrew School texts, and was, in fact, my first teacher of the Hebrew language. And while this did not especially “stick,” the sense

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of the Jewish people as a universal people, and the special condition of Jews in the interwar period of 1918-1938 became part of my intellectual arsenal, if such it could be called. My heart was not hardened to my people’s suffering, but I was terribly unaware of the magnitude of the war against the Jewish People that was being waged, and, alas, won by the Nazi regime at the same time as it was clearly losing the war against the Allied Powers. Genocide does not take place in hot house isolation from other aspects of social life and political struggle. It is a function of legal, ethical and cultural disintegration. My writings on genocide reflect the circuitous route of an obviously misspent childhood and youth. After two early theses efforts in the history of European thought, specifically on the dialectical tradition in Italian Renaissance and French Enlightenment thought, done under the supervision of the great Jewish scholar, Paul Oscar Kristellar in 1952 and 1953 at Columbia University, I wrote my first serious and independent work, The Idea of War and Peace in Contemporary Philosophy and Social Theory. The effort had scarcely a word about genocide or the Holocaust. It was the seeming potential for nuclear annihilation that was of paramount concern in that volume. In the mid-1950s, the American nation, indeed the entire world, was gripped by the fear of a nuclear holocaust. Everything, from films on the makeup of a post-nuclear assault to books on stages in the processing of such warfare, became common grist. For the first time, the American public came to believe that a third world war would be fought on American shores as well as European capitals. Despite this, my summary of major figures of our century, from Alfred North Whitehead to John Dewey in philosophy, and from Vladimir Lenin to Mohandas K. Gandhi in politics, was thought by some to stray too far beyond the path of linguistic philosophy and logical positivist methods that held sway in the Anglo-American world of the 1950s. With the early 1960s, my work moved from an interest in conflict and its resolution to a more focused emphasis on anarchism and violence. The heating up of the war in Vietnam seemed the proper time, and still does, for a natural extension of my thinking about the metaphysical foundations of war as such. Along with the noted social psychologist David Riesman, I helped found the Committees on Correspondence and a monthly bulletin alerting the academic and policy communities about the dangers of the pending expansion of

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the South East Asian conflict. It also was fueled by the academic shift from philosophy to sociology as a career path. It was in such a congruence of practical and academic considerations that the issue of genocide came into any sort of focus. In such works at Radicalism and the Revolt against Reason (Horowitz, 1961) and a largescale anthology on The Anarchists (Horowitz, 1964), I described the issue of genocide as mass murder by state authorities; and saw this as a source of anarchist rationalization of violence against government officials. It also became apparent to me that the anti-statist forms of terrorism cut in multiple ways: some toward radical reconstruction of society, others toward reactionary reconstruction of earlier societies. On either side, the Jewish question became a litmus test for social theory. So whether dealing with one or another variety of radical approaches to the German condition, the situation of the Jewish people became a problematic rather than a given. To study war and conflict in modern times was to look closely at the German contradiction between education and barbarism, rationalism and mysticism. My earliest concerns saw Jews as part of the revolutionary movements within German life, as part of the class structure identified with the “interests” of other radical groups, but not on Jews acting in their own behalf. Hence, everyone from Karl Marx, Werner Sombart, and Theodore Herzl came into play by the mid-1960s. To study the Holocaust as a concrete expression of human behavior meant to also look at National Socialism as a specific manifestation of German behavior. By the close of the 1960s, my interests in war, conflict, and genocide was given a large boost by an invitation to serve as visiting professor at the Hebrew University in its American Civilization program. That trip had a profound effect on my sense of the magnitude of the Holocaust. I met some survivors and some children of survivors, and realized that Israel as a modern State had itself risen out of the ashes, the charnel house of a wartime Europe. I spoke with people who lived in towns and cities from whence my parents came, and saw firsthand evidence of broken bodies, and even bent spirits that seemed to be a common if subdued legacy of all Israel. Indeed, some of my closest friends and colleagues were from Hungary and Romania, with untold infirmities that made my own hair-lip and cleft palate pale in comparison. Some were induced from their concentration camp experiences, others that limited movement or impeded speech. The number of such people on my first visit moved and

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disturbed me. But more pointedly, these colleagues went about the business of living without self-pity. They nearly all had wives and children and large families at that. The tragic sense of Europe played against the canvas of the liberating sense of Jews reborn in the Old World and new State of Israel. All of that weighed heavily on my mind. Even before that, a decade earlier as a matter of record, in a demographic study of the Jewish communities in Buenos Aires in 195859, I was forced to recognize that the issue of Jewish survival was bundled with the issue of the Holocaust, of the genocide committed against the Jewish people by the fascists in the most obvious sense, and then by the Stalinists in only a slightly more covert sense, i.e., socialism as a struggle against Zionism. But even as backdrop in my book Israeli Ecstasies and Jewish Agonies (Horowitz, 1974), the sense of genocide remained a distant backdrop to what appeared to me to represent a more urgent set of considerations as exemplified by the title. So it was the actual contact with Israel, remote and transient though it may have appeared at the time, that provided a perspective on genocide in particular and conflict in general, sorely lacking in my earlier work. On a practical level, I became involved with the struggles of the Jewish people to survive Stalinist and post-Stalinist power in the Soviet Union. I became a fervent advocate of the idea that the struggle of intellectuals was far different than simple identification with political parties and partisan enterprise. Intellectuals in the conduct of their research and work must take a cue from atomic scientists: to struggle against the misuse or abuse of their specific contributions to the century by forming appropriate voluntary associations. Together with a handful of extraordinary people ranging from Hannah Arendt at the New School for Social Research, Daniel Bell and Eli Ginzberg at Columbia University, Andrew Hacker and Milton Konvitz at Cornell University, Ithiel de Sola Pool and George Wald at MIT and Harvard respectively, to name some of the better known figures, and with a particular bow to the extraordinary leadership in this effort taken by Hans J. Morgenthau, we formed the Academic Committee on Soviet Jewry—one of several specialist groups mobilized by largely Jewish agencies, to ward off what was felt to be an impending disaster for the Jewish people of Russia. Our mission in the late sixties and early seventies, if such were it called, was to assist in the migration of Jewish men and women of letters to Vienna,

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Rome, Jerusalem, and points West. It was an amazingly successful mission which, combined with other efforts on behalf of Soviet Jewry, paved the way for the massive Jewish migrations from Russia to points West in the 1990s. The support, albeit belated, from the American Jewish Congress, provided an organizational platform that extended our efforts from the university to the political realm. We established contact with important figures in Soviet academic life and linguistics, mathematicians, physicists, and musicians, and developed networks for their early emigration and resettlement in Israel and to a lesser extent Europe. It was an effort that extended up to and through the toppling of Communist power in Russia. This is not said in boast, for our committees probably did too little rather than too much. But it was a mechanism by which we translated a concern for a new holocaust into a practical effort of saving lives. For this chance to participate, I shall be forever grateful. A strong leitmotif in my work, terrorism, provided an essential piece of the puzzle before I attempted a direct investigation of genocide. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I conducted a series of seminars for the Council on Foreign Relations on terrorism. Our working group, under my direction, developed a variety of scenarios when terrorist acts were likely, and more important, the sources of such acts, that is, from state or anti-state elements in a society. My interest in terrorism derives from the same intellectual background as my interests in genocide—that is, from political sociology as a field for studying the interaction of state and society. Only now, with the publication of my volume entitled Behemoth: Main Currents in the History and Theory of Political Sociology (Horowitz, 1999) have I been able to provide a fusion between various strands in the political processes that bring together the story of violence with that of specific assaults on subjugated peoples. As my work moved from a study of terrorism as a series of actions, to issues of legitimacy and power on one side, and profiling the terrorist and above all, to the victims of terrorism and terrorism’s impact on the larger society on the other, the various strands initially seen by myself as separate and distinct came together. By 1980, I began to see some semblance of a general theory of genocide come into focus. By the close of the millennium, this general theory was completed. It became the grounds for the fourth edition of Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power (Horowitz, 1997), virtually a new book, and as mentioned above, Behemoth. The title, based on the Hebrew word, Behemah, or huge, unruly,

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beast, was hardly accidental. It was a shorthand way of bringing together discrete strands in my earlier thinking. Only when I started work on Foundations of Political Sociology at the start of the 1970s did the issue of genocide come into sharp relief. In studying the sources and systems of National Socialism and International Communism alike, it became apparent that the State under totalitarian control exercises its power, not in connection with or on behalf of a social class or strata, and not even with much regard for the nature of the economic system, as is repeatedly claimed from Marx through Lenin, but as an independent actor as Max Weber uniquely understood. My primary evidence became the condition of the Jewish people throughout twentieth century Germany. Under the Weimar Republic, it was clear that Jews formed a substantial part of the working class in membership and leadership alike. They were active players in the economic expansion of Germany since emancipation. But it was not only that Jews were hence a target from Left and Right perspectives alike, but from the State apparatus, the regulatory mechanisms for the maintenance of social order from the top down. The historic strategy of maintaining a “low profile” in alien environments backfired. Unbridled from considerations of functioning social classes or even economic rationality, the State ferreted out its victims, and “cleansed” the nation of its “enemies.” In the process, it satiated the feeding frenzy of its Aryan citizens. The Jews were both victim and explanatory device for the Nazi State. Only the fortuitous death of Stalin, and the aborting of the so-called “Doctor’s Plot” of Jews against the regime, prevented a similar outcome from evolving in the Soviet Union. The State was the epicenter of genocide because it was the root of terrorism and totalitarianism alike. What made this a hard lesson to learn was the need to rethink the relationship of fascism to communism, to see them both as “right” and “left” aspects of totalitarianism. With the aid of the classic tradition in political sociology, especially the work of Max Weber and the no less classic, neo-Kantian tradition in legal philosophy as exemplified by Hannah Arendt, it was possible, nay necessary, to rethink fundamental fault lines. The process became simpler once the unitary character of anti-Semitism in Germany and Russia under its dictators became evident to all but the blind. In my case, the strange crossover careers of Hitler and Stalin made it necessary to further understand that these regimes were based on maximum terror, on taking lives.

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Here is where I believe I have made a fundamental contribution to the literature on the Holocaust: in the areas of social stratification in which Jews were either absent or poorly represented, most particularly in the bureaucracy and the military. Jews thus became vulnerable as scapegoats for whatever went wrong in the political establishment. The overestimation of the role of economy, combined as it was with the underestimating of the role of the State as an instrument of policy, created a dangerous situation that was to enable demagogues and extremists to lay the blame for whatsoever went wrong at the feet of the Jews. They could be blamed for being bourgeois exploiters of people, and at the very same instance, blamed for being rabble-rousing agitators goading these same masses to antigovernment protests and riots. A deep source of genocide in general and of the Holocaust in particular, is the ability of the holders of state power to demonize a group, expose their vulnerabilities, and isolate them from potential allies and supporters. By their estrangement from the levers of state and military power, the Jews, for all of their vaunted historical capacity to survive adversity, found themselves in an impossible situation: without legitimization and without the means to defend themselves. The search for sociological and objective rather than psychological and subjective sources of genocide became a prime mission reflected in my book Taking Lives: State Power and Mass Murder (Horowitz, 1980). What pushed me in this direction was the twin exaggerations of genocide studies: on one hand, the personal narrative which explained survival techniques and torture better than the systematic destruction of people; on the other hand, theological discourse that presumed teleological explanations for Jewish tragedy as something “fore-ordained” by a turn away from Talmud and Providence. My personal no less than professional need was to make sense of genocide as part of the theory of the relationship between the behemoths of state and society, that is, a function of the system of governance that not only permitted but mandated racial warfare and religious hatred. The study of the Holocaust also stimulated in some a notion of quantification in the measure of the quality of political and social orders. Thus, my work in this area was self-perceived not simply as an exercise in memory recovery but an exploration in social scientific method and theory. We have too long taken for granted the nobility of science and social science in and of itself. But it now becomes clear that a vast

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army of psychologists, physicians, lawyers, demographers, and even anthropologists maintained their loyalty to the Nazi government. Indeed, a huge and unexplained anomaly is how the Holocaust could be conducted by that nation boasting the highest levels of education, the most advanced institutes of research, and cultural traditions that were linked to emancipation and enlightenment. So it becomes evident, to me at least, that the task of social science and social research does not stop with the collation of data or the presentation of theories. It does carry a moral component. But that component can only be exercised by intellectuals and academics acting as a class for and of itself, not as lap dogs for any particular political power or social ideology. To be sure, the perfume of power, the exhilaration of standing in the national limelight defined by others, was and remains itself an element in genocidal practice, no less than critical research. The search for the fine line between science and values is endless. But the pursuit of genocide by totalitarian regimes sharpens that line. I mean by this that the thin line between the taking of life and all other forms of mischief of which statist regimes are capable, even the best of them, thickens the line. My work has increasingly come to rest on distinguishing varieties of anti-democratic regimes from the unique regimes that have practiced genocide. This may not be a pleasant distinction, but it is a useful one as a guideline through the dark voyages into state power. My primary aim in this field has been to show genocide as part of a general theory of violence; or more broadly, the capacity of unbridled state power to utilize violence against a specific group in order to secure and maximize its own autonomous realm of operations. Once seen in this light, the study of genocide is an extreme end of the continuum involved in war and peace studies. The breakthrough here was made my dear friend, R. J. Rummel, of the University of Hawaii. He has demonstrated, in method and theory, how anti-democratic states are the unique carriers of the poison of genocide. And conversely, that democratic states are the societies that embody anti-genocide premises and principles. In my capacity as editorial director at Transaction Publishers, we were able to promote his work and indeed publish his final six books. This kind of work, when combined with studies of terrorism and violence of earlier researchers like E. V. Walter of Brandeis University and Walter Laqueur of Georgetown University, provides a framework to bring genocide studies back home, that is back to the world of social science re-

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search—where they stand the best chance of being understood and basically overcome. Genocide is not only a problem of power, it is a fact of numbers; and social scientists should know how to count and interpret “raw data.” To permit the study of genocide to become the exclusive domain of theologians and psychoanalysts is to return such studies to selfinflated and not always accurate memoirs of events now considerably long past. This is not to deny the place of a theologically centered and autobiographical witness literature; it is to note that such efforts are starting points, not ending points of sound scholarship and social research. It is difficult to speak of matters of death and mean-spirited brutality in clinical and objective terms. But to do otherwise is to remove this enormous characteristic of the century to the realm of the personal, the unspeakable, and ultimately, the mystical. Whatever else social science is or should be, it must always be in the realm of what one can rationalize and generalize. There are altogether too many social scientists quite pleased to avoid confronting the issue of genocide as a critical test of the very worth of the social sciences. That cannot be permitted, not only as a matter of human responsibility, but as a matter of improving the analytical ground on which we share a common ground. The preservation as well as presentation of human life is a sociological imperative. In this regard, one of the major efforts I have made in relation to the study of genocide is the publication of outstanding works by others that illumine the field. Transaction Publishers has in the course of its 37-year plus history published a fundamental series of works on the Armenian genocide, including efforts of Ephraim K. Jernazian, Richard G. Hovaniassian, Anny Bakalian, Jacques Derogy, and Vakhan Dadrian. We have published the collective efforts of the aforementioned R. J. Rummel, itself a landmark in the study of genocide and its relationship to contemporary totalitarian regimes from China to Russia; major works by Jewish and Israeli scholars on genocide in comparative geographical as well as ideological contexts, including the work of Israel W. Charny, Donald J. Dietrich, Iwona IrwinZarecka, William Helmreich, and Daniel Elazar. More recently, we have published works on the medical and legal aspects of genocide by Kurt Jonassohn, Howard Adelman, and Mark Osiel that extend the boundaries of our understanding of the relationship of professional life, moral standards, and legitimizing devices that the State has at its command in the conduct of annihilation. In short, in recent

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years, my concerns have turned from a personal effort at scientific analysis to publishing the best and the brightest scholars working in this area. Having said this, I should make clear that my publishing activities were not uniquely focused on genocide, but on the social sciences as a whole and of which the study of state power and state terror is a part. But it is precisely that phrase, genocide as part of the fabric of social life, which sets our publishing house as unique and distinct in the field of international social science. In the early 1980s, I also became heavily involved in the efforts of the Armenian National Assembly, more directly as a member of the board of the Zoryan Institute. Although my understanding of the Armenian genocide was relatively weak in the early 1970s, my references to its similarities and antecedents to the Holocaust were evident. And I began to write increasingly on such continuities and discontinuities, especially as issues about the uniqueness of the Holocaust came to the fore. While I recognize the special features of the Nazi assault on the Jewish people, I also felt that it was dangerous to exaggerate the uniqueness of the destruction. The rising tide of interest led to an expansion of victimology as an ideology, one that displaced real analysis with the mantle of self-immolation—a dangerous form that substituted sentimentality for analysis and personal narratives for systematic study. My later work on the Armenian condition, which was later to involve a trip in the mid-1990s to Yerevan in Armenia and Moscow in Russia, provided a comparative framework—one that emphasized prospects for survival and growth of a victimized people without basking in the sunset of defeat. By going to Armenia, I was able to appreciate the degree to which the people of that nation and ethnicity had moved considerably beyond reflecting on the past, and were attempting to fashion a democratic state in a hostile environment— not entirely unlike the Israeli effort to fashion a Jewish state in a Moslem world. Here, too, was an ancient civilization coupled with a modern state. And here also was a religious entity surrounded by Islamic theological-political structures. There are, to be sure, profound differences in levels of economic development. It is one thing to have a British mandate, quite another to be of a decaying Soviet empire. The more I examined the issues, the more it became evident that the business of genocide involved more than professional examination. It entailed a set of personal decisions. Indeed, I say without

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fear that my three major “passions” of research in foreign policy— Israel, Armenia, and Cuba—involve a basic struggle for human decency. Small nations are often litmus cases for big issues. And even though the dictatorship of Fidel Castro is in no way commensurate with the horrors inflicted by Nazi secret service agents or Turkish military officers, it is of a piece with the general consideration that to struggle against genocide is to struggle for democracy. I realized through personal involvement that nation-building imposes its own strict rules of survival, and that having been victims of genocide is no sure guarantee of democratic outcomes or error-free political judgments. This is as true of Armenia with respect to Azerbaijan as it is of Israel in relation to Lebanon. This is a hard lesson for all of us working in genocide studies: politics trumps history. Now that the issue of genocide is on the international docket of ideas, we need studies in a variety of fields to settle old issues and lead the way to new paradigms. Among the highest and thorniest issues in my opinion are the following, in no particular order of importance: (1) The relationship of warfare to genocide. (2) The relationship of civil strife and ethnic conflict to genocide, i.e., the systematic elimination of one part of those involved in strife in favor of another. (3) A more exact sense of the distinction between major genocides and whether they can also be described as “Holocausts,” i.e., what sort of numbers are involved in each. (4) Why is it that certain forms of totalitarian regimes are non-genocidal and others genocidal, i.e., Italy under Mussolini in relation to Germany under Hitler? Are these differential outcomes the consequence of differential cultural inputs? (5) What price does one place on a life after the fact, namely payments to families of those destroyed in genocidal conditions? (6) What is the degree to which international law is an operational reality or a fiction with respect to the punishment of those who carry out specifically heinous forms of destruction? (7) Does the introduction of notions of cultural genocide enhance or degrade the study of mass physical murder? (8) And finally, is there is a continuum of means and ends in terminating genocidal regimes? More specifically, can the bombing and decimation of an “evil” regime be viewed as a good, without regard to the damage inflicted on the innocents of the offending nation? These are just some themes that might lend themselves to social scientific analysis. There are other questions, such as the degree to which it is permissible or impermissible to save oneself at the ex-

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pense of others in situations of ultimate desperation, the type of issues with which religious and secular law must wrestle. Even framing concerns in these terms makes it evident that the study of genocide entails an examination of the dark side of human nature as well as unbridled State power. The issues can never be fully resolved or even addressed to universal satisfaction. Even if we can develop a broad consensus at the general level, students of genocide will need to account for specific variations in grounded conditions. Alas, with Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and, most recently, Kosovo as “case studies” in the present period, we do not lack for confirmation of general propositions or for individual differences in concrete historical settings. But we can move on a variety of fronts: educational, cultural, and analytical to heighten an awareness of the preconditions of genocide. As others have pointed out, we need early warning signals and systems in place, and we need the policy resolve to address and redress such situations. However, by no means, does this imply that every situation will or can admit of solution through direct intervention. Nor can it be asserted that every situation will be resolved in a pacific manner. To appreciate the limits of analysis is to understand the finite capacities of human nature as such. And that is why the voices of silence will always have their say in the study of genocide. We stand in awe of our staggering accomplishments over the course of the twentieth century, and in the abyss of deeper despair over our failures to create a humane society. Having said this, we must also deal with quotidian events that do not admit of easy distinctions between good regimes and evil states. At the end of the day is a sense that ours is a tragic century in moral terms and an exhilarating one in technological terms. But we still have yet to learn how to match ethics and engineering. Until we do, the danger of genocide is haunting, while the policy tasks ahead are daunting. References Horowitz, Irving Louis (1990). Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections of a Harlem Childhood. Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi. Horowitz, Irving Louis (1974). Israeli Ecstasies and Jewish Agonies. New York and London: Oxford University Press.

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16 Leo Kuper: A Giant Pioneer Israel W. Charny Introduction Would that this chapter on Leo Kuper be autobiographical, as are the other chapters in this volume by pioneering scholars of genocide. I miss Leo Kuper on the most personal level, as a man I loved, and I miss him as the leader and doyen of scholarship in genocide studies that he was for the emerging field of genocide scholarship. As will be seen in the description of his most influential work, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, which first appeared in London, and then in the U.S. (Kuper, 1981a), Leo Kuper was probably the first scholar to bring together for a worldwide interdisciplinary readership a theoretical model of the causes and unfolding of genocide embedded within and accompanied by a panorama of case histories and analyses of genocide in a wide-ranging variety of countries and regions. While some earlier scholars had labored in their descriptions of individual cases of genocide at extracting theoretical overviews that might be applicable to other cases of genocide, Leo was already resolutely on the search for a universal model that would be open to the scenario variations of individual cases in different historical and cultural contexts, but would also resonate the inherent universality of our species’ tragic availability to be so incredibly destructive of human life. As noted, Leo undertook the considerable intellectual challenge and tension of becoming knowledgeable of a wide variety of cases of genocide, which he reported in detailed depth to his readers. The only writer preceding Leo who, 267

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for me, conveyed this kind of broad-based knowledge of multiple nationalities, polities, and cultures was the indomitable father of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, and, sadly, in Lemkin’s case this is largely to be seen in his unpublished writings (see Jacobs 1992, 1999). But it was more than the noteworthy admirable scholarship that Leo achieved that, in my opinion, made him the true leader of genocide studies in the world. While forever a gentle man in his manner, and modest in his ease of appearance and participation in the academic word, there was simultaneously a communication emanating from Leo of concern for the whole world in which we lived and a firm resolution to seek new ways for impacting effectively on the real life of this world to intervene in genocidal situations and to prevent genocide. Speaking with Leo about genocide scholarship was not an exercise in academics so much as it was learning from and sharing with a spiritual leader who was forever seeking new constructs and methods to bring about change in the real world. While there were occasions that his own personal emotions as a human being came to the fore in degrees of pique and annoyance, and certainly incredulity about the uncaring of so many human institutions or leaders, and obstructionism to new ideas (see Kuper, 1990d), basically and largely, Leo Kuper’s tenor and spirit bespoke a profound spiritual commitment to seek to protect human lives. There was a kind of holiness about him, certainly a basic disinterestedness as far as normal academic and intellectual politics, notoriety and economic gain were concerned, and the result was that the emerging scholars in the young field of genocide studies flocked to him naturally for his guidance, consultation, and support. Leo’s office at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and his home were the natural meeting points for scholars from all around the world who had become inspired to seek to understand the causes of genocide and to think about means of intervention and prevention. Today while our field of genocide studies has grown immeasurably to a level of mature productivity, and we have any number of fine major scholars whose works constitute them as leaders in the field, I personally doubt that to date anyone has replaced Leo in the combination of personal and scholarly leadership that he provided this field, and the commitment of his total being to advancing humankind’s battle against genocide. For me, Leo Kuper first came to my attention through a worried message from my editor of my then-forthcoming book, How Can

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We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide, the Human Cancer (Charny, 1982a). My editor, Lynne Rienner, who has gone on to become a major publisher in her own right, had been a profound support to me on the occasion of my earlier book on nonviolence, Strategies Against Violence (Charny, 1978), and was now fully rooting for me in the development of the book I was bringing to press on the psychology of man’s capacity to commit genocide, as well as on a proposal for a Genocide Early Warning System as a social-psychological or sociological-communications institutional mechanism for reducing threats of incipient genocide. Lynne picked up from publishing sources that Leo Kuper’s book was on its way into print in the United States in 1982, the same year that my book was to appear. As a publishing person, she was concerned about the competition. For me, on the other hand, I was thrilled to learn of additional scholarship on the crazy, largely neglected subject of genocide, which seemed to me one of the overriding but neglected needs of mankind. Fortunately, too, perhaps thanks to the psychoanalysis I had enjoyed by then, I had decided that I must be careful in my professional life not to succumb to competitive and jealous emotions (even if they did make their natural appearance in my heart), and that it was better to celebrate the creativity and productivity of my colleagues alongside of my own, rather than as competitive to mine. And then, when I read Leo Kuper’s book (1981a), I learned that I was now in the hands of a master scholar and teacher from whom I had an enormous amount to learn about case histories of genocide that I had not studied sufficiently, as well as about a theory of process of genocide to which I too was aspiring to contribute from my thinking about early warnings, and that I could only benefit from the sharing and cross-fertilization. Once I became aware of Leo, it was clear to me that we needed to have him as one of the major leaders in the conference that I had been planning since 1979, which was to be a first International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide in Tel Aviv in June, 1982 (Charny & Davidson, 1983; Charny, 1984). I invited Leo to be one of the major Section Leaders, and he accepted, and we were looking forward to working together in the conference in June, 1982. As 1982 came in, and I awaited the publication of my own book in the Spring, Amnesty International decided to invite three consultants on genocide to a meeting in Amsterdam that was devoted to extra-judicial executions that was taking place in April of that year.

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The three consultants that Amnesty had identified were Leo, Irving Louis Horowitz (see Horowitz, 1976), and myself, and so it was at the Amnesty meetings in Amsterdam that I first met Leo in person. Barely two months later, Leo and I met once again in Tel Aviv for the aforesaid conference. This conference was marked by tremendous pressures from the Turkish government, and then from the Israeli government in response to the Turkish government, first to eliminate speakers on the Armenian Genocide, and then to close the whole conference down because we refused to eliminate the speakers on the Armenian Genocide (Charny, 1983). It was in the context of this process that I saw that I had earned Leo’s personal respect for me as a person who could be counted on to stand up for the values we shared, and my inner sense, which was to prove right, was that from this point on we would be life-long friends with a special sense of closeness. Fortunately, much of my wife’s family resides in Los Angeles, and in the years to follow we found ourselves in Los Angeles any number of times, each of which gave an occasion for a meaningful and extended visit to Leo’s home. In addition, slowly but surely, as the world of scholarship of genocide developed, Leo and I would meet at different venues of conferences to which we were both invited, such as a conference in Paris in 1998 sponsored by the local Armenian community on the Armenian Genocide and genocide worldwide; and the first Raphael Lemkin symposium on genocide at Yale University Law School in the dramatic year of 1991—when I had to tear myself away from my home in Israel while Saddam Hussein’s missiles continued to fall on our country, in order to participate in this auspicious symposium which was breaking new ground on legal definitions and the sociology of genocide (see Charny, 1994b). Leo and I also cooperated on a great many projects. He assisted me personally in my handling of the chapters on the study of genocide and on prevention of genocide in the first volume of Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review (Charny, 1988a,b); and he honored us by writing the foreword to the second volume (Kuper, 1991a). In the international newsletter which our Institute (the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide) produced during the ten year period 1985-1995, the Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide (Internet, 1985), he became a contributing editor, writing a regular column. In his last years, when his own creative energies and capacities were limited by illness and decline, Leo was nonetheless the

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committed listener and forever wise counsel to the plans that I would bring him for our continuing work in Jerusalem, let alone a person whom I wanted to visit with my heartfelt message of caring for him. Biography Leo Kuper, considered by many the world’s foremost scholar of genocide, passed away at age eighty-five in Los Angeles on May 23, 1994. Born in Johannesburg on November 24, 1908, he practiced law in South Africa until the Second World War. He served in the British South African Intelligence in WW II with the Eighth Army in North Africa and Italy. After the war he organized the National War Memorial Health Foundation, which provided social and medical services for the disadvantaged. In 1948 he began to train as a sociologist, first at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then with Charles Madge at Birmingham University, where he wrote a pioneering study of urban planning, Living in Towns (Kuper, 1953), based on research in Coventry. In 1952 he returned to South Africa as professor of sociology at the University of Natal in Durban. He was active in opposition politics and became chairman of the Natal branch of the Liberal Party. He wrote two classic studies on South African society, Passive Resistance in South Africa (Kuper, 1956), and An African Bourgeoisie (Kuper, 1965), both of which were banned by the government, and with two colleagues, Watts and Davies, Durban: A Study in Racial Ecology (Kuper et al., 1958). 1952 was the time of “The Defiance of Unjust Laws” campaign organized by the Indian National Congress and the African National Congress. Leo’s wife, Hilda, who, herself, was appointed a lecturer in anthropology (and later, an eminent anthropologist on the faculty of UCLA), long-ago recounted how during the period of heightening tensions there were spies at the university, including one they knew in Leo’s department. With wry humor, she described how once when she was lecturing, “a suspicious-looking character came to listen,” and how she took great pleasure in describing in her lecture the songs of ridicule of the Eskimo. From Natal, he moved in 1961 to the University of California in Los Angeles where he was professor of sociology and also served for some years as director for the African Studies Center. By this time, Leo’s further writings included: The College Brew, a satirical novel set in an apartheid tribal university (Kuper, 1960?); Pluralism in Africa (Kuper and Smith, 1969); Race, Class and Power

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(Kuper, 1974); and The Pity of It All: Polarisation of Racial and Ethnic Relations (Kuper, 1977). He received the Herskovits award for An African Bourgeoisie, and the Spivak Fellowship from the American Sociological Association for contributions to the study of group relations. His work on Africa was hailed as “a most penetrating analysis of contemporary race relations... The most valuable part is the section on revolutionary change, and Professor Kuper’s suggestions as to how subordinate groups can effect changes in their relationships with dominant groups.” A New Statesman review asserted: “His work is marked by a peculiar sweetness of tone, a kind of patient rationality...and really makes clear the issues of race, pluralism and change in Africa as a whole.” In 1981 Leo Kuper published what is considered his major and seminal work, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (Kuper, 1981a), by Penguin in London and Yale University Press in the United States, in which, more than any previous writer had done, he articulated the common theme of “the odious scourge” of genocide in a variety of societies, writing about each compassionately and analytically, and broke new theoretical ground towards a classification of different types of genocide. The review in the Times Literary Supplement commented that: “If there were a peace prize for sociologists, it should be awarded to him.” Other reviews hailed the work as “perceptive, original, and compelling,” and as “the definitive work on this subject.” This book was followed in 1985 by The Prevention of Genocide in which Leo Kuper analyzed critically the major obstacles to effective UN action against genocide and the possibilities that still remain available for United Nations preventive action. He offered specific strategies for activity both within and outside the United Nations. For example, he recommended that a technical advisory service be created to assist governments to respond to claims for self-determination, and that early warning systems be established that would monitor events around the world. Throughout his painful work on a grim subject of great tragedy, Leo Kuper remained a positive, optimistic intellectual and activist. Quietly gentle yet resolutely committed to the triumph of reason and decency over the primitivism of genocide, he was a deeply admired and beloved leader in the emerging field of genocide studies, in scholarship on human rights and in the traditional academic disci-

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pline of sociology. “I am not pursuing analysis simply in its own right,” he wrote at one point. “It is subsidiary to the main purpose, which is to devise strategies for the prevention of genocide.” Leo Kuper was a founding and long-time member of the international Council of the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem, a contributing editor to its publication, Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide (Internet, 1985), to which he regularly contributed critical commentaries in the field of genocide studies, along with contributions to the first two volumes of the Institute’s encyclopedic series, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review (Kuper, 1988, 1991a; see also Charny, 1994a, and Krell and Sherman, 1997). Not the least of Leo Kuper’s efforts to make a real difference in the world in fighting back against genocide was his very real effort to create an international organization against genocide, International Alert, which he helped found with Lord Young of Darlington, and to which he helped bring the great Martin Ennals, who had led Amnesty International to its eminence as a Nobel Prize winning organization. Ennals agreed with Kuper that Amnesty’s failure to define mass killing within the purview of its goals left a gap too serious to be ignored, and Ennals agreed to leave the secure flourishing world of Amnesty to become the first secretary-general of the new struggling International Alert. (Unfortunately, Martin Ennals was to die in 1991 a premature death before he had succeeded in bringing International Alert very much towards its goal.) Upon his death, Leo was survived by daughters Jenny and Mary, and grandchildren Joe, Sam Pablo, and Ellie in London, and many loving family members, friends, and colleagues. In an appreciation of Leo Kuper written by a nephew, Adam Kuper (1994), he wrote: His studies were full of subtle and sophisticated argument, based on careful empirical research and written with elegance, but it was a moral commitment that drove him on. Kuper contemplated the bleak South Africa of his day without illusions, but without despair. Some of his major works were banned by the Nationalist government, and he was later venomously attacked by advocates of political violence, but he never wavered in his commitment to the liberal principles that co-operation was better than polarisation, that argument and if necessary passive resistance were to be preferred to revolutionary violence, and that civil institutions, that brought people of different groups together in co-operative enterprises, provided the most effective counter to racial division. He was one of the few to argue in the darkest days of apartheid that a social basis existed in South Africa for a peaceful transition to a democratic society, a consummation that was achieved in the last month of his life.

Adam Kuper has also provided some additional biographical details about Leo that are worthy of note. More specifically, he ob-

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serves that Leo was raised in an orthodox Jewish family. He studied for the BA and LLB degrees at the University of the Witwatersrand and practiced law until World War II, acting in human rights cases for African clients and representing one of the first non-racial trade unions. Also, he supported his sister Mary when she helped to establish the first legal aid charity in South Africa. Adam Kuper has described how Leo Kuper rose to face the impositions of the South African National Party on academics, and then years later how violent death struck in Leo’s own family in South Africa: “When the National Party forced the universities to impose a racial test on entry, Kuper wrote a bitter satire on the new tribal colleges, and despite the urgings of his friend Alan Paton he reluctantly decided to emigrate. In 1961 he accepted a position at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he remained until his retirement, serving for four years as director of the African Studies Center. In 1963 his brother, my father, a judge in South Africa, was murdered, and Leo’s commitment to peaceful social change became yet firmer. He published ground-breaking theoretical accounts of race and ethnic relations in plural societies, and then moved on to the great problem of genocidal violence.” Adam Kuper also notes that “Leo drove himself very hard, because he knew that there were not many scholars who could bear to contemplate these terrible events. For 20 years he was dealing with crimes that challenge any faith, but though he turned against religion he never lost the hope that the great social evils might be mitigated through informed intervention. ‘If there was a Peace Prize for social scientists,’ Professor Michael Bantomn once wrote, ‘it would have been awarded first to Leo Kuper.’” Leo’s earlier work, Pluralism in South Africa (Kuper & Smith, 1969), his respectful appreciation of “Negritude” at a time when the white Western world was just awakening to the inequities being foisted on blacks in much of their domain, and blacks themselves were daring to formulate the first stage of appreciation of the beauty of blackness, and then his evaluation of how subordinate groups can effect changes in their relationships with dominant groups, were major contributions to a sociology of racial-ethnic processes. Leo’s work on Race, Class and Power (Kuper, 1974) was hailed by the British Book News as “Most penetrating...extremely useful...and an outstanding contribution. No one in the field of racial studies can afford to be without it.” A reviewer in the Journal of Modern African Stud-

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ies said that Leo’s work would “set the tone of research” in the area of “racial studies for some time to come.” The Pity of It All (1977) Slowly but surely, Leo was developing a theory of genocide even as he was extending his observations to more and more societies. In 1977, Leo published The Pity of It All: Polarisation of Racial and Ethnic Relations. In it, he examines four societies on the African continent, Algeria, Rwanda, Burundi, and Zanzibar during the period of decolonization, and in the case of Burundi also during the period following independence. More than an important narrative and analysis of events in each of these societies, Leo formulated basic principles of the process of genocide, including the concept of a point of no return and how it takes place in the unfolding of the processes set off by ideologies of polarization. “The state of polarization, in its most extreme form, is indeed one in which there is no longer the possibility of understanding, of dialogue, of adjustment of interests. Evolutionary programs of reform have broken down, and there has been an elimination of the middle ground which might have offered a social basis for policies of reconciliation.” (p. 9) Brilliantly, Leo tracks the process, for which he has borrowed— with appreciation from René Lemarchand—a concept of “the logic of an ‘infernal machine,’ a situation in which challenge provokes repression, terrorism, counter-terrorism, until there is no longer the possibility to compromise with the adversary.” (p. 9) In a steady manner that builds to convey the incredible drama of large-scale human destruction, Leo describes how a society becomes divided into two mutually exclusive hostile camps, where the ideologies associated with the divided camps proclaim the irreconcilability of goals. Moreover, he picks up how the most infernal destructive forces dress themselves up in illusory claims of bringing reforms for the betterment of human life and society, and how they are cast as the agents of no less than real justice. Leo describes how the violence becomes endemic; isolated atrocities, terrorism and counter-terrorism build to what Jean-Paul Sartre (1968) called “a holocaust of violence,” or repeated sequences of massacre and counter-massacre, to “a point of no return” (p. 10), and then “a final solution is attempted or achieved by genocide.” (p. 10) The polarization may be planned and manipulated, or it may be an inevitable outcome of the process set in motion. “Polarisation may be a deliberate policy,

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or an unpremeditated consequence of strategies pursued. There are certain clichés of action, almost involuntary idiomatic actions, which feed into the process of polarisation. Action and reaction, premeditated and involuntary, may so intermesh as to move violence to higher levels of destruction through escalating cycles of polarisation.” (p. 127) The beginnings of genocide are often innocent with a genuine commitment to reform, and indeed a process of reform and reconstruction of society may be successfully and hopefully underway; but if, as so often happens, the reform does not gather sufficient momentum, and/or the forces committed to revolutionary violence (which by necessity pit themselves against the success of the reform movement) prevail, a deadly chain of circumstances is set in motion. The “missed opportunities” (p. 65) of reform now move towards a “point of no return” (p. 65)...“in which the failure of petitions and of submissions of constitutional approaches finally leads to the decision to engage in violence, as offering the only possibility left open for radical change” (p. 66), and finally, there is “no exit” or “polarisation in extremis.” (p. 87) Leo was sensitively and painfully attuned to the sense of justification that attends the launching of violence. The beleaguered, besieged justice-seeking people are convinced that they have tried everything. “For subordinate groups, the essential elements are first the alleged failure of non-violence. This rests on the assertion that the subordinates have explored all possible forms of non-violent action without success, and that there are no constitutional channels for change.” (p. 114) And the ruling groups on their part “simply laugh at nonviolence...and they are impervious to moral and reasoned appeals. Their domination rests on violence, they respond by violence to nonviolence.” (p. 115) The arguments for the necessity of violence are supplemented by tactical and strategic considerations. Only violence will be effective for raising political consciousness, it is argued. Violence will forge unity. “Necessity and justification are interwoven. If violence is necessary to freedom, then violence is morally justified, assuming, that is, the overriding value of a state of freedom. If there is an historical necessity for revolution, if revolution is the midwife of history, then violence is not only a necessary part of the historical process, but again morally justified. What unspeakable atrocities of tyranny and

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torture have been committed in the name of freedom or of historical necessity, how many millions slaughtered under their banner!” (pp. 115-116) Wisely, sociologist Leo Kuper undertook to speak of the huge great truths of human history of major and mass destruction; sensitively, with pain and moral protest, he describes the characteristic unfolding of events; scientifically, he began to lay down a sense of the orderly, frequently repeated, trans-cultural process. Indeed, Leo captured the hypnotic, self-justifying inevitability of the escalation of violence being justified by one people after another, and he cried out (in this case in connection with an analysis of genocide in Burundi): “Is another cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism, of massacre and counter-massacre inevitable? Is there no other way? Is there no escape from the deadly embrace of ethnic hatreds?” (p. 107) There is a subtle tension of incompleteness to Leo’s movement in this work between concrete analysis of specific societies and his development of an emerging theory of genocide. One senses at times that Leo, humble and careful scholar that we knew him always to be, is holding himself as if to theorize about one of the specific societies he is describing rather than daring to formulate a proposal for a broad trans-cultural theory of genocide; but in fact his wise observations and theorizing about a given society are inevitably leading to new concepts that will yet prove to be relevant for a great many societies. Certainly this book about four societies does achieve a full-blown level of theoretical generalizability of the subject of polarization with “two antagonist groups with incompatible and irreconcilable interests, rendering inevitable the resort to violence. In its extreme form, polarisation is marked by mounting violence and atrocious holocaust.” (p. 128) The process is “embedded in the structure of society, in the nature of the situation, in the concepts of authority, and in the exigencies of the struggle. Particularly conducive to violent and extreme polarisation are systems of domination, in which a relatively small minority rules over large numbers of subordinates of different culture, who are not integrated into the dominant society, but remain from the perspective of the rulers, a largely anonymous mass.” (p. 139) The most basic process, Leo insists, is the reciprocity of violence, where violence begets violence. With the passion of the prophet,

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and the eloquence of the poet, Leo Kuper cries out, “The extreme of aggregating and polarising violence is reached when violence blindly attacks men, women and children engaged in innocent pursuits; when it kills or mutilates in total disregard for position or direct involvement in the struggle, identifying its victims solely as members of the opposing group; when it strikes suddenly, unpredictably, terrifyingly, injecting the fear and horror of unspeakable anguish into the daily routine of living. The ultimate point is the point at which the reciprocities of violence create an irreversible situation, a point of no return.” (pp. 144-145) One of the most devastating conclusions Leo reaches is that the prospects for the middle ground by moderates bent on reform are often weaker than the inevitability of escalations of polarization of violence. “By the middle ground, I refer to those relationships between people of different racial, religious or ethnic background, and those ideologies, which might form the basis for movements of intergroup cooperation and of radical change, without resort to destructive violence. Where the carriers of these ideologies are significant in number or power, the process of polarisation requires that they be appreciably recruited or coerced into one or other of the warring camps, and that the irreducible minority is either silenced or eliminated, at the same time that its ideologies of conciliation are discredited.” (p. 209) Presaging his calls for international intervention in work that would be done some years later, Leo observes, “In the absence of intervention, there would seem to be no possibility of escape from the interminable reciprocities of massive violence. With intervention, as by the United Nations, it might conceivably be possible to launch regional projects or to establish, and to maintain, a heavily policed separation: but given the policies the great powers pursue of battening on divided societies, the probability is that the great powers will stoke the conflict, in the hope of securing some perhaps quite illusory gain.” (p. 243) Note that in this work, Leo has specifically excluded situations of major disproportionate power such as between the Turks and their Armenian victims or the Nazis and their Jewish victims, and has sought to describe the emergence of violence in a pluralistic society where there are more equal antagonistic forces pitted against each other. “The basic process underlying these cycles of polarisation is the reciprocity of violence...a great multiplier of acts of violence [that] establishes routines of violence and of atrocity. Routinisation

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raises the level of violence by encouraging the resort to more extreme violence, as the routines become commonplace.” (p. 263) In this pioneering work, Leo has laid the groundwork for an understanding of genocide, a concept which we must remember was used very rarely in those years, and with a strange sense of unfamiliarity attending its infrequent use at the time. “The basis of genocide is the categorising of racial, ethnic or religious groups as targets for eradication.... By reason solely of membership in the group, men, women and children share an equal guilt to the death.... They fall outside the bounds of a common humanity, and hence outside the restraints on cruelty, atrocity and slaughter.” (p. 281) Originally a South African, he saw clearly in that country the moral and inevitable historical choice. He described the South African government’s offer of potentially independent Bantustans as a fraudulent policy that hardly answered the need for equality and entitlement of the Black Africans. Leo speculated whether the government of South Africa would “take the responsibility for much suffering and destruction of life? Or will it now be ready to open the society to the peoples it has oppressed for so long, and to affirm their common humanity?” (p. 286) International Action Against Genocide (1982) In 1982, Leo published a very instructive pamphlet entitled, International Action Against Genocide, in the sterling series of reports published by the Minority Rights Group of London, which was under the direction of Ben Whitaker, who was later to play a superb role as the special rapporteur of the United Nations Commission on Genocide and authored its report in 1985 (Whitaker, 1985; Internet, 1994). In a hard-hitting last section headed “Proposals for Action,” Kuper called for action both within the United Nations and outside the United Nations. Within the UN, he called for a new level of standard setting, new or supplementary institution building including the development of a machinery for the punishment of genocide, prevention of genocide such as through the agency of the High Commission of Human Rights, and implementation of complaints of genocide in UN bodies. “The most effective sanctions are those within the competence of the Security Council in situations which constitute a threat to the peace, or a breach of the peace. These include the interruption of economic relations and of communications, severance of diplomatic relations, recommendations to the General

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Assembly for the suspension or expulsion of the offending member State, and the use of armed force. They are clearly available for action against genocides perpetrated in the course of international war. But they could also be available in what would appear to be purely internal ‘domestic’ genocides.” (p. 14) Outside the United Nations, Kuper called on individual governments, preferably in cooperation with one another, to assert the right of humanitarian intervention whenever the UN failed to take action under its peacekeeping machinery, encourage the growth of international human rights organizations, including those who would demonstrate to the UN how campaigns might be conducted against genocide, the creation of extra-judicial trials on the lines of the Russell Tribunals investigation of the UN involvement in Vietnam, and the documentation of crimes of genocide—just as, Leo suggested, Simon Wiesenthal had documented crimes of genocide by the Nazis. Finally, Leo proposed an organization of International Alert: “From the point of view of public policy, and of humanitarian considerations, prevention of the crime, or action to restrain its destructive course, should be the primary objective, rather than its punishment.... In cases where there appeared to be an impending genocidal conflict, or where there were the first reports of mass murders, action would take the form of an International Alert. Genocidal conflicts generally involve governments, either as active agents or as condoning, or failing to take preventive action. The first step, then, would be that of representations to the offending government. If these should fail, then all possible means of pressure and persuasion would be brought to bear.” (pp. 14-15) Finally, Leo called for economic sanctions, “the sanctions which can be applied through public support, by means of economic boycotts, the refusal to handle goods to or from offending States, and selective exclusion from participation in international activities and events.” (p. 15) Genocide (1981a) Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (1981a) is probably the single most definitive book on the subject of genocide ever written, if only judging by its rate of appearance in the bibliographies of other scholarly works, and by the rate of its appearance— which continues unabated many years later—on reading lists in courses on genocide. Leo’s book was not the first in an absolute sense. Among others preceding him are the seminal work by the

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father of the concept of genocide, Raphael Lemkin (1944); the truly forward-looking pioneering volumes by Pieter Drost (1959); and the pioneering political science treatise by Irving Louis Horowitz (1976). What is outstanding about Leo’s work is that he combines a series of in-depth reports of a wide-ranging number of events of genocide with a major effort at conceptualization of the basic, underlying universal process through which genocide is spawned, organized, and effected. The range of cases that Leo treats conveys a metamessage of the widespread universal nature of genocide that attacks every continent and a broad selection of ethnicities, civilizations and polities. Add to that Leo’s examination of the process of genocide, seen not only from the point of view of its definition legally as the onerous crime that it is, but going beyond the political science aspects of the governance systems which allow, seek, and exploit genocide as ways of organizing their power to a broader view of the sociology of clashes between dominant and minority groups and one has—perhaps for the first time—an inviting look into the truth of the enormity of genocide as it is visited on the human race time and time and time again. Finally, there is in Leo’s writing, as in the person we knew, a rare combination of muted but deeply felt emotion about the tragedy and folly of destruction of precious human life, accompanied by a steady serious scholar who one senses one can trust as a relatively objective and fair compiler of information. One does not get a mixed feeling in reading Leo Kuper that perhaps the intellectual study of genocide becomes more alluring to the scholar and pioneer than the deep moral protest that formed the study to begin with. He begins his book with a chapter entitled “An Odious Scourge,” about which he says: “The word is new, the crime ancient. The preamble to the Convention on Genocide, approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations in December 1948, describes genocide as an odious scourge which has inflicted great losses on humanity in all periods of history.” (p. 11) What is guiding and driving Leo Kuper throughout is a dedication to human life—a categorical ethical imperative—that makes one feel good about his assemblies of information not being for fetishistic reasons, but for the beautiful purpose of advancing human life. How is one to write on the theme of genocide? And how to convey in a comparative study, or indeed in any study, the suffering and the cruelty? The very act of comparison is an affront. Should not each human evil be understood in its own terms? Yet even in

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the particular case, the enormity of the genocide seems to defy understanding. It is individual suffering which speaks to us most directly and meaningfully—the account of a survivor; the anguish of a mutilated baby; an Italian Consul’s despair as witness to an episode in the Turkish genocide against Armenians; a young boy’s first view of Auschwitz at the time of the German annihilation of Hungarian Jews; the narrative of a husband and wife moving from a Polish ghetto through the death camps to a heartbreaking reunion with their son. But I have been driven to this study by the realization that genocide is all too common in our own day, and that the organization charged with its prevention and punishment, the United Nations, responds with indifference, if not with condonation. It would seem that it can only be recalled to its duty by the mounting pressure of international opinion. (p. 9)

In one of its various editions (a paperback by Yale University Press), the cover of this book features the following “blurb” on top of the book title: 1915 800,000 Armenians 1933-45 6 Million Jews 1971 3 Million Bangladeshis 1972-75 1,000,000 Hutu “The Turkish Genocide Against the Armenians” is a full chapter—and one should remember that Leo’s book appeared at a time when an earlier effort by the United Nations to recognize the Armenian Genocide had been stricken down by the political forces that be, and Armenians were suffering grievously that their genocide was indeed the “forgotten genocide.” “The German Genocide Against Jews” also has a full length chapter devoted to it. And in addition to the Bangladesh and the Hutu who are featured on the cover of this edition, the author addresses the genocides of various peoples under Stalin, genocide in Indonesia, genocide in Cambodia, and genocide in Uganda. Finally, in a courageous tour de force, Kuper describes the intense prolonged conflicts, including ideological polarization, that characterized Northern Ireland and South Africa, yet notwithstanding the considerable destructiveness and violence in both societies the fact that both managed to remain “non-genocidal societies.” In his effort to understand how in these conflicts, which were also based on structural pluralism and, as previously mentioned, ideological

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polarization, there had been no escalation to full blown genocide, Kuper concludes as follows: “In cases of very sharp and destructive conflict in plural societies, the condition for non-genocidal conflict would seem to be the presence of an effective peace-keeping force, as in Northern Ireland, and the continuous pressure of international public opinion, as in South Africa.” (p. 209) What are the causes of this odious scourge? Leo emphasized in his observations the dangers that were inherent in a pluralistic society, especially when they were sensitized, exaggerated, and demonized through the process of dehumanization. “It would seem that the ideology may emerge after the massacres, as rationalization or as justification, rather than as warrant, but generally there would be ideas circulating which encourage the commission of genocide and the mobilizing of murderous mobs and of organized killers. The most widely held theory is that these ideologies act by shaping a dehumanized image of the victims in the minds of their persecutors.” (p. 85) Leo pointed out that, frequently, a grave paradox develops where the process of slaughter is also an outgrowth of, or at the least accompanied by, a great deal of idealism, and the idealistic utopian image is devoted to and becomes the rationalization for the massacre of the victim peoples. He notes that any number of observers of the human condition have warned us of the subversion of values and noble goals to the justifications of violence against those who do not hold the ideals one insists must be fulfilled. Thus, French philosopher Pascal, as cited by Pieter Drost says: “Jamais on ne fait le mal si pleinement et si gaiement que quand on le fait par conscience”; and the great British novelist-philosopher, Arthur Koestler (1978), observed, “We are thus driven to the unfashionable conclusion that the trouble with our species is not an excess of aggression, but an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.” Kuper summarizes definitively: “The combination of the highest ideals with massive slaughter is all too common. Indeed the high ideals often serve as warrant for massacre. Unfortunately there is a great deal of truth in the quotation from Pascal at the opening of this chapter, that men never surrender themselves to evil with more joyous abandon than in the service of a good conscience.” (p. 100) About the way genocides erupt, Leo Kuper observes: Some genocides have appreciable spontaneity, others are highly organized. There is probably always a measure of organization. What appears to be spontaneous may of

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course be organized, as in the inflaming and unleashing of mobs, for example, against the Ibos in Northern Nigeria, or against the Armenians in Turkey or the Tutsi in Rwanda. Related to this distinction is that between genocides which are centrally planned and executed, and those which take somewhat the form of mass social movements, or of a social process with the convergence of different strands, as in the extinction of many hunting and gathering peoples in the course of the advancing industrial exploitation of resources. The same type of genocide may take quite different forms. Thus the East European pogroms range from the seemingly spontaneous action of mobs to organized massacres by military forces, as in the Ukrainian pogroms launched by Petlura at the end of the First World War.” (p. 102)

In this book, Leo Kuper was the observing scientist we needed so badly at this stage of understanding the “disease-process” of genocide. He watches his “patients” and notes similarities and differences between them, carefully refraining from premature generalization, yet all the time straining towards the beginning of deductive conceptualizations. Leo’s book was hailed by the New York Times Book Review, Library Journal, and many others. The Virginia Quarterly Review called the book, “The definitive work on this subject.” It is a further tribute to Leo Kuper to look carefully at the books listed in his bibliography when his book appears in 1981 as a way of assessing how much—in truth, how little—had been done on the subject of genocide in the years preceding Leo’s work. No, Leo Kuper was not the sole originator nor the first pioneer. There are two dozen and more citations in his bibliography of groundwork for thinking about genocide. I have already referred to Lemkin’s seminal book on the Nazis in 1944—and there are other articles by Lemkin in the years following; to Pieter Drost’s two volumes in 1959; and to Irving Louis Horowitz’s 1976 volume. In addition, there are those thinkers about the Holocaust who, on one level or another, reach out from their anguish and scholarship about the Holocaust towards some aspects of a broader picture of man’s readiness to destroy en masse, as it had obviously been brought to expression in the Holocaust but in fact has appeared many times before in human history. Arendt’s classic, and seriously provocative, work on Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Arendt, 1969); Norman Cohn’s efforts to see the projection and ideological basis for persecution, Warrant for Genocide (Cohn, 1966); Helen Fein’s award-winning work seeking to understand the patterns of lawfulness and determinism and accounting for the differential rates of destruction of Jews in the Holocaust in different countries, Accounting for Genocide (Fein, 1979); Konrad Lorenz’s struggle to place human aggression in the perspective of

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knowledge of aggression among other forms of animal life, On Aggression (Lorenz, 1966); Eric Fromm’s struggle to create a psychology of human choice between good and evil, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (Fromm, 1973) are among the works which can hardly be minimized. And yet, none of these works, or others, achieve the kind of comprehensive overview of both a survey of a range of different case histories of genocide as well as an effort at a beginning theory of dynamic process through which genocide unfolds. The resulting work by Leo Kuper is an unforgettable text on genocide about the ubiquitous destructive evil that it is in human life. The Prevention of Genocide (1985) Leo’s last book was The Prevention of Genocide (Kuper, 1985). In it, he gave a scathing condemnation of the failures of the United Nations up until that point to protect people’s rights to life in respect of the murders of huge masses of people during the course of genocide. He chided the UN for its “history for the most part of inaction and evasion” (p. 7), and noted that “human rights enjoy so high a prestige in the deliberations of the United Nations that their violation is routinely defended in the rhetoric of human rights.” (p. 89) The UN was corrupted by a “cliché-ridden, and often unctuous, style of debate [that] heightens the impression of the hypocrisy.” (p. 89) Here, too, Kuper called for punishment of those who committed genocide and for diplomatic, trade, and other sanctions against offending states. He called for the extension of the United Nations Genocide Convention to the protection of political groups, and for the replacement of limited jurisdiction in crimes against humanity. He also looked ahead to the possibility of legal actions, such as suing for damages in respect of genocide, and espoused the creation of extra-judicial tribunals like the Russell Tribunals for evaluating guilt. Needless to say, Leo thought a great deal about and looked forward to the possibility of prevention of genocide some day. He commended the proposal for a Genocide Early Warning System by this author (Charny, 1982a, b; see also Charny, 1999), and called for a variety of measures to alert international public opinion and to exert pressure on offending governments. Hoping against hope, he called on the United Nations, especially the Security Council, to take action, but also looked to individual governments to take action, especially when the international system failed: “In three of the cases

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discussed in this book, murderous regimes were overthrown by outside intervention—in Pakistan by India, in Uganda by Tanzania, and in Kampuchea by Vietnam. All three cases could have been defended as humanitarian intervention.” (pp. 225-226) Leo Kuper recognized, pessimistically, that the proliferation of international warfare and the power of entrenched establishments in government, industry, and the military worked against the possible prevention of genocide, yet he held out to the last the hope that there would be a “massive grass-roots international peace movement, with the participation of influential political leaders” that would succeed in imposing restraint and prevent “an overwhelming threat of genocide, and indeed of omnicide, the extinction of our species.” (p. 228) Apropos, Leo Kuper was unambiguous in his opposition to nuclear destruction. Theological Warrants for Genocide: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (1990a) Towards the end of his life, Leo Kuper also devoted himself to a study of religious bases of genocide, what he called the “theological warrants for genocide” that were to be found in all the established religions (Kuper, 1990a). I remember discussing this work with him, and how excited he was by its intellectual and cultural significance for our civilization in its time-honored idolatries of religions as if all pure and beneficent when, in fact, they have also been the sources, contexts and agents of so much killing. (Note: In our Institute’s series, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, we had the experience several times of recruiting well-known scholars of theology to write a chapter on the life-supporting and life-destroying roles of religion, only to have the scholars drop out at the last moment, obviously because they could not bear to tell of institutional religion’s roles in destroying life. Leo knew from me in our conversations of each of these episodes. Only in the third volume of the series were we able to present a chapter on this subject by an anthropologist, Leonard Glick [1994].) Leo studied the texts of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and how they serve as justification or sanctification of ideologies of colonization, religious intolerance, and murder. The religious facilitation of genocide, he argued, is entirely comparable to secular ideologies which had justified mass murder, such as the “bio-racial ideology” developed by the Nazis, or the “apocalyptic vision of the liquidation

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of the bourgeoisie, and a historical process leading inexorably to the triumph of the workers’ ‘utopia’” (p. 353) in communism, or the indirection that is characteristic of capitalism in the face of mass deaths by the British government toward the Irish during the Great Famine of 1846-48. Leo thus presented the philosophy of the rightwing pro-fascist Israeli leader, Rabbi Meyer Kahane, as an example of a Jewish fundamentalist interpretation: “The Jewish people is the Chosen of God, unique and holy. Its right to the Holy Land of Israel derives not from favor or historical residence, but from title granted by the Builder and Owner...to serve the Jewish people, so that they have a distinct, separate place in which to fulfill their obligation under the Covenant. ‘There can be no others who freely live there, let alone share sovereignty and ownership.’ A religious creation, the State of Israel is the beginning of redemption with final messianic redemption dependent on faith.” (p. 360) Quoting an Israeli scholar, Kuper described the Kahane philosophy as a quasi-fascist one “in its anti-alien sentiment and racist symbology, in its propaganda and personality cult and in its legitimation of violence and the engagement of some of its followers in anti-Arab atrocities.” (p. 360) “Theological warrants for genocide, or other religious beliefs which might facilitate genocide, do not operate in isolation from the societal context. They interact. Thus the religious dispensations of the Catholic Church in medieval Europe created a social status for Jews which became a significant element in the genocidal massacres of the Peoples’ Crusades and in later persecutions, including the Holocaust.” (p. 375) Conclusion: The Significance of Leo Kuper for the Field of Genocide Studies As previously stated, following the passing of Raphael Lemkin, Leo Kuper was more than likely the true leader of genocide studies in the world. He earns this designation because of the breadth of his writings on the genocides of so many peoples, each of which he treated in admirable scholarly detail in its own right, even as he also worked towards creating a typology of different types of genocides and a conceptualization of the recurring processes which characterize the unfolding of genocide in different societies and eras. He also earns the designation of the world’s leading genocide scholar in his time because that was the role he truly played in the lives of countless genocide scholars. They respected, admired, and appreciated

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the genuineness and fineness of this man, and flocked to him to benefit from his wise counsel, encouragement, support—and most of all, his impassioned commitment to the necessity of civilization doing battle against genocide. It should be remembered that Leo Kuper’s life’s work took place in a period when there was very little scholarship on genocide as a universal problem that occurs time and time again in different ethnic, political, religious, and other contexts, and at a time when there were so few scholars and so few resources to support that first generation of genocide scholars. In short, Leo Kuper earned the deep respect of the first generation of pioneers of genocide studies, both as a great scholar, devoted humanist, and genuinely fine person. If Lemkin deservedly will always be remembered as the person who developed the term “genocide” and as the father of the U.N. Convention on Genocide but who did not have enough time to leave an appreciable written record to influence the field of genocide studies, Leo Kuper did leave a significant body of written contributions to the field even as he did not succeed in impacting on the real processes of society as strongly as he dreamed, although he did play a major role in influencing the report of the U.N. Whitaker Commission, and was a major figure in the conception of International Alert, both of which represent major signposts from which other developments in the battle against genocide (such as today’s U.N. Courts which try those who commit genocide and crimes against humanity) continue to evolve. Two Tributes to Leo Kuper Note: These two tributes to Leo Kuper by Helen Fein and Robert Melson appeared in a memorial to him in a Special Section of the Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide (1994), and are also reproduced in the entry on Leo Kuper in the Encyclopedia of Genocide (Charny, 1999). Helen Fein: I knew Leo Kuper for little over a decade through talks, bus rides and tours and beers and breakfasts during six conferences on three continents, with many phone calls and letters in between. We agreed on much, disagreed respectfully, and appreciated each other’s intelligence, integrity and commitment. His greatest foundational contribution was to go beyond the assumptions of the mainstream social sciences as in a sentence I fre-

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quently quote from Genocide (1981): “The sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of its sovereignty, the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres, against peoples under its rule, and that the United Nations, for all practical purposes, defends this right.” (p. 161) Another critical work was The Pity of It All (1977), exploring the roots and construction of genocidal massacres, which is still pertinent today. Leo was consistently modest, worldly-wise yet persistent in his plans to change the world, ironic, curious and caring about individuals as well as collectivities. My sadness [at his death] is tempered by reflection on how these virtues and habits can continue to sustain us. Robert Melson: Kuper was an engaged humanist. He could be scholarly and analytical, but his detachment was in the service of a deep commitment to help prevent genocide. His Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century has set the agenda for future discussion of the subject because he based his definition of genocide on the United Nations Convention and because he included the Holocaust in his analysis. Both these decisions were daring, controversial, but ultimately fruitful. The Genocide Convention was written by a committee of diplomats that was worried about the definition’s implications for state sovereignty. Yet Kuper based his own work on the UN’s definition because, as he said: “I do not think it useful to create new definitions of genocide, when there is an internationally recognized definition and a Genocide Convention which might become the basis for some effective action, however limited the underlying conception.” (Kuper, 1981, p. 39) He broadened the UN’s definition to include political groups and classes, which allowed him to cast his net more widely and to include cases that the UN would have otherwise neglected. His decision to stick with the UN definition but to enlarge its scope has enabled his work to remain fresh and relevant for contemporary policy analysis of recent instances such as Yugoslavia and Rwanda. His decision to include the Holocaust under the rubric of genocide remains controversial for some scholars who believe that the Holocaust was so unique that it cannot be compared. By identifying certain processes such as the dehumanization of the victim group that were at work in the Holocaust as well as in other instances of genocide, Kuper demonstrated not only that Holocaust can be compared but that comparison was enlighten-

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ing. Indeed, far from trivializing the Holocaust, Kuper helped to keep its memory alive by making its lessons instructive for other instances. In all, he hoped that his work would make a difference. I believe that his work as well as his hope was part of his legacy to us all. Note: I am grateful to acknowledge the considerable bibliographic assistance of Marc I. Sherman, M.L.S., Director of the Holocaust and Genocide Bibliographic Database at the Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide in Jerusalem. I also appreciate reviews of the manuscript by Leo Kuper’s daughters, Mary Kuper and Jenny Kuper, and especially by Adam Kuper, a nephew who had authored the obituary of Leo Kuper in The Independent, London, which was an important source of information, and who provided several helpful critical corrections to this manuscript. Selected Works of Leo Kuper Note: An effort has been made to assemble for this chapter as complete a bibliography of Leo Kuper’s writings as possible, particularly since we have not come across any comprehensive list of Leo Kuper’s publications. Readers who may have additional citations, or corrections, are invited to send them to the author for future editions of this work.—IWC Kuper, Leo (1953). Living in Towns. Selected Research Papers in Urban Sociology of the Faculty of Commerce and Social Science, University of Birmingham. London: Cresset Press. Kuper, Leo (1956). Passive Resistance in South Africa. London: Cape, 1956; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957, paperback 1960; New York: Kraus Reprint Co., 1971. Kuper, Leo; with Watts, Hilstan; and Davies, Ronald (1958). Durban: A Study ofRacial Ecology. London: Jonathan Cape; New York: Columbia University Press. Kuper, Leo (1960). The College Brew: A Satire. Durban, South Africa: Universal Printing Works. Kuper, Hilda, and Kuper, Leo (Eds.) (1965). African Law: Adaptation and Development. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kuper, Leo (1965). An African Bourgeoisie: Race, Class, and Politics in South Africa. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kuper, Leo, and Smith, M.G. (Eds.) (1969). Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Kuper, Leo (1969a). “Plural Societies: Perspectives and Problems.” In Leo Kuper and M.G. Smith (Eds.) Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 7-26. Kuper, Leo (1969b). “Some Aspects of Violent and Nonviolent Political Change in Plural Societies. A. Conflict and the Plural Society: Ideologies of Violence Among Subordi-

Leo Kuper: A Giant Pioneer 291 nate Groups.” In Leo Kuper and M.G. Smith (Eds.) Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 153-167. Kuper, Leo (1969c). “Some Aspects of Violent and Nonviolent Political Change in Plural Societies. B. Political Change in White Settler Societies: The Possibility of Peaceful Democratization.” In Leo Kuper and M.G. Smith (Eds.) Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 169-193. Kuper, Leo (1969d). “Ethnic and Racial Pluralism: Some Aspects of Polarization and Depluralization.” In Leo Kuper and M.G. Smith, M.G. (Eds.) Pluralism in Africa. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, pp. 459-487. Kuper, Leo (1970). “Continuities and Discontinuities in Race Relations: Evolutionary or Revolutionary Change.” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 10 (39): 361-383. Kuper, Leo (1971a). “Theories of Revolution and Race Relations.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 13 (1): 87-107. Kuper, Leo (1971b). “Political Change in Plural Societies: Problems in Racial Pluralism.” International Social Science Journal, 23 (4): 594-607. Kuper, Leo (1972). “Race, Class and Power: Some Comments on Revolutionary Change.” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 14 (4):400-421. Kuper, Leo (1974). Race, Class and Power: Ideology and Revolutionary Change in Plural Societies. London: Duckworth, 1974; Chicago, IL: Aldine Pub. Co., 1975. Kuper, Leo (Ed.) (1975). Race, Science and Society. Paris: Unesco Press; London: Allen and Unwin; New York: Columbia University Press. Kuper, Leo (1977). The Pity of It All: Polarisation of Racial and Ethnic Relations. London: Duckworth; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Kuper, Leo (1981a). Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. London: Penguin Books, 1981; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Kuper, Leo (1981b). South Africa: Human Rights and Genocide. Bloomington, IN: African Studies Program, Indiana University. Kuper, Leo (1981c). “Theories of genocide.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 4(3), 320-333. Kuper, Leo (1982). International Action Against Genocide. London: Minority Rights Group, Report No. 53. [pamphlet] Kuper, Leo (1984). “Types of Genocide and Mass Murder.” In Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press and London: Bowker Publishing, pp. 32-47. Charny, Israel W.; Davidson, Shamai; Felstiner, John; Kuper, Leo; Littell, Franklin; Somerville, John; and audience participants (1984). “Conference Summation Panel and Round Table.” In Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; & London: Bowker Publishing, pp. 373-388. Kuper Leo (1985). The Prevention of Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kuper, Leo (1988). “Other Selected Cases of Genocide and Genocidal Massacres: Types of Genocide.” In Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Genocide A Critical Bibliographic Review. London: Mansell Publishing; and New York: Facts on File, pp. 155-171. Kuper, Leo (1989a). “Biology as Destiny: The Scientific Mystifications of Medical Mass Murder: A Review of Robert N. Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, Issue 23, Special Supplement. Kuper, Leo (1989b). “The Prevention of Genocide: Cultural and Structural Indicators of Genocidal Threat.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, 12 (2), 157-173. Kuper, Leo (1990a). “Theological Warrants for Genocide: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.” Terrorism and Political Violence, 2 (3):351-379. Kuper, Leo (1990b). “The Genocidal State: An Overview.” In Pierre Van den Berghe (Ed.) State Violence and Ethnicity. Niwot, CO: University Press of Colorado, pp. 19-52.

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Kuper, Leo (1990c). “The Ukrainian Famine-1932-1933.” Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, Issue 24, Special Supplement. Kuper, Leo (1990d). “An Agonizing Issue: The Alienation of the Unique.” Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, Issue 27, Special Supplement. Kuper, Leo (1990e). “The Behemoths—Nuclear and Nazi: A Review of Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Markusen’s The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat. New York: Basic Books, 1990. Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, Issue 28, Special Supplement. Kuper, Leo (1991a). “Foreword.” In Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. Volume 2. London: Mansell Publishing and New York: Facts on File, pp. xxi-xvii. Kuper, Leo (1991b). “Genocide and the Technological Tiger.” Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, Issue 32, Special Supplement. Kuper, Leo (1991c). “When Denial Becomes Routine.” In a Special Issue (“Teaching About Genocide” edited by William Parsons and Samuel Totten) of Social Education, February, 55(2): 121-123. Kuper, Leo (1992a). “Reflections on the Prevention of Genocide” In Helen Fein (Ed.) Genocide Watch. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 135-161. Kuper, Leo (1992b). “The Comparative Study of Genocide.” In Joyce Freedman-Apsel and Helen Fein (Eds.) Teaching About Genocide: A Guidebook for College and University Teachers: Critical Essays, Syllabi and Assignments. Ottawa, Canada: Human Rights Internet on behalf of the Institute for the Study of Genocide, New York, pp. 9193. Kuper, Leo (1994). “Theoretical Issues Relating to Genocide: Uses and Abuses.” In George Andreopoulos (Ed.) Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 31-46. [Presented originally at the Yale University Law School Raphael Lemkin Symposium on Genocide, February, 1991.]

Archival Materials Kuper, Leo (1951-1993). Leo Kuper Papers. Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 8 boxes, 3 oversize boxes, 39 cartons and 1 oversize folder. Kuper, Leo (1952-1966). Leo Kuper Papers, 1952-1966. Photoduplication Dept., University of Chicago, 10 microfilm reels, negative, 35 mm. Kuper, Leo (1967). How Christian is South Africa? Los Angeles, CA: Pacifica Tape Library, 1 sound cassette (1 hr.): analog, 2-track, mono, plus program notes.

About Leo Kuper Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide (1994). Special Section: Leo Kuper, World’s Leading Scholar of Genocide, Dead at 85. Jerusalem, Israel: Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Double Issue 49-50, 8 pp. Encyclopedia of Genocide (1999). Edited by Israel W. Charny. Entry: “Kuper, Leo.” Santa Barbara, CA and Denver, CO, USA (December 1999); Oxford, UK (February 2000): ABC-CLIO Publishers, pp. 378-383.

Festschrift for Leo Kuper Van den Berghe, Pierre L. (1979). “The Liberal Dilemma in South Africa.” London: Croom Helm; New York: St. Martin’s Press.

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References Arendt, Hannah (1968). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland, OH: Meridian. Arendt, Hannah (1969). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1978). Strategies Against Violence: Design for Nonviolent Change. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Charny, Israel W. (1982a). How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide, The Human Cancer. In collaboration with Chanan Rapaport. Foreword by Elie Wiesel. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982. (Paperback version Genocide, The Human Cancer: How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? New York: Hearst Professional Books [William Morrow], 1983.) Charny, Israel W. (1982b). “Towards a Genocide Early Warning System.” In Israel W. Charny’s How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide, The Human Cancer. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, pp. 283-331. Charny, Israel W., and Davidson, Shamai (Eds.) (1983). The Book of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Book One. The Conference Program and Crisis. Tel Aviv: Institute of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide. Charny, Israel W. (1983). “The Turks, Armenians and Jews.” In Israel W. Charny and Shamai Davidson (Eds.) The Book of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide: Book One. The Conference Program and Crisis. Tel Aviv: Institute of the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide, pp. 269-315. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1984). Toward the Understanding and Prevention of Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press; and London: Bowker Publishing. [Selected Presentations at the International Conference on the Holocaust and Genocide]. Charny, Israel W. (1988a). “The Study of Genocide.” In Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. London: Mansell Publishing; & New York: Facts on File, pp. 1-19. Charny, Israel W. (1988b). “Intervention and Prevention of Genocide. In Israel W. Charny (Ed.). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. London: Mansell Publishing; & New York: Facts on File pp. 20-38. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) with Marc Sherman and Samuel Totten (Associate Editors) (1994a). The Widening Circle of Genocide, Volume 3 . New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Charny, Israel W. (1994b). “Toward a Generic Definition of Genocide.” In George Andreopoulos (Ed.) Genocide: Conceptual and Historical Dimensions. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994, pp. 64-94. [Presented originally at the Yale University Law School Raphael Lemkin Symposium on Genocide, February, 1991.] Charny, Israel W. (Editor-in-Chief) (1999). Encyclopedia of Genocide. Santa Barbara, CA and Denver, CO, USA (December 1999); Oxford, UK (February 2000): ABC-CLIO Publishers. Associate Editors: Rouben Paul Adalian, Steven Jacobs, Eric Markusen, and Samuel Totten. Bibliographic Editor: Marc I. Sherman. Forewords, “Why Is It Important to Learn about the Holocaust and the Genocides of ALL Peoples,” by Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu and Simon Wiesenthal. Charny, Israel W. (1999). “Genocide Early Warning System (GEWS).” Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Genocide. Santa Barbara, CA and Denver, CO, USA; Oxford, UK: ABC-CLIO Publishers, pp. 253-261. Cohn, Norman (1966). Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. New York: Harper. Cohn, Norman (1975). Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great WitchHunt. New York: Basic Books.

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Drost, Peter N. (1959). The Crime of State: Penal Protection for Fundamental Freedoms of Persons and Peoples. 2 vols. Leyden: A.W. Sythoff. Fein, Helen (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: Free Press. Paperback, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1984. Fromm, Eric (1964). The Heart of Man: Its Genius for Good or Evil. New York: Harper. Fromm, Eric (1973). The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Glick, Leonard (1994). “Religion and Genocide.” In Israel W. Charny (Ed.) The Widening Circle of Genocide. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, pp. 43-74. Horowitz, Irving Louis (1976). “Genocide: State Power and Mass Murder.” New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. Revised and expanded edition: Taking Lives: Genocide and State Power. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997. Hovannisian, Richard G. (1986). The Armenian Genocide in Perspective. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide : An International Information Exchange Towards Understanding, Intervention and Prevention of Genocide (1985-1995). Charny, Israel W. Editor-in-Chief. Jerusalem, Israel: Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide. Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide (1986). Special Issue of the Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide on the United Nations Report on Genocide [Document E/ CN.4/Sub.2/1985/6, 2 July 1985, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide prepared by Mr. B. Whitaker], Special Double Issue Three-Four. Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide (1994). Special Section: Leo Kuper, World’s Leading Scholar of Genocide, Dead at 85. Jerusalem, Israel: Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide, Issue 49-50, 8 pp. Jacobs, Steven L. (Ed.) (1992). Not Guilty? Raphael Lemkin’s Thoughts on Nazi Genocide. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press. Jacobs, Steven L. (1999). “The Papers of Raphael Lemkin: A First Look.” Journal of Genocide Research, 1(1), 105-114. Koestler, Arthur (1978). Janus: A Summing Up. London, Hutchinson. Krell, Robert, and Sherman, Marc I. (Eds.) (1997). Medical and Psychological Effects of Concentration Camps on Holocaust Survivors. Volume 4 in the Series, Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Kuper, Adam (1994). “Obituary: Leo Kuper.” The Independent. London (May 28). [Kuper, Leo: for works by Leo Kuper, please see the list of selected works earlier.] Lemkin, Raphael (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for World Peace. Lorenz, Konrad (1966). On Aggression. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Rosenbaum, Alan S. (Ed.) (1996). Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Sartre, Jean Paul (1968). “On Genocide.” Ramparts, February, 37-42. Whitaker, Ben (1985). Document E/CN.4/Sub.2/1985/6, 2 July 1985, Revised and Updated Report on the Question of the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. New York: United Nations.

17 My Path to Genocide Studies Eric Markusen Over the years, many people have asked me why I decided to devote so much of my life to studying, writing and teaching about such a disturbing and depressing subject as genocide. Even though I have been asked this question repeatedly, I have never succeeded in forming a satisfactory answer. The invitation to contribute an autobiographical essay to this book, for which I feel greatly honored, gives me the incentive to try to explain, to myself as well as to readers, how I came to this point. In my mind, there is no doubt that an important contribution to my choice to focus on genocide and closely related issues stems in part from the fact that I had a difficult, turbulent childhood. My mother, who struggled all her adult life with schizophrenia—despite which, I am convinced, she managed to provide a secure and loving home environment during my early, formative years—committed suicide while I was in junior high school. My father, who had served in the United States Navy during World War II from the attack at Pearl Harbor to the final victory over Japan, was an alcoholic who committed suicide shortly before his fiftieth birthday, when I was a senior in high school. In between the self-inflicted deaths of my parents, I spent an extended period of time in out-of-home placements, including institutions of various kinds. Fortunately, my father’s second wife, Jean Erickson, and a dedicated psychiatrist, Will Larson, were indispensable in helping me attain sufficient emotional strength and self-confidence to have successful and rewarding experiences in high school and college. Those difficult personal and family experiences gave me an intensified sense of the ultimate vulnerability of all human beings to 295

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misfortune and harm, and also a humbling feeling of gratitude for the good fortune and love that enabled me to avoid a fate similar to my parents and so many others who are cursed with overwhelming problems and insufficient resources to deal with those problems. After graduating from Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1969, I was, like many of my peers at that time, unsure what to do with my life. While in college, I had worked part-time and during summers as a youth worker with children and adolescents from poor, often troubled families; this led me to consider a career in social work or another helping profession. At the same time, I loved the academic environment and had been fascinated by what I learned in my major, sociology, and my minor, psychology. So I ended up starting graduate studies in sociology at the University of Minnesota, where I met a professor, Robert Fulton, who was to affect my life in important ways that ultimately led me to genocide studies. Fulton, founder-director of the Center for Death Education and Research at the University of Minnesota, was among the handful of scholars around the world who had created and developed the social scientific study of death and dying, and he taught the first course on the subject in an American university. Fulton became a mentor, collaborator on several projects, and close friend— and the field of death education and research became the first substantive area in which I specialized. What drew me to this field of study was that it is, above all, fundamentally relevant and significant, something that affects all of our lives sooner or later. Also, it is a subject that, despite its undeniable importance, had at that time received insufficient attention as a research topic or a subject for education. Finally, it demands multi-disciplinary cooperation, which has always appealed to me far more than narrow specialization. Of course, all of this applies to the subject of genocide. Fulton’s approach to studying issues of death and dying encompassed more than what he called “plain, old, ordinary death”—e.g. terminal illness, euthanasia, suicide, homicide, grief—but also emphasized the importance of confronting death and killing on a much larger scale, as in war and genocide. It was Fulton who introduced me to Gil Elliot’s pioneering 1972 book Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, and to Robert Jay Lifton’s landmark 1967 book, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. In retrospect, I believe the seeds of my eventual engagement with the problem of genocide were planted by those two books.

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Stimulated by Elliot and Lifton, I read more about the nuclear threat, and what I learned surprised and horrified me. As I plunged my mind into the literature on nuclear weapons, nuclear deterrence, and the probable effects of nuclear war, I realized that the some of the leading nations of the world based their national security on the threat to kill so many people that a genocide like the Holocaust would actually pale by comparison. This included the United States, which had been the first to create and use nuclear weapons. At that point in time, in the late 1970s, I was back at the University of Minnesota after dropping out for several years. In the interim, I had started the graduate program in clinical psychology at the University of Manitoba, but stayed only a couple months, held a number of jobs, and also entered the Masters in Social Work program at the University of Washington (which I completed in 1977). At Minnesota, I was completing course work and preparing for preliminary exams for the Ph.D. in sociology, but was undecided about a topic for my dissertation and still not sure just where my life was headed. Then, in 1979, I had a life-changing experience when I participated in an international conference on science and ethical responsibility held at the University of California, San Diego. Called Student Pugwash, the conference was named and patterned after annual meetings in Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada, that were started in 1957 by Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein to bring together leading scientists from around the world in order to discuss ways in which scientists and other professionals could contribute to peace and social reform. At Student Pugwash, I met undergraduate and graduate students from all over the United States and several foreign countries who shared my preoccupation with the nuclear threat. I also met a number of distinguished senior participants who were active in the struggle to reduce the danger of nuclear war. Among them was Daniel Ellsberg, who was famous for his release of the so-called “Pentagon Papers” on the Vietnam War in 1971, but not as well known for his role as a top-level nuclear war planner in the Kennedy administration. I quickly came to deeply respect Ellsberg for the moral courage he demonstrated through his willingness to face a long prison sentence for releasing the Pentagon Papers and for his ability to repudiate his earlier work with nuclear weapons and become a passionate anti-nuclear advocate. Inspired by my experiences at Student Pugwash, and stimulated by new friends I made there, including Ellsberg, I returned to the

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University of Minnesota determined to promote education about the nuclear threat. With a fellow graduate student, John Harris, I originated and team-taught a new course titled “Introduction to Nuclear War.” Later Harris and I worked with the Federation of American Scientists (a public interest science organization in Washington, D.C.) to promote the development of similar courses at colleges and universities in the United States. I also began writing about psychological and social dimensions of the nuclear threat, and advocating for education about nuclear war, in such journals as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1981), and the Harvard Educational Review (1984). Then, in 1981, I had the privilege of serving as a research assistant to Robert Jay Lifton. As noted earlier, I had been introduced to Lifton’s work by my mentor at the University of Minnesota, Robert Fulton, shortly after I started graduate studies in sociology there in 1969. A decade later, after my experiences at Student Pugwash led me to become engaged in the anti-nuclear weapons movement, I happened to attend a number of conferences and symposia on the nuclear threat at which Lifton spoke; however, I do not recall ever speaking with him at the time. I first met Lifton in person during the summer of 1980, while I was at Princeton University’s Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, studying nuclear weapons issues, at the invitation of Professors Frank von Hippel and Harold Feiveson, whom I had met at the Student Pugwash conference the year before. Thanks to another Student Pugwash contact, I had the opportunity to visit Lifton at his summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts, and spend several hours talking with him. Following that initial meeting, I encountered Lifton again at several conferences, after one of which, in the spring of 1981, I had the chance to ask him if he ever needed research help. As it turned out, he was at that time working on the voluminous manuscript of what would be The Nazi Doctors (1986). He asked if I could spend the summer at Yale as a research assistant in the Department of Psychiatry, where he was Foundation’s Fund Research Professor, and I immediately said “Yes!” Working for Lifton not only enabled me to see how a first-rate scholar worked and wrote, but it also required me to undertake a serious study of the Holocaust in general, and the role of the medical profession in the Holocaust in particular. Among my tasks was reading the English translations of his interviews with dozens of

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former Nazi doctors, as well as surviving inmates, and noting examples of certain psychological themes and processes that he identified as important for understanding how healers became killers. Confrontation with the Holocaust, combined with my work on the nuclear threat, had two major effects. First, it alerted me to provocative psychosocial commonalities between the perpetrators of the Holocaust and those who contributed to the preparations for nuclear war. I suggested to Lifton that we collaborate on a book that would comparatively analyze the Holocaust and the nuclear threat, and he readily agreed. The results of our collaboration, The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat, was published in 1990. Second, I realized that I had to confront the available literature on genocide, which, when I began, was not very extensive. However, Leo Kuper’s 1981 book, Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century, had just been published, and it became the foundation for all my subsequent work on the problem of genocide. Also, I discovered, in Helen Fein’s 1977 article, “Is Sociology Aware of Genocide?” that my own discipline had largely ignored this crucial topic. And her 1979 book, Accounting for Genocide: Victims—and Survivors—of the Holocaust, provided an excellent example of comparative analysis in a chapter discussing parallel features of the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide. Kuper’s book made it painfully clear that the Holocaust was neither the first nor the last case of genocide in the twentieth century, and also that the problem of genocidal violence had by no means been sufficiently comprehended, let alone curbed. As did Elliot (1981) in Twentieth Century Book of the Dead, Kuper emphasized the close association between genocide and modern, total war. My earlier work made me attend powerfully to one statement made by Kuper (1981) that has inspired and guided my work on genocide ever since: The changing nature of warfare, with a movement toward total warfare, and the technological means for the annihilation of large populations, creates a situation conducive to genocidal conflict. This potential was realized in the Second World War, when Germany employed genocide in its war for domination, but I think the term must also be applied to the atomic bombing of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the U.S.A. and to the pattern bombing by the Allies of such cities as Hamburg and Dresden. (p. 46)

This particular passage brought to mind a book that Dan Ellsberg had urged me to read back in 1979 when we had met at the Student

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Pugwash conference: A Torch to the Enemy, Martin Caidin’s (1960) harrowing account of the American fire bombing of Tokyo during World War II. Suddenly, I had the concept and subject for my dissertation: a comparative study of two prominent forms of mass killing by governments: genocide, using the Holocaust as the primary case example, and modern war, using Allied strategic bombing during World War II as the primary case example. My first publication on the subject of genocide, “Genocide and Total War: A Preliminary Comparison,” was a distillation of my dissertation that appeared as a chapter in the 1987 reader, Genocide and the Modern Age, co-edited by Isidor Wallimann and Michael M. Dobkowski. (pp. 97-123) Later, David Kopf, a University of Minnesota historian, and I collaborated on a greatly expanded and updated adaptation of the dissertation. It was published in 1995 as The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century. Fundamental Problems and Issues in Genocide Studies Despite the vital contributions of scholars, human rights activists, and others, the energy and attention devoted to understanding and preventing genocide are negligible when compared with the scale and urgency of the problem itself. Genocide as a subject confronts the scholar with serious challenges. Studying the pervasive reality of genocide—and identifying and counting its many victims—is a profoundly distasteful task. To study mass killing is to immerse one’s mind in horror and to examine in detail the most atrocious of human behavior. The study of mass death and mass killing threatens to exacerbate the investigator’s anxieties regarding his or her own death, as well as the deaths of loved ones. The study of genocide is fraught with political implications and issues. It requires scholars and other citizens to look critically at their own societies and assess the role of mass killing in both the past and the present. Genocide studies, as opposed to Holocaust studies, is concerned with all cases of genocide. It is a scholarly field based on comparative analysis. Comparing the Holocaust with other cases of genocide risks offending some Holocaust scholars, who assert the irreducible uniqueness of the Holocaust and resent it being compared with anything else. It is essential to bear in mind that the process of comparison entails searching not only for similarities between two or more cases, but also for differences. To compare is not to equate.

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Defining Genocide There is nothing approaching universal consensus among genocide scholars regarding how to define genocide. Some rightfully worry that a definition that is too vague or too inclusive may dilute the power of the word as emblematic of the most heinous of offenses. Others are rightfully concerned that labeling certain acts as “genocide” is done for political purposes. On the other hand, too narrow a definition may lead to an underestimation of the number of cases that have occurred and the significance of the problem. When asked, as part of a membership questionnaire for the Association of Genocide Scholars, for my definition of genocide, I simply put something to the effect of “The United Nations definition, only applied to a wider range of protected groups.” The UN Convention on Genocide defines genocide as follows: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. (Quoted in Kuper 1981, p. 19)

One of the main criticisms of the Genocide Convention definition is the exclusion of political groups from those protected under the Convention. This omission resulted from self-interested resistance from the Soviet Union and other nations who feared that they might be someday charged for persecution of people within their borders. However, I believe that whenever groups are deliberately targeted for destruction—and when members of the groups are killed simply because of their membership in the group—then the label of “genocide” is appropriate. I believe this is consistent with the spirit of Raphael Lemkin’s conception of genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, published in 1944, in which he presented his detailed analysis of the Nazi genocidal state up to the time his book went to press. (p. 79) This, of course, means that the number of cases of mass killing that are considered as genocide is considerably greater than would be the case with a more exclusive definition. I also strongly believe that cases of mass killing that may not constitute outright genocide may warrant being labeled as “genocidal” and, therefore, earning a special level of condemnation and opprobrium. (Huttenbach, 1988, pp. 289-303; Markusen and Kopf,

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1995, pp. 62-64) And I strongly concur with Leo Kuper (1992), who concluded, based on his extensive comparative study of genocide and other forms of mass killing, that “War crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide are by no means exclusive categories.” (p. 1) The massive death tolls from mass killings that fit within my definition of genocide and genocidal killing force the conclusion that the genocidal mentality has been and still is thriving in many places around the world today. I am in full agreement with Gil Elliot (1972) who wrote that “The scale of man-made death is the central moral as well as material fact of our time.” (p. 6) Put differently, the problem of genocide, and the mentality that enables governments and individuals to engage in it, must be confronted, if our species is to have any prospect of a decent, long term future. My Primary Aim as a Scholar of Genocide My primary aim as a scholar is to learn about the sources and causes of genocide and the genocidal mentality. I want to learn how modern warfare creates social and psychological conditions conducive to the outbreak of genocide, how cases of incipient genocide can be detected and prevented, and how punishment of those responsible for genocide and other crimes under international law may help survivors and deter future cases. And I want to learn about psychosocial processes by which “ordinary people” can become accomplices and perpetrators of genocide. Individuals and Scholarly Works That Have Influenced My Work Among the most important influences on my work have been the writings of—and the opportunity to collaborate with—Robert Jay Lifton. From his first book—Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, published originally in 1961—through his most recent books—Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence and the New Global Terrorism (1999), and Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions (with Greg Mitchell) (2000)—Lifton has struggled with the problem of collective violence as a manifestation of both psychological processes and historical trends, and from the perspectives of both victim and perpetrator.

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In The Nazi Doctors (1986), he presented a conceptual framework of psychological and social factors that contribute to the formation of the genocidal mentality, in both individuals and societies. It remains a foundation for my own understanding and research. Inspired largely by his study of the role of individual physicians and the German medical profession in the Holocaust—but building also on his previous research on the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Vietnam war, and the nuclear threat—Lifton employed a medical metaphor to express the basic genocidal dynamic. “The model I propose,” he wrote, “includes a perception of collective illness, a vision of cure, and a series of motivations, experiences, and requirements of perpetrators in their quest for that cure.” (Lifton, 1986, p. 467) Within this overarching dynamic of perceived illness and the search for a cure, Lifton discerns a sequence that involves three crucial steps, or processes: pervasive insecurity and anger stemming from societal disruption, which can lead to widespread embrace of a simplistic, victimizing ideology which can lead in turn to victimizing members of groups defined as threatening or subhuman or both. Supporting and facilitating this sequence are psychological mechanisms such as psychic numbing, aspects of bureaucratic organization such as division of labor, and the distancing effects of technology. (Lifton, 1986, p. 442; p. 495; pp. 159-162) Lifton believes that scholars should not be content to sit detached in the so-called “Ivory Tower.” Thus, he has become personally engaged with a range of social causes, including protesting the American war in Vietnam, participating actively in the anti-nuclear war movement (including speaking at many symposia organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War), and publicly condemning Bosnian Serb genocide of Bosnian Muslims in the 1992-1995 war in former Yugoslavia. Finally, Lifton and his wife, Betty Jean, have, over the years, invited me into their home numerous times, as well as inviting my participation in the annual gathering of scholars and activists interested in psychology, history, and current events that they host at their summer home in Wellfleet, Massachusetts. Their friendship and guidance have been crucial influences on my life and work. In many ways, my career as a scholar of genocide has also been powerfully influenced by Israel W. Charny. His numerous publications—particularly his 1986 book, How Can We Commit the Un-

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thinkable? Genocide, the Human Cancer; the three volumes of Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review (Charny, 1988, 1991, 1994) that he edited; and his article, “Genocide and Mass Destruction: Doing Harm to Others as a Missing Dimension in Psychopathology” (Charny, 1986, pp. 144-157)—have been crucial resources in my own struggle to comprehend the problem of genocide. By inviting me to contribute two chapters (“Genocide, Total War, and Nuclear Omnicide,” and “Professions, Professionals, and Genocide”) to the second volume of his bibliographic series (Markusen, 1991, pp. 229298), he stimulated me to delve more deeply into these important subjects and gave me a prestigious forum for presenting my findings and conclusions. I was honored to accept Charny’s invitation to serve as a contributing editor and associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Genocide, of which Charny is the founding editor in chief. (Charny, 1999) Like Lifton, Charny does more than merely sit in the Ivory Tower and read and write books. I deeply admire the decision he made in 1982, when both the government of Israel and the government of Turkey were pressuring, even threatening, him not to include discussion of the Armenian genocide in the landmark conference on the Holocaust and genocide that he had organized. Charny refused to comply and carried out the conference despite risks to his personal financial security and his future academic career in Israel. Finally, Charny has also been an inspirational role model for me; as far as I know, he and I are the only genocide scholars who have also been professors of social work. His friendship and support have meant more than words can say. Richard Rhodes is a scholar with a deep concern about matters of life and death who also survived a traumatic childhood. (Rhodes, 1990) His books, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (1995) deepened my knowledge and understanding of the nuclear threat and violence in general. (See also, Rhodes, 1988, 1999) For nearly a decade, Rhodes and I have carried on a dialogue—first with letters, then faxes, now mostly email, and occasional in-person conversations. His friendship and appreciation of my work have been a vital source of selfconfidence and guarded optimism. As a sociologist engaged in study of the human-made disaster known as genocide, I have benefited greatly from the work of fellow sociologist Kai Erikson, particularly his two studies of the social impacts of natural and human-made disasters, Everything in Its Path:

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Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood (1976), and A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community (1994). Erikson’s combination of the highest standards of sociological field research and deep empathy for the victims of disaster is a model for my own field work in the former Yugoslavia and in the Horn of Africa. I have the privilege of presently collaborating with Erikson, together with Kerstin Schultz of the Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, on a field study of a war-torn multi-ethnic community in Croatia. Finally, I could never have maintained sufficient sanity, optimism, and perseverance to do this work without the loving support of my wife, Randi, and our daughter, Maria. Randi has steadfastly supported me. And she has joined in my work, serving also as a research assistant to Lifton in his work on the Nazi doctors (Lifton, 1986), conducting interviews with me in the former Yugoslavia, and editing my manuscripts. Maria’s bright, positive, and hopeful personality has kept me focused and motivated. Has There Been a Consistent, Persistent Focus in My Work on Genocide? Inspired by the work of Leo Kuper, the most consistent, persistent focus in my scholarship on genocide has been to expose and analyze the connections, and similarities, between modern war and genocidal killing. Put differently, I have tried to examine and expose the genocidal nature of modern war. (Markusen and Kopf, 1995, pp. 55-78; Markusen, 1996, pp. 75-86) I believe it is appropriate to describe much modern warfare as “genocidal” for several reasons, only two of which can be briefly mentioned here. First, many genocides occur during and after wars, reflecting the tendency for war to create social and psychological conditions conducive for the outbreak of genocide and genocidal killing. Leo Kuper (1985) observed that “warfare, whether between ‘tribal’ groups or city states, or other sovereign states and nations, has been a perennial source of genocide.” (p. 157) Second, a fundamental commonality between genocide and much modern warfare is that both employ massacre of large numbers of innocent, helpless noncombatants as a means of obtaining their objectives. The proportion of civilians injured and killed in wars of the twentieth century has steadily increased over time: in World War I, only five percent of the deaths were civilian; by World War II civilians constituted 66 percent of the deaths; and in wars

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since the 1970s civilians have accounted for 80 percent or more of the deaths. (Sivard, 1988, p. 28) These and other commonalities are examined in more detail in The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing. (Markusen and Kopf, 1995) The Evolution of My Thinking about Genocide In our 1990 book on the Holocaust and the nuclear threat, Lifton and I defined the “genocidal mentality” as “a mind-set that includes individual and collective willingness to produce, design, and, according to certain standards of necessity, use weapons known to destroy entire human populations—millions, or tens of millions, of people.” (p. 3) In a broader sense, the genocidal mentality refers to the willingness of governments, and their citizens, to engage in the mass killing of innocent people. The motives for such slaughter vary from case to case, but Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn (1990) have identified four of the most common rationales: to eliminate a group perceived by the killers as a threat; to spread terror among enemies; to accumulate economic wealth; and “to implement a belief, a theory, or an ideology.” (p. 29) At the end of our book, Lifton and I suggest an alternative to the genocidal mentality, using Lifton’s concept of “species consciousness.” By that we mean “an expansion of collective awareness, an altered sense of self, that embraces our reality as members of the single species and thereby opens up new psychological, ethical, and political terrain.” (Lifton and Markusen, 1990, p. 255) This perspective on self and the world recognizes the endangerment of all humans by the nuclear threat and other massive dangers. It includes our sense of belonging to family, ethnic group, race, religion, and other identifications; but it overarches them all with a deep recognition of common qualities and shared fate. It is antithetical to genocide and an antidote to the genocidal mentality. Extensive travel through much of former Yugoslavia, beginning in 1994, has exposed me to the reality of genocidal war. I visited some of the most badly-destroyed cities—Vukovar, Mostar, Sarajevo—and drove through dozens, even hundreds, of ruined villages in the war zones of Croatia and Bosnia. There I learned to respect the courage and dedication of members of the United Nations peacekeeping forces and other organizations who risked their lives in an attempt to reduce the suffering. I fear that armed humanitarian intervention is likely to become more frequently needed in

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the years ahead—unless the genocidal mentality can be exposed and resisted. Beginning in January 1995, I have made more than a dozen visits to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (in The Hague, Netherlands) and met with a wide range of officials, including the prosecutor, the deputy prosecutor, the senior appeals counsel, the senior legal advisor, the director of investigations, the legal co-ordinator, legal officers, research officers, public information officers, and others. I have attended several trial sessions, studied indictments and other documents produced by the trials, and read numerous journalistic and scholarly publications on the Tribunals. These experiences convinced me that the Tribunals, for many reasons, represent a profoundly progressive and hopeful milestone in international law, in the history of the human rights movement, and in the struggle against genocide. (Akhavan, 1998, pp. 737-816) Apprehending, judging, and—if convicted—punishing individuals, even heads of governments, for the crime of genocide may deter future leaders from adopting genocide as a policy. At the same time, it would show the surviving victims of the genocide that some justice has been done and that at least some of the guilty people did not enjoy impunity. Perceptions of the Field of Genocide Studies The establishment in 1995 of the Association of Genocide Scholars was a most important step in the development of this newly emerging field of study. Courses on genocide are being taught at a growing number of universities around the world, and the number of conferences and symposia dealing with genocide and other massive human rights crimes is also growing. New centers are being established that focus on genocide in comparative perspective, including the Genocide Studies Program at Yale University, and the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The Journal of Genocide Research was founded by Henry Huttenbach in 1999. The twovolume Encyclopedia of Genocide, edited by Israel W. Charny (1999) and featuring entries by the vast majority of the world’s leading scholars of genocide, is a milestone in the field. However, in view of the dreadful toll taken by genocide during the twentieth century—rightly called an “age of genocide” by Roger Smith (1987, p. 21), president of the Association of Genocide Schol-

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ars from 1997 through 1999—I must emphasize that past and present activities are dangerously belated and insufficient. Current and likely political and economic instability in many regions of the world portend growing risks of pervasive social insecurity and psychological distress. Since many of the political and economic problems will take place in societies with a heritage of festering racial and ethnic animosities, there is a significant danger of victimization. Thus, the overall dynamic of a “perceived illness” and a desperate search for a “cure,” which Lifton discerned in several of the major cases of collective violence of our century, may be repeated elsewhere. (1986, pp. 466-500) Work in Progress Since early 1994, I have been engaged in a study of genocidal killing in the former Yugoslavia and made numerous research visits to almost all sides of the conflict. I have met with a wide range of people in Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Pale (the headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs), Knin (the headquarters of the Croatian Serbs between 1991 and 1995), and Mostar (which was, and is, in Spring 2001, still divided into a Croat-controlled side and a Muslim-controlled side). A preliminary discussion of what I learned appeared in an article with Damir Mirkovic. (Markusen and Mirkovic, 1999, pp. 39-76) As previously mentioned, since 1997, with two colleagues, Kai Erikson and Kerstin Schultz, I have been also engaged in a field study of a war-torn community in Croatia for which we conducted nearly 200 tape-recorded interviews. We have begun data analysis. In November 1998 I visited Ethiopia—which was then and still is at war with neighboring Eritrea—in order to investigate allegations that in June 1998, Eritrea attacked both a primary school and a food storage and distribution site in northern Ethiopia. While there, I also interviewed civilians displaced by the war. Then, in March 1999, I visited Eritrea to investigate its claim that Ethiopia had brutally deported many innocent people of Eritrean background who had been living in Ethiopia. In Eritrea, I interviewed several individuals who had been deported, inspected several sites where Ethiopian warplanes had dropped bombs on civilian targets, and visited one of the active front-lines. A report of these missions is in progress. Presently, I am serving as research director at the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies, in Copenhagen.

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What Remains to Be Done Anything that promotes the human rights movement—and support for agencies and organizations that monitor and protect human rights, as well as those which serve the needs of victims of human rights violations—also contributes to efforts to confront and resist the genocidal mentality and to prevent future genocides. Support for the ongoing international criminal tribunals, as well as for the newly-established Permanent International Criminal Court, will contribute importantly to deterring future genocides and helping the victims recover from their traumas and become survivors. Further scholarly study of the problem is essential, as are ongoing efforts to strengthen international legal sanctions against the slaughter of innocents, but they are not sufficient. In order for such sanctions to be successfully and meaningfully integrated into the international political arena, new generations of students and citizens must appreciate just how serious the epidemic of genocidal killing has become. Moreover, in addition to recognizing the scale and urgency of the problem, they must learn about how it might be reduced and eventually eliminated. For this to occur, I suggest that a necessary condition is the development of college and university courses, and other learning opportunities, about genocide as a subject in its own right and in comparative perspective. References Akhavan, Payam (1998). “Justice in The Hague, Peace in the Former Yugoslavia? A Commentary on the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal.” Human Rights Quarterly, 20(4): 737-816. Caidin, Martin (1979 [1960]). A Torch to the Enemy. New York: Ballantine Books. Chalk, Frank, and Jonassohn, Kurt (1990). The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Charny, Israel, W. (Ed.) (1999). Encyclopedia of Genocide. London: ABC-CLIO. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1994). The Widening Circle of Genocide: Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Volume 3. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Charny, Israel W. (Ed.) (1991). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Volume 2. New York: Facts on File. Charny, Israel (Ed.) (1988). Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Volume 1. New York: Facts on File. Charny, Israel (1986). “Genocide and Mass Destruction: Doing Harm to Others as a Missing Dimension in Psychopathology.” Psychiatry, 49(2):144-157. Charny, Israel (1982). How Can We Commit the Unthinkable? Genocide: The Human Cancer. Boulder: CO: Westview Press. Elliot, Gil (1972). Twentieth Century Book of the Dead. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

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Erikson, Kai (1994). A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Erikson, Kai (1976). Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster. Fein, Helen (1979). Accounting for Genocide: National Responses and Jewish Victimization During the Holocaust. New York: The Free Press. Fein, Helen (1977). “Is Sociology Aware of Genocide? Recognition of Genocide in Introductory Sociology Textbooks in the U.S., 1947-1977.” Humanity and Society, Volume 3, pp. 177-193. Harris, John, and Eric Markusen (1984). “The Role of Education in Preventing Nuclear War.” Harvard Educational Review, 54(3): 282-303. Huttenbach, Henry R. (1988). “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum: Toward a Methodology of Definition and Categorization.” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 3(3):289-303. Kuper, Leo (1992). “Genocide and the Technological Tiger.” Internet on the Holocaust and Genocide, No. 32, pp. 1-2. Kuper, Leo (1985). The Prevention of Genocide. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kuper, Leo (1981). Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lemkin, Raphael (1944). Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Lifton, Robert Jay (1999). Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. New York: Metropolitan. Lifton, Robert Jay (1986). The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide. New York: Basic Books. Lifton, Robert Jay (1976). Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima. New York: Random House. Lifton, Robert Jay (1961). Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Lifton, Robert Jay, and Eric Markusen (1990). The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear Threat. New York: Basic Books. Lifton, Robert Jay, and Mitchell, Greg (2000). Who Owns Death? Capital Punishment, The American Conscience, and the End of Executions. New York: William Morrow and Company. Markusen, Eric (1996). “Genocide and Warfare,” in Charles B. Strozier and Michael Flynn (Eds.) Genocide, War, and Human Survival, pp. 75-86. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Markusen, Eric (1987). “Genocide and Total War: A Preliminary Comparison,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (Eds) Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, pp. 97-123. New York: Greenwood Press. Markusen, Eric (1991), “Genocide, Total War, and Nuclear Omnicide,” in Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review, Volume 2, pp. 229-298. New York Facts on File. Markusen, Eric (1991), “Professions, Professionals, and Genocide,” in Israel W. Charny (Ed.) Genocide: A Critical Bibliographical Review, Volume 2, pp. 229-298. New York Facts on File. Markusen, Eric, and Damir Mirkovic (1999). “Understanding Genocidal Killing in the Former Yugoslavia: Preliminary Observations,” in Craig Summers and Eric Markusen (Eds.) Collective Violence: Harmful Behavior in Groups and Governments, pp. 35-67. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

My Path to Genocide Studies 311 Markusen, Eric, and David Kopf (1990). The Holocaust and Strategic Bombing: Genocide and Total War in the Twentieth Century. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Markusen, Eric, Jeffrey Dunham, and Ronald Bee (1981). “A Nuclear Education Campaign.” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 37(5):39-42. Rhodes, Richard (1999). Why They Kill: Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Rhodes, Richard (1995). Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rhodes, Ricahard (1990). A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood. New York: Simon & Schuster. Rhodes, Richard (1988). “Man-Made Death: A Neglected Mortality.” Journal of the American Medical Association, 260(5):686-687. Rhodes, Richard (1986). The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster. Sivard, Ruth Leger (1988). World Military and Social Expenditures. Leesburg, VA: World Priorities. Smith, Roger (1987). “Human Destructiveness and Politics: The Twentieth Century as an Age of Genocide,” in Isidor Wallimann and Michael N. Dobkowski (Eds.) Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death, pp. 21-39. New York: Greenwood Press. Wallimann, Isidor, and Michael N. Dobkowski (Eds.) (1987). Genocide and the Modern Age: Etiology and Case Studies of Mass Death. New York: Greenwood Press.

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Lawyers and Jurists

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18 Bearing Witness1 M. Cherif Bassiouni Introduction History is like a boiling cauldron of facts: some bubble to the surface, others stick to the bottom or the sides, while most of them are an amorphous mass shifting somewhere in between. The historian, or, as in this case, the raconteur, consciously or unconsciously selects from the cauldron these facts which may best fit his or her story. Sometimes selectivity is unconscious as a result of traumatic or difficult experiences that the mind prefers to forget or to alter in order to make the recollection more bearable. To what extent I have selectively chosen from the cauldron of my personal history facts which best fit my needs or which flatter my self-perspective is something I cannot objectively assess. But, in reviewing the manuscript, I could not escape the conclusion that it contained far too many positive representations and far too few negative ones. Thus, I feel compelled to ask the reader for his/ her benevolence and to be receptive to the message I tried to convey, even if as its bearer I erred in the way I presented it. The message is one of commitment, determination, and courage in the pursuit of truth, justice, and peace, irrespective of personal consequences. But, as time has taught me, there are always better ways to accomplish these goals. Diplomacy and subtlety are not compromises, but far wiser ways than confrontation. Regrettably, I have frequently failed to follow that approach because I allowed my ego to get the best of me. In fact, there is little that I now know that would have altered my choices, but much that would have changed 315

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my ways. In short, I would do it all over again, but differently, and that in itself is some comfort. Reflections on the Political and Human Context of Investigating Violations of International Humanitarian Law in the Former-Yugoslavia Since this book is about the scholarly and personal journeys of those who come to the study of genocide and its prevention and intervention, I start my account with the experience that made me part of those who bear witness. The former-Yugoslavia’s final disintegration came in 1991 with Serbia’s war against Slovenia, then Croatia, and in 1992 against Bosnia. Each of these former-Yugoslav republic’s declarations of independence was met with a Serbian military response. Europe and the United States had long seen these Balkan wars coming, but they did not plan for their occurrence. The warning signs were ignored, supplanted by the wishful thinking that somehow the winds of war would blow away. When the ominous signs of war did not dissipate, but rather intensified in 1989, the Western Powers scrambled to improvise a policy, stumbling from one mistake to another. In 1991, the United Kingdom (U.K.) was the first European country to seek a diplomatic settlement to the impending war. These diplomatic efforts were perhaps doomed, but at least the U.K. tried in earnest to prevent and then limit the wars in Croatia and in Bosnia. British and French troops were the first to go into the field, first under the European Union’s mandate, and then under the United Nation’s blue flag of peace. However, these soldiers were lightly armed and scattered first throughout Croatia and then Bosnia in small units, frequently in isolation to each other, and without tanks or artillery to support them. These forces, which reached at one point 30,000, could have been the United Nations’ greatest strength, but they were in fact its greatest weakness because of their lack of deployment armament and strength. They became de facto hostages to the Serb forces. To a large extent, this explains the ambivalence of the U.K. and France toward initiatives that could increase their forces’ vulnerability. After the wars in Slovenia and Croatia, the war in Bosnia erupted in May 1992. The international community’s response was to broker a potential settlement at the hands of Lord David Owen, the

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E.U.’s representative, who was later joined by the U.N.’s Cyrus Vance, a former U.S. Secretary of State. Owen, a man of many talents, had the impossible task of resolving an intractable conflict essentially on the strength of his personality, determination, hard work, and diplomatic skills. He possessed neither an effective stick nor sufficiently enticing carrot to induce the warring factions to make peace. He could not threaten the use of military force, which was made apparent from the vulnerable positioning of the French and British troops as described above, and which made up most of the U.N. forces in the region, and the lack of American resolve to commit troops. The Bush Administration (1988-1992) was clearly disinterested in any military involvement, and, later, after the November elections, there was a great deal of uncertainty as to what role the U.S. would play in the new Clinton Administration. Owen also had to contend with the fact that Serbia was militarily and economically dominant in relation to Croatia and Bosnia and had the support of Russia and Greece. Croatia, however, was gaining military and economic strength with the help of Germany and Austria and later with the military assistance of the U.S. Only Bosnia had no meaningful external constituency to support it. The population of Bosnia consisted of a majority of Bosnian Muslims, with ethnic Serbs and Croats making up only 35 percent of the total population. These three ethnic groups had, for the most part, lived together in peace and harmony in that part of the formerYugoslavia. But, separating these three population groups by allocating to them different territorial enclaves was an almost impossible task. The U.N.’s promises of protecting the civilian population was beyond its means and the tragedy that ensued will long be remembered. A negotiated settlement seemed possible between Croatia and Serbia. Such a settlement meant that some 300,000 Serbs living in Croatia since the late 1300s would ultimately be forced to leave and resettle in Serbia proper. The quid pro quo for Serbia would be to obtain large portions of Bosnian territory along the Drina River as well as parts of central Bosnia in order to realize what was referred to as “Greater Serbia.” Croatia also wanted to annex Herzegovina, which was part of Bosnia, because this area had a substantial Croatian population. Even though neither Serbia nor Croatia would at first admit to this potential deal, whose costs would be paid by Bosnia, the fact remained that Owen was left with no recourse but to try to

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convince the Bosnians to accept the dismemberment of their state and the loss of between 30 to 40 percent of Bosnia’s territory. Owens proceeded along these lines in 1992-93, while the Serbs and Croats intensified their military pressure against the Bosnians. Croatia occasionally supported Bosnia in its conflict with Serbia and the Bosnian Serbs, while at the same time carrying out military activities against the Bosnians in Herzegovina. Bosnia was clearly suffering the most, and, at the same time, it was under the greatest military and economic pressures. By the end of 1992 Bosnia was on the brink of disaster, and that situation lasted well into 1993 when Bosnia’s leadership was on the verge of accepting Owen’s peace plan. But between May 1992 and the end of 1993, reports of terrible atrocities committed by the Serbs against the Bosnian Muslims became known worldwide through the dedicated reporting of journalists and human rights organizations from many countries. The Serbs’ campaign that terrorized the Bosnian Muslims with ethnic cleansing, systematic rape, murder, torture, and the destruction and looting of cultural, religious, and private property was cruel and savage. The international community’s unwillingness to stop these crimes was shameful. Bosnia had no support from the West. An unconscionable policy of preventing Bosnia from receiving any military assistance to defend itself had been put in place through a U.N. arms embargo. The little support it received from Muslim countries, which was smuggled into Bosnia, was barely enough to keep it at the level of survival. This meager support, however, was used against the Bosnian leadership by Serbia and its supporters who put forth the racist argument that a Muslim state could not be tolerated in Europe. Conversely, Serbia and Croatia managed to get their military needs without much disturbance from the U.N. embargo. Whether that was part of pressuring Bosnia to accede to Owen’s peace plan cannot be established. The Western powers again seemed to have forgotten their postWorld War II pledge of “never again.” The United States then devised a plan to establish a United Nations commission to investigate these crimes based on the precedents of the Post World War II. Many members of the Security Council were skeptical of this initiative, but grudgingly acquiesced to it because they could not publicly oppose the establishment of an investigatory commission because of its legal and moral significance. The United Kingdom gave the new body the name “Commission of Experts Established Pursuant to Security

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Council Resolution 780” (1992), which foreshadowed the ensuing efforts to keep the Commission’s work as innocuous as its name. The Commission’s mandate to investigate and secure evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide was the broadest for an international criminal investigating commission since World War II. Owen was reportedly concerned about the Commission making public statements or leaking out evidence of the crimes committed. The concerns of those who wanted peace at any price included the acceptance of compromising justice. These concerns were that the Commission would reveal the atrocities committed against the Bosnians and shift world public opinion. This would upset the delicate political situation in which Owen hoped to negotiate a political settlement. The underpinning of what became known as the “Vance-Owen Plan” was the false assumption of equal moral blameworthiness. In other words, all parties were to be equally blamed, and no one would appear to be worse than the other. The political reasons were that, if Bosnians gained worldwide sympathy as the victims of some of the most terrible crimes committed in Europe since World War II, their leadership would resist accepting a peace plan that so favored Serbia. Moreover, it would be impossible to justify to world public opinion why so much was given to Serbia at the expense of Bosnia. Anything that altered this perception would make Owen’s work more difficult, and that would mean the continuation of war and its terrible consequences. It was a typical dilemma of realpolitik versus truth and justice. What follows describes how this process evolved. In October 1992, I was informed through a “backdoor channel” that Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali planned to name me as the Commission’s chair. Shortly after that communication, Mr. Carl August Fleischhauer, then legal counsel to the United Nations, notified me that I had been chosen to be a member of the Commission and asked if I would accept the chair if offered. I confirmed my acceptance in writing. Two days later, however, I was informed that Fritz Kalshoven, a retired Dutch professor, had been offered the chair. I immediately called my “backdoor channel,” and was told that the Secretary General had been advised that it would not be a good idea to appoint a Muslim as chair because it might give the Serbs the impression that the Commission was biased in favor of the Bosnian Muslims. I accepted the explanation at face value. As it later turned out, Kalshoven was not, by reason of age and temperament, the

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right person for the task at hand, but the choice was made because of those reasons. It was the beginning of a long road full of bureaucratic and financial hurdles whose cumulative effect was to prevent the Commission from doing what it was intended to do. As I think back at these events, I am amazed as to how far we have progressed with the International Criminal Tribunal for (former) Yugoslavia (ICTY), International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the International Criminal Court (ICC). The iron curtain that existed between 1992-1994 has been substantially lifted since then. Truth and justice are now an undisputed part of international relations, though their consistent and effective implementation remains a work in progress. But, in 1992, the situation was very different as the iron curtain had not even been partially lifted. Both as a member of the Commission and later as its chair, I was committed to bringing to light the atrocities committed on all sides and to present them in an unbiased fashion. I wanted the work of the Commission to pave the way for international accountability. The Commission was born into a maelstrom of competing cries for both justice and peace at any price. I faced political and bureaucratic hurdles, the least of which included the under-funding and under-staffing of the Commission. The means enforced were bureaucratic and financial hurdles, and, ultimately, the premature ending of the Commission’s work. The U.N. did not provide funding for the fact-finding missions of the Commission, for its investigatory work or for its database. Thus, the Commission had to raise funds from governments and private sources, rely on some governments’ contributed personnel and volunteers, and the support of DePaul University’s International Human Rights Law Institute, which provided the space and staffing, and obtained the funding for the database operation, analysis of the data, and preparation of the Final Report and Annexes. The database alone required a staff that over two years cumulatively exceeded 160 paid and volunteer lawyers and law students. The funding was provided by the Open Society Institute and by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The support of Aryeh Neier and Adele Simmons, respective presidents of those two foundations, made it all possible. I will always be grateful for their institutional and personal support during these difficult times. The obstacles I faced were compounded by the difficulty of gathering evidence during an ongoing war where at one point there were six warring

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factions with their respective armies, supplemented by some eightynine paramilitary groups. I did not play the game of realpolitik, which I am sure would have been favorably received by certain governments and some senior U.N. personalities. But I also did not know how to get around these hurdles in more subtle ways. I did not have the ability, time, or temperament to do so. I was driven by conviction and the commitment to bring the truth to light. When adequate funding and staffing were not made available by the U.N., I found volunteers and raised additional resources from governments and private foundations. When the U.N. would not provide adequate space to store the data being collected, I asked my university to provide the necessary space at no cost. For that, I had to create elaborate security measures to protect both witnesses who were interviewed and the data that was collected to allay the concerns raised by the United Nations Office of Legal Affairs. It was a constant struggle to get things done. The Commission found that between April 1991 and July 1994, the conflict in the former-Yugoslavia produced an estimated 200,000 dead and displaced some two million people. It estimated that in Bosnia alone, some 500,000 people were arbitrarily arrested and detained, of whom an estimated 50,000 were tortured. Most appalling was the rape of some 20,000 women, an estimate that is based on extrapolated information that some 4,500 women had been raped. The destruction of cultural and religious property, as well as private property, has never been assessed due to its enormity, but partially documented. The most vicious atrocities were committed by paramilitary groups, one of which was under the leadership of “Arkan” (his nom de guerre), and another one under Sesselj’s. These men were known for their close association with the Milosevic regime in Belgrade. Both of them were indicted by the ICTY. The former, “Arkan,” who was notorious during the war for running a contraband and smuggling operation that later was reported to engage in drug trafficking, was murdered in Belgrade in 1999. The latter is still an important political boss in Serbia’s ultra-nationalist community. Their paramilitary groups were responsible for carrying out in many towns and villages across Bosnia and Croatia the terrorizing practices that were part of the policy of “ethnic cleansing.” At their turn, the Croatians, as part of the secret arrangements preceding the Dayton Accords,

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ethnically cleansed the Krajinas, and, earlier, the Slavonias, of their Serb inhabitants. Though the war in Croatia between April of 1991 and March of 1992 was cruel, the patterns of violence in Bosnia were most cruel. The Commission identified over 800 places of detention, some were used for only a limited period of time, others became infamous, such as Omarska and Ternojpole prison camps, where many savage acts of torture and rape took place. We also identified 150 mass graves where anywhere between five and 3,000 bodies were reported to have been buried. Most of the mass graves were in the vicinity of the prison camps or near the ethnically cleansed towns and villages. The mass graves we uncovered, the victims of torture and rape we interviewed, the destroyed mosques, churches, and houses we went through, and the thousands of terrorized and helpless people we saw affected us deeply. This anguish will remain with us always. Some Telling Personal Experiences My first trip to Sarajevo was in April 1993 because the U.N. had opposed until then our request for field investigations. The reason advanced was security problems. Finally, at the insistence of the Commission, Kalshoven, Bill Fenrick and I went to the area, but only Fenrick and I went to Sarajevo due to the hazardous situation there. Fenrick and I were quite surprised as we first landed at the Sarajevo airport to find ourselves under bombardment and what we saw of the devastated city as we were led by armored personal carrier to a bombed out Holiday Inn where we were supposed to stay. The hotel had no windows left, no water or electricity, and very few rooms with beds that we could lay on for the night. That night was the first time we came under bombardment as Serb artillery had repeatedly fired on that besieged city. The artillery barrage, which at first seemed far away, started to come closer throughout the night. Some of the shells fell near and others landed on the hotel itself. One of these shells blew up room 740,2 which was next to my room 744. The next day, we went by armored personnel carrier to visit the Kosevo Hospital, which later, through the work of the Chicago database, documented as having been bombarded 289 times in the span of 720 days, most of it occurring between the hours of 12:00 and 2:00 p.m. I only understood the significance of the timing when I visited that hospital during these hours and was rushed to the basement for safety after the shelling started. It was then that I was told

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that the targeting of the hospital during these hours was because it was visitation time. Because the hospital lacked food, medical supplies, and other essentials to care for its sick and wounded, relatives and friends came between 12:00 and 2:00 p.m. to bring whatever they could for the hospital patients. Irrespective of the cruelly selected timing however, bombing a hospital is an unquestionable war crime. The Kosevo Hospital in Sarajevo, as well as all the hospitals that I visited throughout Bosnia, lacked medical supplies of any sort, including anesthetics. Surgeries were frequently performed without anesthesia, and I remember a dentist who was trying desperately to obtain anesthesia to treat dental patients, particularly those upon whom jaw and face surgery had to be performed. The psychiatric hospital in Sarajevo, as well as in other cities we visited, had no medical supplies of any sort, and had nothing better to give traumatized patients than aspirin.3 The reason that medical supplies could not reach besieged areas like Sarajevo was that the Serb forces surrounding them prevented their entry. Even humanitarian assistance provided by UNHCR was frequently prevented from reaching besieged areas and was only allowed to go through when a portion of that assistance went to the warring faction that controlled the access. It was in April 1993 in Sarajevo that I interviewed the first two rape victims that I met. They were respectively sixteen and seventeen years of age and had been imprisoned in the town of Foca 4 and reportedly raped for some eight months. They were part of a group of young Muslim girls who had been seized by the Serbs because their parents were believed able to financially pay ransom for them. The girls’ captivity had been prolonged because the parents had been evacuated from the town, and thus it took all that time for the parents to assemble the money and get it back to their daughters’ captors. Another one of the victims of this group of Foca girls was about twelve or thirteen and was kept by herself in one of the hospital’s dismal rooms on a worn out metal bed where she lay in a fetal position. The psychiatrist who took us to her said that she had been traumatized since she had given birth to an unwanted dead baby as a result of being raped. Her parents could not be found. It was then that I resolved to conduct the rape investigation to bring to the world’s attention this inhuman behavior. It is difficult for me, even after a number of years have passed, to describe what I saw or to speak about what I heard, other than in the

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neutral language of reports. But it is important for the reader to have a feeling for what was taking place and to understand how I felt, particularly when facing the cynical, political, and bureaucratic games designed to prevent the truth from being recorded. There were many occasions when I saw or heard of terrible and cruel events committed by seemingly ordinary people against others who posed no threat to them, and who, in many cases, were people they knew or inhabitants of the same town or village. One such person I interviewed who raised sheep told me of how he had killed thirteen people in the same manner that he slaughtered sheep on his farm. He described it in a most matter of fact way, rationalizing it by saying that it was cheaper that way than to use bullets. Bill Fenrick and I had another similar experience when we interviewed a Serb militia prisoner by the name of Herak held in a Bosnian camp. He was also very matter-of-fact about over a dozen civilians he had killed, including a number of women. He described how he would go to a motel near Sarajevo converted into a women’s detention facility where Serb soldiers and militiamen like himself could go to satisfy their sexual urges—in other words to rape the women prisoners. As Herak recounted it, there came a time when there were too many women for the number of rooms at the motel and the principal keeper, another militiaman, who carried out his jailer functions from behind the motel’s lobby counter, asked him to take “surplus women” with him whenever he left. Herak would do so, and, whenever he would get tired of a woman, he would simply kill her and dump her body in the woods. I conjured up in my mind the image of the militiaman behind the counter handing out keys to the rooms to those who came in so they could go up and rape these women. It was such a simple act of handing out a key to a room, but it epitomized what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil” as she reported on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. It was then that I understood the profound meaning of these words. It reminded me of a document I once saw. It was a letter from a private German company that manufactured ovens and reported to the German Ministry of Armaments and Supplies that it had completed the order for three such ovens, requesting the Ministry to make arrangements for their transportation. It was such a banal commercial communication. But its meaning was profoundly evil. These were ovens that were going to be sent probably to Auschwitz to burn human beings.

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During the course of the rape investigation in January 1994, I had established the investigation’s headquarters in Zagreb, Croatia, and had eleven teams of three spread out in Bosnia, Croatia, Slovenia, and then Austria. One evening a team leader who was a Canadian prosecutor with ten years experience came to brief me while in a very troubled emotional state. She told me a story recounted to her by one of her witnesses. The witness was a man who could have been in his middle to late forties but appeared much older. He was on crutches and had difficulty walking as both his feet seemed damaged. He recounted that he was a Catholic Croat born in Sarajevo who was a soccer player, and had, at one time, been captain of the Croatian soccer team in Sarajevo which, at some time, had defeated the Serb and Bosnian-Muslim teams. He married a Serb woman from Sarajevo, widowed from a Bosnian-Muslim also from Sarajevo and from whom she had two daughters. Upon their marriage he moved to her apartment which was in the Serb section of the city, and, with her, opened a café in that section whose decoration consisted mostly of soccer team pictures and other soccer-related motifs. The two daughters became so close and dear to him that he considered himself as their rightful father. When the war broke out that section of the city was severed from the rest of Sarajevo and remained under Serb control. One day a group of young volunteer militiamen, between eighteen and twenty-two, working with the local Serb police, came to his café and took him to a police station where his hands were tied behind his back as he was made to sit on the floor, his feet extended in front of him. Whereupon the young men with the butts of their rifles broke the tibia bones in both of his feet. As they did so, they said to him that he would never play soccer again and could never claim to defeat a Serb soccer team. He was left there, crying in pain, while some or all of the group of five men brought in his wife and two stepdaughters, who at that time were respectively thirteen and fifteen. As they saw him on the floor, they started crying and screaming, but the young men restrained them and tied their hands behind their backs. Then they started vilifying the mother and calling her names, such as “whore” and “traitor” because she had first married a Bosnian-Muslim and then a Bosnian-Croat. They then threatened to rape the two girls if the mother did not agree to do everything the young men wanted. She agreed in order to save her daughters. They forced her to undress and perform different sexual acts with the men

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in the presence of the agonizing husband laying on the floor with two broken legs and the two hysterical young daughters. When they satisfied everything they had in mind, they then slit her throat with a knife and left her to writhe on the floor until she bled to death. They then turned to the two daughters, raped them and then slit their throats and let them die on the floor like their mother. The room was a puddle of blood when the young men lifted the body of the husband from the floor, untied his hands and threw him out in the street with the warning of “go out and tell your friends what we do to our enemies and to traitors.” The husband, recounting the story to our team of investigators who were in tears, concluded by saying to the effect, “I lived until the day I could tell this story to the world. It is on your shoulders.” The team leader then told me that after this interview, she did not feel she could continue and wanted to return home. Two days later I was told that the man who told us this terrible story had committed suicide. When I submitted the Annexes to the Final Report of the Committee of Experts to the secretary-general and also notified the first president of the ICTY, Professor Antonio Cassese, I recounted that story in my communications to both. I concluded as I passed on the information that I had collected, just as that witness had, that it was now “on their shoulders.” Professor Cassese replied to me that he was so troubled by the story that he wanted to put that in the first report of the Tribunal, but for some reason, it was not there when the report was published. Admittedly the story recounted above has not been proven, nor in any way verified. It could well have been made up. But there were so many acts of terrible cruelty that took place during that conflict that it would not have been impossible to have happened. I wish we could have deleted the ethnicity of the perpetrators, but I could not. Ethnicity was tragically used as a tool to fuel the atrocities. The acts of senseless cruelty of those five young men remain as an illustration of what can happen when social systems break down, when the worst instincts of men are encouraged by ruthless leaders to surface, when total impunity for such crimes is offered by leaders, when the commission of such crimes are heralded by a given social group as great feats of nationalistic accomplishments, and when they are “justified” by a social group as necessary for their

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defense against others, and, last, but not least, when the victims are dehumanized. I could go on for pages recounting terrible things I saw or heard, the latter of which may be true; others possibly exaggerated or even totally fabricated. But there were enough accounts of cruelty to make anyone wonder about the degree of civilization that we proclaim to have attained. This and other conflicts proves that our degree of civilization is no more than a thin veneer which can easily be erased by certain circumstances, leaving only raw human atavism to surface, almost as it was in the early stages of our history some 50,000 years ago. In terms of humanism, we seem to have learned only a little since then, our scientific and technological advances notwithstanding. Somehow fundamental human values have been left behind in our quest to develop scientific and technological gadgets that run from the atomic weapon to the more benign objects designed to satisfy our daily comforts and pleasures. Fortunately, there are still many whose values are strong enough to withstand social and other pressures. There were many such examples in the formerYugoslavia of Serbs helping Muslims and Croats helping Serbs and Muslims helping Croats and Serbs. This is why it was so unfortunate that the Commission could not complete its work and even expand it to show that amidst, many tragedies, there were also many courageous, decent and kind persons on all sides. To document evidence and information about crimes is important, but to use it in a way that helps people bridge their differences and eventually reconcile, once the truth is established, is a function the Commission should have been allowed to carry out. It would have been so important to peace. But a true peace was not even on the radar screen of the realpoliticiens. This was the context in which I operated, and it obviously affected my state of mind. I could not easily deal with the politics and bureaucracy of the U.N. while living these experiences. It was difficult to shift gears from the detachment of the New York glass palace on the Hudson River, which seems to be a self-contained universe, to that of the reality of war, death, torture, rape, and other inhumane and senseless cruelties. My most difficult psychological problem was to shift mental and emotional gears. I had to cope with the everyday duties of running an organization with all of its bureaucratic and petty concerns, deal with people whose lives and concerns were totally unaffected by

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what affected me, while facing at the same time the terrible atrocities and victims of war. It was not an easy task, but I had no choice. I remember one day after returning from a mass grave exhumation, having been in the field, in the cold and without a hot meal for three days, how guilty I felt taking a hot shower in a hotel in Zagreb followed by a good hot meal. The reader can only imagine my feelings after interviewing rape and torture victims that I left behind in refugee camps living in terrible conditions, while I returned to the comfort of my apartment in Geneva and to the placid life of that international city. The Secretary-General once told me reproachfully, “You are too personally involved.” “Yes, and I have to be” was my reply. I did what Prophet Muhammad called for in a hadith: “If you see a wrong, right it; With your hand if you can, or With your words, or With your stare, or In your heart, and that is the weakest of faith.” My Formative Years We are all the product of our childhood formation and defining life experiences. They shape our values and to a large extent determine who we will be and how we are going to act in the future. That is why a cursory description of some of my childhood and other experiences are relevant. I am the only child of a politically and socially prominent and wealthy family, brought up by European nannies. I traveled abroad with my parents since childhood, spoke six languages by the age of ten, and made the acquaintance of many royal people and the elite of the Middle East and Europe. My grandparents described below were famous, if not legendary. One of Cairo’s main streets is named after one of them, “Mahmoud Bassiouni.” They were my role models and their stories shaped my values as did my mixed education by French Jesuits at school and Muslim tutors at home. From my early childhood, I was taught that we are all creatures of the Almighty and that we will all one day be accountable to Him. In the meantime, while on earth, we must do as much good as we can, and as little evil as we can; and we must act with dignity, honor, and honesty. We must use our good fortune to commit to something bigger and better than the pursuit of personal interests and pleasures. For generations

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our family has been dedicated to public service, and it was natural for me to have a strong sense of duty to country. I grew up hearing stories of my grandfathers’ heroic deeds and of their willingness to lay career, fortune, and even life on the line to do what was “right.” My maternal grandfather, Mohammed Khattab, was an aristocratic attorney who did legal work primarily for members of the royal family until he broke ranks with the aristocracy and supported General Ahmad Orabi. The General, in 1883, was the only Egyptian general to oppose the British landing at Tel-el-Kibir, resulting in the occupation of Egypt until 1954. My paternal grandfather, Mahmoud Bassiouni, from whom I received my first name, was president of the Senate and president of the national bar association for many years. As a famed criminal defense lawyer, he devoted most of his successful practice to pro bono cases that made him very popular in Upper Egypt. In 1919 he led the revolution in Upper Egypt against the British, which resulted in the country’s independence in 1922. For his role in that rebellion, he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death by a British Military Court, a conviction that was subsequently reversed by the Crown’s Privy Council in London. After being freed from a prison in the western desert oasis, he participated in the drafting of Egypt’s first Constitution, which was promulgated in 1923. He served over twenty years in the Senate, many of which as president or acting president and also served in two cabinet posts. In 1936, as vice-president of the Senate, he went to India to meet Mahatma Gandhi, and bring him Egypt’s Nationalists’ support. A picture of that visit with Gandhi and my grandfather, flanked by Nehru, hangs in my office. I remember a story my grandfather told me about that visit. He noticed that Gandhi was writing an important message concerning an upcoming massive peaceful demonstration that was being planned. He was doing it with a very short stub of a pencil, and had difficulty writing. Grandfather asked me, “Why do you think he was using such a stub?” At seven, I had no clue. He said that he had asked Gandhi the question, and the answer was, “as a sign of respect for the labor of those who made the pencil.” It took me many years to understand the symbolism of respecting the labor of others, no matter how insignificant it appears to be, or how unimportant the results. Nurtured by the stories of these two greater-than-life grandfathers from early childhood, I found myself attempting to follow their example of doing the right thing, irrespective of the consequences.

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As a child, I was spoiled, yet taught discipline. I had the best of material things, but was taught to appreciate even the smallest things. I was part of the elite, yet brought up to respect all as equals. I was immodest, yet reminded of the need to be humble. I was urged to enjoy the Lord’s bounty, but never to forget sharing some of it with the less fortunate, and, more significantly, that giving is not of things material, but of giving of oneself. My sense of the just and the good has served me well and guided me in periods of adversity, though frequently stubbornness, ego, and arrogance have been frequent hindrances. My strong personality inspires loyalty from some and antagonism from others, and my drive, which is in large part egodriven, sometimes manages to rub people the wrong way. My only explanation for this is that when you fight difficult battles, you are mostly alone, and a strong ego is a necessity in order to sustain you. God has blessed me by providing so many persons who have contributed to my life, well being, and accomplishments. I owe so much to so many. Defining Experiences My life has consisted of many struggles, each one preparing me for the next. The sum total of these experiences prepared me for the challenge of my work in investigating crimes during the war in the former-Yugoslavia between 1992 and 1994 and beyond it to face many other challenges and tests. The following are some illustrative episodes that might perhaps give the reader insight into who I am, and perhaps even to explain why I do things in a certain manner. During the first battle of el-Alamein in 1944, the Germans flew air raids over Cairo as Rommell’s Afrika Korps threatened to overwhelm the Allied forces and enter Alexandria. During one such raid, my father, a career diplomat, was away on a mission overseeing the planned flooding of the Nile Delta to slow the German advance if they managed to break through at el-Alamein. I was seven at the time, living with my parents in an apartment in Zamalek, an exclusive, wealthy area in Cairo. As the tenants and their house staffs rushed in darkness and in great confusion down the stairs heading for the safety of the basement, I managed to slip away in the commotion and went out in the street. Amidst the eerie wail of air raid sirens and under that night’s full moon, I stood in the middle of the street in front of the building with a toy gun in hand aimed at the sky. My mother came running out of the building to carry me to

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safety, screaming at me in tears, “What are you doing?” As I tried to wrestle away from her, I said, “I want to kill Hitler,” believing that he was flying the plane for which the sirens were screaming. I knew not the full extent of the Nazi horrors, but I knew that Hitler was a bad man doing bad things to people in Europe. That was why I had a toy gun, to kill such bad people. The Don Quixote in me never went away. Two years later, in 1946, I had a small first hand glimpse of Hitler’s campaign of dehumanization. An Auschwitz escapee (identified as X.F., since he is still alive in Israel) came to see my father to advocate the cause of the Jewish people in Palestine. While having reservations about the man’s cause, my father nevertheless arranged for him to meet some high-ranking officials in the Egyptian government. During X.F.’s second visit to our apartment, my father had to leave for an urgent meeting, and X.F. remained to speak with my mother. I stood curiously at the door of the living room watching my mother sobbing as she heard X.F. describe the horrors of the Nazi regime and then saw him show her a faint blue tattooed number on his arm. It was the sort of thing that could not be easily forgotten, especially when later I understood the full horror of what this tattoo symbolized. The Holocaust has always been on my mind, and, like many others, I, too, vowed to use my efforts to prevent its recurrence. “Never again” has also been my motto. When Israel, France, and Great Britain were poised to attack Egypt in the summer of 1956 after President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal Company, I was a second-year law student at Dijon University in France. Though in the top ten percent of my class, I abandoned my scholarship to board a Greek freighter in Marseilles that was bound for Egypt with money borrowed from other Egyptian students in Paris. The inevitability of war and the sense of injustice and harm that I felt might befall my country of origin moved me to action. In Cairo, I joined the National Guard and volunteered for a commando unit. After a rushed basic training, I was commissioned a “unit leader,” equivalent to second lieutenant, and sent to the Suez Canal front for the campaign for which I received a medal. Back in Cairo, I was assigned to train 220 Algerian freedom fighters who came to Egypt for that purpose before rejoining their comrades in the struggle for independence from French colonialism. The assignment was fortuitous because, when the Algerians arrived in Egypt, it was discovered that they did not speak enough Arabic to

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be effectively trained by Egyptian-Arabic speaking officers. Somebody in the military discovered that I was fluent in French, had received the same type of training that was to be given the Algerians, and had proven myself in battle; thus I was assigned the training task. Curiously, it was only a three-week program, carried out with secrecy at a sports stadium in the center of Cairo. One evening while I was duty-officer, the guards at the gate of our camp reported that a crowd of people was heading to a nearby site where it was said that an Israeli fighter pilot had parachuted. My first thought was that the angry mob would kill the pilot, and I frantically gathered ten men, picked up a machine gun from the arms rack, and raced to the location. Even though this was contrary to strict orders never to leave the camp, my only thought was to save the pilot from death by the angry mob. As a law student, I was aware of the Geneva Conventions, but more so, I thought of the human being that would likely be killed. If Egypt and its people were to be acknowledged as honorable enemies, nothing should happen to a prisoner of war. I was convinced that, wars notwithstanding, Egypt and Israel would ultimately be at peace, and that peace depended on the humanity that Egyptians and Israelis would show to one other in war. Fortunately, the situation turned out to be a rumor and we returned to camp, where I explained to the squad that accompanied me the significance of why it was so important to save the life of the enemy pilot. I will never forget the respect in their eyes after I explained my motives. Later, after hearing me out, my commanding officer overlooked the transgression of leaving the camp and a threatened court martial was avoided. In time, my expectation proved right, as I was told by Israeli General Abrasha Tamir,5 who was Prime Minister Begin’s Chief of Staff and one of the key persons at Camp David in 1978, that one of the reasons the Israelis could make peace with the Egyptians was the way their prisoners of war (POWs) were treated throughout four wars. Regrettably, however, Israelis killed Egyptian POWs in the 1956 and 1967 wars, and the Egyptians have neither forgotten nor forgiven these crimes. This proves once again that humanitarian considerations are essential to peace and reconciliation. Shortly after the 1956 war and the brief interlude of fame and recognition that I received, I found myself intervening with the authorities in two cases involving Jewish friends who had been or-

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dered to leave Egypt in the aftermath of that war. At age nineteen, wearing the special forces uniform with five military ribbons and full of the ego and confidence that my age and social status impelled in me, I felt invulnerable. Taking extraordinary risks, though without realizing it, I interceded in their favor with high level authorities, and was successful in delaying their departure. One of them was my former high school history professor whose name was Haroun Haddad. His Jewish name, which I did not know then, was Aaron. As his student for two years, I never knew he was Jewish, and, of course, I did not know that his eldest son, who was my classmate, was also Jewish. It was not because they were hiding their religious affiliation, but because it was something that I did not focus on and it therefore escaped me. What mattered to me was that Haroun Haddad was a good teacher and a good man whom I respected and admired. When I got him and his family an extension of one month to leave Egypt, he was tearfully grateful, as he and his wife, Leila, embraced me in their apartment on July 26 Street shortly before they departed their beloved country of origin, which had so wrongly rejected them. That was December 1956. In January 1963, I was on my honeymoon in Los Angeles, where I visited my mother who had settled there after divorcing my father. Having never been in Los Angeles before, I borrowed her car and drove to Santa Monica to see the ocean. There I walked on the pier, and, as I got to the end of it, I noticed an older man sitting on a bench gazing out at the sea and whose appearance seemed familiar. He turned to look at me, and, to my utter surprise, he was Professor Aaron Haddad. We fell into each other’s arms, and, afterwards, he took me home to see his wife, Leila, and his two sons. He had become a professor of Middle East history at the University of California at Los Angles (UCLA), and my classmate from Cairo was now a physician. We re-established our contacts and he and his wife became frequent visitors of my mother who was living her final days fighting cancer. Aaron and Leila gave her emotional support during her last few months, and, when she was buried, they were the only ones, other than immediate family, who were present. I thank the Lord many times over for having given me the opportunity to have done something for this dear man and also for allowing the circle to come to such a perfect close. Experiences such as these have marked my life and confirmed that the personal and professional risks that I have taken have been the right things to do.

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In January 1957, after the war, I returned to France to pursue my studies, but my student visa was not renewed when the French authorities found out that I had trained Algerian soldiers in Egypt, and I was forced to leave my studies one month before graduation. The disappointment was great. But, even in that loss there was some reward. One of my professors, acting on behalf of the entire faculty of law, had filed a petition with the highest administrative court to have the decision denying my student visa overturned. The effort did not succeed, but the concern of the Dijon law faculty was an unforgettable gesture that confirmed my belief in the French sense of justice. I still have the dean’s letter expressing the faculty’s regret for this administrative decision. Graduation, which was so close, eluded me. I elected to continue my legal studies in Geneva, beginning again with the second year, which meant I would have another additional two years to go. That, however, did not ultimately materialize. I went back to Egypt for the summer and was prevented from returning to Switzerland for reasons described below. In Geneva, I took a course from the late Jean Graven, who was dean of the law school, and who showed me interest and kindness for which I was always grateful. Among other things, he introduced me to international criminal law and to the International Association of Penal Law (IAPL). Professor Graven was President of the IAPL, and little did I know that I would eventually succeed him in the Association’s presidency (1989 to date), and pursue a lifetime career largely devoted to international criminal law.6 After successfully completing my first semester in Geneva7 , I returned to Egypt in August 1957. While there on vacation, I heard for the first time that a large number of Egyptians were being jailed for their political views. The estimates exceeded 26,000 persons arbitrarily arrested, many tortured and killed because of their political views. They ranged from communists to Muslim brothers and everybody in between who opposed the Nasser regime. Though I was neither a communist nor a Muslim brother, and, for that matter, had no political affiliation, I was shocked and incensed. Once again, oblivious to danger, intemperately and emotionally, I went to several high ranking personalities and argued with them against these terrible practices, using a picture smuggled out of jail showing a Muslim brother leader who had been tortured to death. I will never forget that gruesome picture which became to me the image of the most abhorrent thing that man can do to man. That picture haunted

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me when I was forced later to confront the same prospects in my own life. My vociferous objections having reached high level officials and coupled with suspicions arising out of my earlier intercessions for the Haddads and another Jewish family (which made me in the eyes of the authorities a “Jewish sympathizer”), resulted in my being placed under house arrest with the threat of being taken at any time to the very prisons where people were being tortured. The picture of the Muslim brother leader tortured to death was indelibly inscribed in my mind, and I imagined that could happen to me. That fear was my psychological torture. Both my father and I were also informed that another option being considered was my being shot. While this too was frightening, it was more welcomed than the alternative of torture, even if I could survive it. The suffering that this fear caused me was probably as brutal as some of the physical pain that I could have endured. But the Lord protected me. I was confined to my apartment in Garden City, Cairo. The wooden shutters were closed, the telephone and radio removed, and no visitors allowed. Once a day, I received food but had no contact with the outside world. My universe gradually shrank, at first to the apartment, then to my bedroom, and, finally, to my bed where I lay most of the time, reliving every moment of my past twenty years. It was the most traumatic experience of my life. I was overtaken by fear and loneliness. Daily, I expected the secret police to come for me and take me away to be tortured. It was the hopelessness and injustice, however, that frustrated and angered me the most. The feeling of the presence of God was my constant companion, and my prayers included imploring the Lord for a quick death. After seven months of that terrifying experience, I was abruptly informed one day by two police officers that I could go out. Though nominally free, my passport was withdrawn. My family’s property was placed under governmental control, and I was forbidden from working, and everyone having contact with me was called in for questioning. I stopped all contacts with others mainly to avoid their embarrassment as well as my own, and was left overwhelmed by my loneliness. Depression became my predominant state of mind, alternating with bouts of anger and frustration, and it was the anger that kept me going. It was the injustice and the abuse of power that most angered me, but it also confirmed in my mind that only the law can stand between the strong and the weak because tyranny flourishes where there is

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no Rule of Law. The experience traumatized me for years but reaffirmed my dedication to uphold the Rule of Law. I left Egypt for the U.S. in 1962, but I have kept the Garden City apartment to this day, perhaps as a reminder of what I had endured and overcame. Determined to beat the demons of fear that haunted me for so long, in 1998, thirty-six years later, I fixed up the rundown apartment. When it was ready a year later, I spent my first night there alone in what was my former prison. It was a long and sleepless night in which I relived the past experience, but if the hurt was still there, the fear had largely dissipated, though not entirely. The next day, after a sleepless night, I received an unexpected call from a dear friend visiting Cairo, the syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer. I insisted she come visit me at the apartment because I needed to tell the story to a friend who would understand—she did. I knew then, however, that I had only partially defeated the demons of the past, for these types of demons never really go away. Traumas like these remain for the rest of one’s life, and one never knows how, when, or where they will resurface. The Lord was also gracious to me in this terrible experience. Indeed, He works in mysterious and strange ways. In 1977, I co-chaired the Committee of Experts that drafted a Convention against torture. The U.N. adopted the Convention in 1984. That my personal experience with torture could lead me to contribute to this landmark legal instrument and that it could possibly stop even a single instance of torture anywhere in the world was more than I could expect. It gave my own victimization a meaning that transcended what I had suffered. That circle thus came to a close. There have been many experiences in my life when I faced great dangers only because I acted on my belief in certain values. I will allude to two of these experiences. In 1958, after my release from house arrest, one day, as I was idly walking along the Nile attempting to fill time (of which there was so much), a car pulled up to the sidewalk. A social friend of my parents, Bruno Pinto, a wealthy Italian businessman now deceased, leaned out of the car’s window to say hello and asked if I wanted a lift. I told him that I was just taking a walk. This led him to ask what I was doing and I admitted to doing nothing. He asked me to get in the car, assuming, as he later told me, that because I had rich parents, I did not need or want to work. He told me that he felt it was such a waste for a bright, well-educated young man who spoke six

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languages to simply do nothing, whereupon he offered me a job on the spot in one of his family’s import-export companies where he thought my talents would be best suited. I could not bring myself to tell him my story; to explain that I was forbidden by the authorities from working. But I could not let the opportunity he offered me pass by either. I had to break out of the terrible black hole of loneliness and idleness into which I had been thrust. The next day I reported to his office, and he explained to me that, for the next few months, I would be his personal assistant so that he could mentor me and then would assign me to appropriate duties. I was tormented the whole day, but could not bring myself again to divulge to him anything regarding my situation. This was my chance to break out of the terrible isolation into which I had been thrust. The interlude was short-lived. The very next day two secret police officers came to inform him that I was forbidden from working. He was shocked that such a thing could exist in Egypt. Though he was born in Egypt, he still was more European than Egyptian, spending a portion of every year in Italy. Also being a businessman, he was removed from the realities of the internal political scene. He called me into his office after the two officers left to inquire of the reasons for this prohibition. I told him the whole story, including my intercession for the two Jewish families. He listened to me with grave attention and complete silence, and then, to his glory, he said, “So long as my family owns this business, you will have a job here.” Though he was English educated and very reserved, I could see that he was deeply troubled and his eyes misted over as he said these words. Tears ran down my cheeks, and I felt eternally grateful to him and I was determined to work for him as hard as I could. Summer then came, and he and his family went to Italy for their annual vacation. But instead of returning at the end of September as planned, he extended his stay. One day in October, a member of the chief prosecutor’s office of Cairo came, accompanied with a contingent of police officers and soldiers, and informed the hastily gathered staff that the Pinto companies had been ordered seized because its owners were Jews who had fled the country and had illegally taken with them substantial assets. The office manager stated that they were Italian Catholics and the prosecutor replied that the Pintos had converted to Catholicism after 1948, that is, after the establishment of the State of Israel, in order to protect themselves and their assets in Egypt. It suddenly dawned upon me why Bruno Pinto had

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offered me a job and said to me what he did. I had stood up for Jews; he was a Jew and would stand up for me as well. Two days later, an Austrian gentleman, W.H. (who is alive and well), came to Egypt and met with the top managers of the Pinto companies, which, to my surprise, also included me. He proceeded to inform us that he was a friend of the family and had come in an attempt to save whatever he could of their assets. He wanted to know who among the managers would represent the Pintos’ interests. Such a person would act as if he were the true owner, and then, one day, when the dust would settle, that person would be amply compensated by the family for saving the companies from government seizure. It was time for me to show my gratitude to Bruno Pinto. For the next few months, I did the best I could to protect their assets from seizure and to prevent a finding that they had illegally taken funds out of the country, which could have led to their extradition and to their prosecution in Egypt. That was the beginning of my interest in the subject of extradition law. A former prosecutor who was working for the Pinto family, Mr. Abdel Hamid, became chairman and president of the newly named United Arab Company for Commerce and Industry (UACCI) which took over one of the Pinto companies where I worked, and I kept my administrative post, with the title of administrative manager. I remained with the successor company for two years before finally leaving Egypt. It was this transition that allowed me to leave Egypt in 1962, even though I was prohibited by the authorities from going abroad. During the few years that I spent in Egypt, between 1958 and 1961, I registered at the University of Cairo Faculty of Law, though I never attended classes, reaching my final year when I had to leave six months before graduation. Once again, I missed graduating, but I was subsequently granted the LL.B. equivalent. I left Egypt in December 1962, because my mother, who had settled in the U.S., had undergone her first cancer surgery and was going to go through radiation with scant hope of survival. I asked the authorities to reinstate my passport, which was seized in 1957, and to allow me to leave the country, but it was denied. At that, I resolved I was going to leave anyway to be with her in her hour of need. The undertaking was almost impossible in the tight dictatorship of the Nasser regime. I had no passport, no exit visa, could not buy a plane or ship ticket without a valid passport and a valid exit visa, and,

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obviously, I could not enter another country without a passport or visa. Airports and port facilities were high security zones and well guarded, and there was no way to enter them to seek escape. By land there were three possible exits, Israel to the East, Libya to the West, and the Sudan to the South, but all three borders were heavily guarded and there was no way of sneaking through. Ironically, my work at the Pinto companies and later at the successor company required me to go frequently inside the port area in Alexandria, and for that I had a special permit. During prior visits to the customs port area of Alexandria, I had noticed a gap in security in boarding passenger ships from inside the customs port area. Presumably, since the outside perimeter was very secure, the security on the inside was scant. Using that observation, I devised a plan to get on board a cruise ship to leave the country. The big problems, however, were to get a passport, an exit visa, a visa to Italy, and a ticket on a ship, and, of course, to get on board undetected. If caught, I would probably be killed, or surely spend many years in jail and was likely to be tortured, something that always obsessed me. I decided to rely on the bureaucracy’s mindless processes and officially applied for a new passport. The worst that could happen was that it would be denied. A few days later, I went to the passport office late in the day, about 3 p.m., and all the duty officers seemed to have left. There was a warrant officer left in that office and a few sergeants and soldiers. I asked the warrant officer whether my passport had been issued, and, to my utter surprise and delight, he located the passport, which had been issued, but which had not been stamped nor signed by the appropriate officer-in-charge. I asked if he could stamp it so that when the officer in charge came he would sign it, and, with a little bakshish (bribe), he stamped the passport and put it on top of the pile to be signed. It was then that the officer-in-charge came back to his office and a flurry of activity ensued. I asked the warrant officer to give me the passport so that I could take it personally to the officer-in-charge to have him sign it, pretending that I knew him. He gave me the passport and I went out in the corridor but instead of turning right to go to the office of the officer in charge, I turned left and headed out of the building. As I walked down the steps of the passport office, there were many people walking around with their passports completing formalities and I asked one of them to see his stamp which he readily showed me. It was the same as mine, but it also had the scribbled signature of the officer-in-charge,

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which mine did not have. But the signature was barely noticeable over the stamp, so I decided to use the passport with the stamp, but without the signature, hoping that no one would notice. The lawyer in me prevented me from risking a forgery by adding a scribbled signature to the stamp. The next day I went to get a visa from the Italian consulate and because of my connection with the prominent Italian Pinto family, the vice consul immediately gave me a threemonth tourist visa. With the passport and visa I went to buy a ticket on a luxury liner from Alexandria to Genoa. The travel agent did not notice that I was missing an exit visa and sold me the ticket. A few days later, I was on the Italian luxury Mediterranean liner “Esperia,” heading for Italy. To board the ship, which was the trickiest and scariest part of the plan, I went to the customs area of the port in late afternoon, hid until 2 a.m. and then boarded the ship in the thick of night without anybody noticing. There I hid on the uppermost deck under a lifeboat until the ship was outside Egyptian territorial waters by 2 p.m. of the next day and went to the purser to ask for my cabin. I was on the passenger list, had a first class ticket, a passport, and a visa to Italy, so everything was in order. But the purser was suspicious as to why a passenger who presumably boarded the ship the day before waited more than twenty-four hours to ask for his cabin. He took me to the captain and I had a simple explanation. I was so exhausted that I simply fell asleep on one of the chaise lounges on the upper deck and had just awakened. The captain was incredulous as he had never heard of someone sleeping so long, but there was nothing he could do short of turning the ship back to Egypt which did not seem to be a reasonable option. After all, I was on the passenger list, had my ticket, my passport, and visa to Italy. And so it was that I left Egypt for Italy as a first class passenger. The date was December 9, my birthday, and I thought that the Lord had allowed me to be reborn on that same day. There is one additional detail to this story, which is that I, of course, had no luggage, but I had some money to buy whatever I needed from the ship’s store for the five-day voyage. For the next three days, I was so emotionally exhausted from the experience that I slept an average of twelve hours a day. I cannot remember ever having been under so much emotional stress, and with so much at risk if I were to be caught boarding the ship. After the ship docked in Genoa, I took a train to Vienna where I met W.H. again, with whom I developed a life-long friendship. On a

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previous trip to Cairo (which he had made to survey the situation of the proceedings concerning the Pinto companies), he had agreed to take to Vienna two suitcases filled with my clothes. After spending two pleasant days as his guest in Vienna at the Bristol Hotel, I returned to Genoa to board for New York a luxury steamer whose very name symbolized my newly discovered life, it was the “Cristoforo Colombo” (Christopher Columbus); this time, however, with two suitcases. And so, once again, the Lord was watching over me and the circle came to a perfect close. Bruno Pinto had stood up for me and gave me a job in recognition for what I had done for two Jewish families. I stood up for Bruno Pinto and tried to save his assets and prevent his extradition from Italy, and, when I had to leave Egypt to be with my mother in the U.S., it was my connection with the Pinto companies that allowed me the means to escape. In many ways, I still live my life as I did at age seven when I defiantly faced Hitler’s plane. But later when it was no longer child’s play, I faced great obstacles armed only with principle and good intentions. The seven-year-old child with the toy gun aimed at the sky who wanted to kill Hitler remained unchanged. Maybe that is why a dear friend from France, Michele Freschi, gave me in 1976 a Picasso print replica of the “Man of La Mancha” that still hangs in my office and said to me “you always tilt at windmills and dream the impossible dream.” It is this visceral sense of justice that drives me to fight against great odds. Upon reflection, it seems that I have always fought against great odds, more often than not, impetuously. Yet I cannot say that I am a brave man for I have always faced dangers with fear, though somehow, when the moment of truth comes, I am able to overcome fear and face whatever confronts me. A certain stubbornness sets in, and I focus intensely on holding to a given course. My judgment and methods have not always been the wisest or the best, but my motives were as good as I could perceive them to be. A New Life in America My early life in the United States was not easy. I was an immigrant who had to find a job, go to law school, start a new life and forget about my country of origin that I loved dearly, but which had treated me so badly. Once again a series of fortuitous events led me to what I became, and, in my mind, it is a result of the work of the Lord.

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One of these fortuitous events was a chance meeting in New York with the dean of Indiana University School of Law at Indianapolis, Ben Small, who offered me admission with state tuition which was much more affordable than the tuition at the major law schools that I was considering. Thus I went to Indianapolis, worked during the day, went to law school at night, and graduated in 1964. It was a difficult and lonely life. Before graduating, I had attended in Chicago a conclave of the Phi Alpha Delta law fraternity of which I was vice-justice, and there I met a man by the name of Al Vail whom I believed to be a practicing lawyer in Chicago. Instead, unbeknownst to me, he was a law professor at DePaul University whose former law partner, Phil Romiti, was the dean of the College of Law. A few months before graduating I moved to Chicago and got a job with an insurance company, and, one day, I followed up on Al Vail’s invitation to call him. He invited me to lunch, and it was then that I met Phil Romiti whom I thought was Al Vail’s law partner. We had a pleasant lunch talking about one thing and another, and I had no idea that this was in the nature of an interview. I did not have the slightest indication that I was speaking to the dean and a senior faculty member. The lunch was at the Imperial Room of the Palmer House. We started at 12:15, and, at a certain moment, Phil looked at his watch and said something to the effect: “Oh, my God, it’s 2:00, I have an appointment in the office and must run. Cherif, you will get the contract in a couple of weeks, you’re a great guy. I look forward to having you on the faculty. When you get the contract, call me and we will talk about courses.” I looked at Al Vail in total consternation and he extended his hand and said in his quiet warm voice, “Welcome to DePaul University College of Law.” We went through a give and take to bring me up to speed on what had just happened, and in the end I asked him why. He answered me in his southern Illinois drawl, which he accentuated at times for effect, and told me a story about the early days of settling the American West. At the end of the wagon trail’s trek in California, there was a spot shaded by trees where the wagon trails would break up and the different wagons would go to different towns. There, a man would wander through the wagons and ask people where they came from, but mostly whether they had left behind them good friends and loved ones. Those who answered that they had no family or friends or that those they had left behind were best forgotten, or that they were glad they had left whatever towns they came from were directed to move for-

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ward to towns suitable for them about fifteen to twenty miles or so beyond that point. Those who said they had left family and friends behind whom they remembered fondly and good neighbors, or who recalled the good things of the past were warmly invited to come to that man’s town. Al Vail then said something to the effect, “You seem to have left behind loving family and good friends, and many good memories. You miss people, and apparently they miss you. Your heart is in the right place and you have good values. You are the kind of person that should come to our town.” When I told him that I had just graduated and hardly knew enough to be a teacher, he said something like “The law you can always learn, but being a good person, you cannot learn.” And that was the beginning of my thirtysix years at DePaul University, during which I have dedicated myself to the defense and advocacy of human rights. Several years later, Al Vail passed away, and his son Bernie, who is now a law professor, was my student. The first few years at DePaul were difficult. I had to teach several sections of criminal law, oversee the junior year’s appellate brief writing, and participate in several committees. These were the days when academics were expected to put in a full day’s work, including a heavy load of classroom teaching and the expectation of scholarly activity and public service. But the pay was low. I started in 1964 at $8,500 a year, and had to wait four years to make $12,000, which was what I was making at the insurance company in 1964 before I started teaching. Promotions were also slow. On the average, one made full professor at DePaul in ten to twelve years. I was fortunate in that I published my first textbook on criminal law in 1969 and was promoted to full professor on its strength after only five years of teaching. I also became involved in pro bono professional work and was assigned to many cases, including a large number of cases deriving from mass arrests in the 1967 Chicago riots and in connection with arrests arising out of the 1968 Democratic convention anti-Vietnam protests. These experiences taught me how important it is to link theory to practice. It also made me realize how many academics and policymakers are regrettably devoid of practical experiences. Because of their lack of practical experience, they are frequently unaware of important practical factors that have a direct bearing on their work. Even though I had a limited insight into the 1967 riots and the 1968 confrontation, it was nonetheless enough to make me

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realize that events involving a large number of persons acquire a dimension that transcends their numbers. Later, in the former-Yugoslavia, having to deal for example with a mass grave containing over 200 bodies, I understood the practical problems it posed. Additionally, the experience of criminal law practice proved to be very helpful in my work in the former-Yugoslavia as I developed the questionnaire for the database as well as the various protocols for investigations. It is probably also the reason why I felt it necessary to have a hands-on approach to the collection of evidence and investigation because I knew from many cases how crucial details were to the outcome of a criminal case. Paradoxically, this practical experience put me at odds with those who did not have it, whether within the U.N. bureaucracy or my colleagues on the Commission and the staff who frequently did not see the need or relevance of some of the things I did or wanted done. My pro bono experience forced me into the courtroom, thus eliminating the apprehension that young lawyers have about practice work. I found it exhilarating, and moved on from there to engage in a limited, but varied legal practice. I must admit that it was much less for the challenge than for the income, as I could hardly make ends meet at my level of salary in the first ten years of teaching. After that, it was also for the challenge and the pleasure of practicing law. At first, I did almost everything: real estate transactions, immigration work, divorce, criminal defense, international business transactions, and even a few personal injury matters. Later, I did almost exclusively international extradition, a field in which I became a specialist and where I handled over a hundred cases which is more than any U.S. criminal defense lawyer. My book on extradition, now one of two in the country, has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in every extradition case it has heard since 1974, and by almost all federal appeals courts. My specialization in extradition is a direct result of my efforts in 1958 in Cairo to prevent the extradition by Egypt from Italy members of the Pinto family (as that episode is described above). When I did my doctorate (SJD) at George Washington University, I wrote my dissertation on extradition, which was then published in 1974 as the first book on extradition to be published in the U.S. in 100 years. Now in its third edition, it is a classic work referred to by almost all who work or write in the field of extradition. Considering my previous experiences, it was inevitable that in my academic career I would specialize in international criminal law

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and human rights. I threw myself with as much enthusiasm and vigor as I could muster in working for the advancement of human rights and international criminal law. I traveled constantly to speak at conferences, wrote articles for the media, scholarly journals and books, and worked in scholarly and professional organizations. At first, the results were necessarily modest. I was young and without academic standing, and, as I later discovered, being of Arab origin and a Muslim was a handicap. Along with so many manifestations of support that I received during my career, I was also the subject of discrimination that Arab-Americans and Muslim-Americans have for so long been subjected to in the U.S. In time, however, I became a leading figure in international criminal law and human rights both in the U.S. and throughout the world. My works in these fields became primary sources and there is hardly any publication on international criminal law anywhere in the world that does not cite my works. A colleague jokingly once said that this was inevitable since I have authored or edited sixty-five books and 203 law review articles in scholarly journals published in several countries and in several languages. My works have been published in or translated into Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. When I first started to teach international criminal law at DePaul in 1974, there was only one other law school, New York University, that occasionally taught a course on the subject. Now there are over forty U.S. law schools that teach international criminal law. All the professors that use a casebook use the one I co-authored, and those that use assembled material include some of my works. This in itself is a great accomplishment of which I am enormously proud and grateful. International criminal law necessarily includes the history of international criminal prosecutions, as well as the long-standing goal of the world community to have an international criminal court (ICC). Thus, I became an ardent advocate of an ICC some thirty years ago, long before it became fashionable in the late 1990s. My inspiration was from the work of a Rumanian diplomat, Vespasien Pella, who was my predecessor as president of the International Association of Penal Law (IAPL), and who was the principal force behind the League of Nations 1937 Convention to establish a permanent international criminal court, but which failed for political reasons. His successors as IAPL presidents, such as Jean Graven, who was my professor in Geneva, all continued the tradition, as I did here in turn. The IAPL

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has been the principal force in the academic world for the establishment of an ICC going back to 1926. The Association, which was founded in Vienna in 1889, and reorganized in Paris after World War I in 1924, has for years been the elite legal academic organization in the world. IAPL members have been academic and policy leaders in the field of criminal justice, particularly in Europe from 1889 to the late 1980s, after which dominance in the field, as with everything else, seems to have passed to the United States. Its presidents and secretaries-general have been among the luminaries of criminal justice in the world, and they were all Europeans. It was therefore most astounding that in 1974, at the age of thirty-seven, I was elected secretary-general of the Association. Never before had somebody under fifty, and not a European, been elected to such a post. That election was the result of a dear and senior colleague, Gerhard O.W. Mueller, whose friendship I cherish. To my great honor I was again unanimously reelected twice for secretary-general for a total of fifteen years in that office, and then unanimously elected president at the Centennial of the Association in Vienna in 1989, and then unanimously reelected twice. This level of confidence and support from the 3,000 or so members and affiliates of the Association from over 120 countries has never been manifested before and I am deeply grateful for that confidence. In 1969, when I was still a young deputy secretary-general of the Association, I was asked by the former president of the Italian National Section, Giovanni Leone, who had become the president of the Republic of Italy, what he could do for the Association that could also be a credit to Italy. I suggested establishing an international center that would be the rallying point for scholars, experts, researchers, and students, from north and south and from east and west. The basic value of such a center would be universal humanism, and we would reach across the globe to build bridges of understanding, to enhance peace, reduce conflict and their human tragedies, work at the control and prevention of crime, uphold the rights of victims, support the integrity of justice systems, improve the administration of criminal justice, uphold human rights, and preserve the Rule of Law. Most of my colleagues thought the goals impossible to achieve and attributed the idea of a global center seeking to achieve these goals to my personal ambition, if not to my megalomania. Against extraordinary odds, the International Institute of Higher Studies in Criminal Studies (ISISC) was established in 1972 in Siracusa, Sicily,

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in the middle of the Mediterranean, in a city founded by the Greeks 5,000 years ago. Since then, the Institute has conducted some 240 conferences, seminars, training sessions, and meetings of different types which witnessed the presence of close to 15,000 jurists from 140 countries and published over 100 books of its proceedings. The influence of the Institute’s work has been enormous. It has, for example, conducted a major human rights education project for Arab countries in the 1980s and trained over 1,900 jurists from almost every Arab country, publishing eight books in Arabic on human rights which was responsible for the awakening in the Arab world to human rights. In the late 1980s, many who attended the ISISC seminars from Eastern Europe and the former USSR, and who had been active in the IAPL, became the leaders in their new transitional democracies, and they were the ones who developed the constitutions, criminal laws, and criminal procedures that brought these countries from tyrannical regimes to democratic forms of government. The Institute also worked in a quiet way as it hosted meetings of experts that drafted international conventions. It was there, in 1977, that the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture was approved by a committee of experts that I had the honor to co-chair with the late Neil MacDermot from the International Commission of Jurists. The text of the draft convention was prepared by me in Chicago, where I worked on it with my assistant, Dan Derby, now a law professor at Touro Law School. It was the IAPL that then, in 1978, introduced that text before the U.N. Later that year, Sweden officially sponsored the text, and, six years later, it became one of the world’s major human rights treaties. The Institute was also the venue of other U.N. instruments such as: the basic principles on the independence of the judiciary, the guiding principles on criminal justice policy, the Basic Principles of victims of crime and abuse of power, and other instruments that became U.N. approved international norms. The younger generations that came to the Institute in the early 1970s have since become leaders in their countries and, through them, the value of universal humanism, and the goals mentioned above continue to make their way throughout the world. It took tremendous amounts of work, a lot of effort, constant determination, and a lot of heartaches (more than I could ever describe), but it has been well worth it considering the results that have ensued. The Institute’s contributions to the Rule of Law have been extraordinary,

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and it has been my honor and privilege to have directed this worldwide effort. There are so many episodes, stories, and particular moments throughout my thirty-seven-year academic career that I could recount, but one will forever stand out, perhaps because of its relevance to my work in the former-Yugoslavia. It is my involvement with the Canadian government in the prosecution of the first case of “crimes against humanity” arising out of World War II, after Canada had passed a law in 1987 permitting such prosecutions. The Canadian government appointed me chief legal expert in its first case. The case, known as the Finta case, was brought in 1989 against a former captain in the Hungarian gendarmerie, who, in June of 1945, had gathered in the District of Szeged, Hungary, 8,617 Jews for deportation to Auschwitz, Poland, and Strasshof, Austria. Captain Finta, in June 1945, at the instructions of his superiors who, at their turn, were so instructed by the SS, gathered these elder Jews, women, and children in the railroad yard. At that time, most men and labor-capable women had either been taken or induced to work in Germany’s factories. He then supervised their loading into the infamous boxcars that took so many thousands to their deaths in camps throughout Poland and other Nazi-occupied countries of central and northern Europe. They were packed in the boxcars so tight that those who had died on the way remained standing until the boxcars were emptied of their hapless passengers. June 1945 was the hottest summer Europe had experienced in many years, with temperatures soaring into the 40s centigrade and the boxcars had practically no ventilation. There was one empty bucket placed at one end and another bucket of water at the other end of the car. The older men and women and the children packed in the cars urinated and defecated on themselves standing up. The first part of the trip from Szeged to Auschwitz took a full five days, filled with agony for those on the train. When it stopped at Auschwitz, many were taken away never to be seen again; others were sent to slave labor camps. On the dock were piles of corpses taken out of the boxcars. Anyone who has seen images like these at Yad Vashem or at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum will never be able to erase them from his or her mind. They reveal a dehumanization that insults the Creator who has made us brethren in humanity. Canada’s law was most difficult to apply as it was the product of a compromise between political forces in a country that did not want

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to prosecute former German military personnel and those of other countries allied with Germany during World War II, and those who wanted to pursue Nazi war criminals no matter where and no matter when. The Canadian legislation required proving that the crime charged existed in international law at the time it was committed, and that it was also a crime under Canadian criminal law. The latter was not difficult to prove but the former, with respect to crimes against humanity, was. There was indeed an international customary law in the making with respect to “crimes against humanity” before it was embodied in positive international law in Article 6(c) of the Statute of the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg). But the crime charged occurred in June 1945, before the Nuremberg Charter was adopted. Consequently, as Canada’s chief legal expert, I needed to prove the existence of “crimes against humanity” before the Nuremberg Charter was signed as a Treaty in London on August 8, 1945. Though by 1989 I was well established as a leading authority on international criminal law, I was still somewhat surprised to have been chosen by the Canadian Ministry of Justice to fulfill the dual role of advising the Canadian prosecution team and helping prepare its legal arguments, and also of testifying at the trial as the chief legal expert. This was, after all, a case that was driven by the facts, and I would have expected the Canadian government to choose another expert who had more familiarity with the Nazi extermination plans in Hungary. Later, I was told in the course of a humorous interchange with an official in the Ministry that I was the ideal expert, not only because of my substantive knowledge and well-known commitment, but also because, if I failed to make the case on the law, I could be blamed and not the Canadian government. Being an Arab Muslim would make me the perfect fall guy. Having heard that, I became more determined than ever to succeed. In accepting the assignment, I had specifically requested the Canadian Ministry of Justice for staff and research support. After the first few months, I realized that there was very little support for the case in the Ministry. Christopher Amerisinghe was the crown prosecutor in charge of the case who was working in Toronto with one younger crown prosecutor and a research assistant who was not a lawyer. This was it. As for me, I was without any support or research assistance from Canada, and basically left to my own devices.

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To prove that “crimes against humanity” existed before Nuremberg required a great deal of research and preparation. But there were also many other legal questions on which I had to assist Crown Prosecutor Amerisinghe in the preparation of his brief, such as command responsibility, obedience to superior orders, what is the required mental element that needed to be proven in “crimes against humanity,” and many other substantive legal issues. All this work had to be done while I was teaching a full load of two courses, as well as managing the academic and administrative affairs of the IAPL and the ISISC. Knowing that I could not do the task by myself, I went to an old friend, Philip Klutznick, who, at one time was president of the World Zionist Organization and a former secretary of commerce under President Carter. Phil had been a friend for many years, and I was sure that he would find a way to help me. What I had hoped for was for him to reach out to the major Jewish organizations in the U.S. or to major law firms to seek out volunteers in the legal community to help me with the monumental research task that faced me. But to my surprise and disappointment, Phil, who had always been supportive, found many lame reasons to explain why volunteer support was not forthcoming. I then went to another Chicago friend, Maynard Wishner, who was past president of the American Jewish Committee, and made the same request, but also without results. I concluded that there were possibly two reasons: the first was that the case did not look too good and was probably headed for a loss. Consequently, I thought major U.S. Jewish organizations and prominent Jewish personalities did not want to be associated with it. The second, which could have been related to the first, was that I was an Arab Muslim. I had no choice but to do the work myself, and, along with a student assistant, I plodded through the task. My problem, however, was to legally establish the existence of “crimes against humanity” in international law prior to Nuremberg. Since there was no treaty on “crimes against humanity” and only an emerging custom, I was afraid that the case would be weak. And then, one day, an idea flashed through my mind that gave me a theoretical basis to prove the case in a different way. One of the sources of international law is called “general principles of law,” and that means that a given legal principle or proposition exists in all or almost all legal systems of the world. I expanded the theory beyond a mere legal principle or proposition to include specific crimes. I made a list of those specific crimes contained within the

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category called “crimes against humanity,” as defined in Article 6(c) of the Nuremberg Charter, which includes “murder, extermination, deportation, enslavement, and other inhumane acts,” and “persecution.” I wrote out each one of these crimes and other included crimes (for example, manslaughter would be included in “murder,” and rape would be included in “other inhumane acts”) horizontally at the top of a wide sheet of paper, and then I listed vertically, in chart fashion, all the countries in the world that existed in 1945, which I discovered to be seventy-four. I then did research in major law libraries in Chicago and in the Library of Congress in Washington, looking for the criminal codes of these seventy-four countries that were in effect in 1945. Looking through these codes I discovered that each one of them contained the same crimes as those that I had listed horizontally across the page and I then inserted in the column under the crime listed horizontally the reference to the criminal code of each country. When I completed the chart it became evident that all legal systems in existence in 1945 contained the same prohibition as those that were contained in Article 6(b) of the Nuremberg Charter. Consequently, I concluded that the definition of “crimes against humanity” in Article 6(b) embodied “General Principles of Law” as recognized in the world’s major criminal justice systems. The next step was to solicit from experts in each of these countries an affidavit to declare that the crimes in question existed in their legal systems in 1945. All of this was not as easy as it seems. Fortunately, my connections as president of the IAPL provided me with the necessary contacts without which this research would have been impossible. But even so, the logistics of identifying these experts, obtaining the affidavits, translating them into English, attaching copies of the codes, translating them and preparing the binders of documents was for me, my assistant, and secretary, a monumental task. Then, all of these documents had to be authenticated. It amounted to six binders which, when stacked, came to over three feet. The new theory that I had developed, backed by the data, carried the day in court, and the judgment acknowledged that “crimes against humanity” did exist in 1945 prior to the Nuremberg Charter. Thus, we won the legal side of the case, and it constituted a significant legal precedent.8 Prior to the court’s final decision, however, I had to testify as to this legal research, as well as other propositions of law which were embodied in legal memoranda that I had prepared for the Crown’s

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prosecution, totaling over 300 pages. My testimony was expected to take a day, maybe a day and a half, but defense counsel, a Mr. Douglas Christie, who is reputed to be a strong supporter of neo-Nazi groups in Canada, kept me on the stand under cross examination for five days, six hours a day. It was a grueling experience. Mr. Christie, who did not exhibit much knowledge of the legal issues, kept up my questioning in an unexpected manner. His early questions had to do with my origins, as he seemed convinced that I was Jewish and that I was concealing myself behind the appearance of an Arab Muslim. He also kept asking me how involved I was in “Jewish politics” and in “Holocaust politics,” as he referred to it. This line of questioning brought to my mind, while on the stand, a visit several months earlier of a Canadian crown prosecutor and a Royal Canadian mounted police officer who showed me an underground newspaper published by neo-Nazis in Canada and in Australia and apparently also in Germany. On page one was a box with my name, address and academic affiliation, asking who I really was with a big question mark. The neo-Nazi “brothers” were to send any information to a post office box. The Canadians offered me the opportunity to withdraw from the case in view of dangers that this ad apparently represented. I remembered the ironic thought that crossed my mind at the time when the two Canadians came to my office in Chicago: I could not get the support of the major Jewish organizations in the U.S. possibly because I was an Arab Muslim, and I was now being targeted by anti-Semitic neo-Nazis for being Jewish. It was one of those strange ironies of life. But it would take more than the neo-Nazis to get the little seven-year-old boy to pack up his toy gun and run away from Hitler’s plane. I could not resist while on the stand from giving Mr. Christie a little bit of his own medicine, and so I answered one of his questions that even though I was an Arab Muslim, I also had Jewish cousins, which awakened his curiosity and led him to pursue that line of questioning. I told him that I had an ancestor by the name of Abraham who had two sons, Isaac and Ismail, and that, while my family came from Ismail, my cousins from Uncle Isaac were all Jewish. Mr. Christie did not realize what I was saying until the entire courtroom burst out laughing. We had a few such give and takes during the five days of my cross examination. The Supreme Court of Canada confirmed the legal proposition that I had presented, but, on the facts, the jury found the defendant

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not guilty, probably on the basis that Finta was a low-ranking officer, a captain, and that he was carrying out superior orders without a chance to deviate from them. It was not the ideal case to have taken to court for the first time under a new law as sweeping as that of Canada. Maybe, as a result of that case, the Canadian government never brought another case like it to trial. The apprehensions of many had materialized, but the legal decision still stands as a landmark on “crimes against humanity.” As a result of this case, I published, in 1992, my first volume of Crimes Against Humanity and a second edition in 1999. The book is considered the most comprehensive legal work on that category of international crimes. The Finta case taught me, however, an important lesson that was later relevant to my work in the former-Yugoslavia. To prove the criminality of Captain Finta, the prosecution had to prove that there was an overall plan by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews in Hungary, and that this plan was part of a greater plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. To prove such historic fact, as well as the policies, patterns and practices related to it, required many experts and much documentation. But in the Common Law system, much of that context was extraneous to the limited facts of what Captain Finta was charged with in Szeged. This is one of the limitations of a Common Law trial that, by its very nature, does not lend itself to proving broader historic facts that need to be fitted into the narrow parameters of a factspecific case. The same problems would later appear in connection with ICTY prosecutions. But, because I was mindful of that, I went to great lengths in the Final Report and Annexes discussed below to establish the existence of policies through factual patterns. In 1990, the College of Law established the International Human Rights Law Institute (IHRLI) to which I was appointed president. IHRLI’s goals include: developing international accountability mechanisms for violations of international criminal law and support for the establishment of the international criminal court (ICC); promoting human rights work and the Rule of Law in the Americas (thanks to a generous gift from Jeanne and Joe Sullivan who have been wonderful friends and great supporters); training judges, lawyers, and prosecutors to advance the Rule of Law; working with indigenous people in Mexico; and training students as the next generation of human rights defenders. Each year we involve in a variety of projects between fifteen and twenty students as Institute fellows and summer interns.

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A current project undertaken in cooperation with the Women’s Commission of the Organization of the American States is an empirical study on international trafficking in women and children for sexual exploitation in the Americas. This is probably today’s most significant worldwide violation of human rights other than victimization arising out of violent conflicts. One of the projects we undertook in 1997 was to assess the number of conflicts that took place in the world since WWII. We have determined that there have been 251 conflicts that resulted in a low estimate of 70 million casualties to a high estimate of 170 million casualties. This study, distributed worldwide, has heightened governmental concerns for various conflicts occurring mostly in Africa and Asia. It was undertaken with the expectation that major world powers will do more to prevent the occurrence of these conflicts or at least minimize their harmful consequences. IHRLI has been particularly active in the last five years in support of the U.N.’s work for the establishment of an international criminal court (ICC). This included facilitating the participation of some thirtysix Less Developed Countries (LDCs) in U.N. meetings in New York and at the Diplomatic Conference held in Rome in July 1998. Without this program, these poorer countries of the world would not have been able to participate in the establishment of this important new institution. We have also undertaken a worldwide campaign since 1998 to support ratification of the ICC and development of national implementing legislation. This is done through legal research, technical assistance and support, as well as training of experts from developing countries. As such, the Institute has been fulfilling a Vincentian mission of helping the poorer countries of the world. Last, but not least, the Institute had a successful arms control program. Over a ten-year period the Institute has received over six million dollars in grants, contracts, and general support funds to carry out its various programs. This in itself reveals the extent of the work undertaken. Additionally, we have received over 500 jurists and human rights advocates from over forty countries as trainees, fellows and visitors; of these, some 200 judges and prosecutors received human rights training. The Institute has done so much that its Tenth Annual Report containing only highlights is thirty-six pages long.9 The Institute’s work has required most of my time during the past decade, and for many of its activities I have been able to combine

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the efforts of the two other organizations I direct, the IAPL and the ISISC. Working for Peace in the Middle East Since 1967, I have been involved in various efforts to promote peace in the Middle East. All of them cannot be described here for reason of space, and also because some of these endeavors require confidentiality or at least discretion. Thus, only highlights will be offered as illustrations. It began in the 1960s with numerous speeches, participation in conferences and meetings of experts, and consultations with government officials in the region and in the United States. I was also involved in several interfaith groups aimed at bringing about a better understanding between Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In 1975, along with Professor Morton Kaplan of the University of Chicago, we developed the idea that became the premise of the 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel. At that time, the policy of the United States, developed by Henry Kissinger, was to pursue a step-by-step approach that, in our judgment, had reached the point where it could no longer yield tangible results. We therefore advocated the pursuit of a comprehensive framework agreement in which the parties would agree on basic principles of peace that would later be implemented in bilateral peace agreements between Israel and Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Palestinians. The 1975 plan containing these principles was published by the University of Chicago’s Strategic Studies Center and widely distributed. Senator Charles Percy, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held hearings on it and wrote the preface to the updated version published in 1977. It was my task to present the plan and the draft text of the principles to the president of the United States, at the time Gerald Ford, and to President Anwar el-Sadat, which I did in person. In 1976, it was presented to President Jimmy Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, and, in 1978, President Carter called a summit meeting with President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin at Camp David that resulted in an agreement on basic principles of peace. These principles were similar to the plan that Kaplan and I had published in 1975 and revised in 1977. During that period, I had frequent meetings with the late President Sadat, the late King Hussein of Jordan, as well as with senior officials from Egypt, the United States, and Israel. I was also active with Egypt in

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connection with the 1979 Peace Agreement between Egypt and Israel, whose signing I attended in Washington, as I did the Post-Camp David White House dinner. Without immodesty, I can state that I had some input into what developed since 1975. Between 1977 and 1979, I attended many meetings in Washington and at the White House on the occasion of the visits of President Sadat and during the meetings hosted by President Carter for President Sadat and Prime Minister Begin, and, subsequently, those hosted by President Reagan for President Mubarak. Since 1995, I have been involved, under the academic umbrellas of IHRLI and ISISC, with a small group of experts from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the U.S. The goal is to develop a regional security regime which includes the elimination of weapons of mass destruction from the region. My selection as coordinator of the group speaks for itself. It was probably as a result of my efforts during 1975-1979 that I became known to the White House and the Department of State for expertise in the Middle East, and this led to my appointment by the Carter Administration in 1979 to be the attorney who would defend the U.S. diplomats taken as hostages by Iran in the event that they would be tried.10 This was a very tense period in which the work for the release of the U.S. diplomats held hostage in Iran was carried out in secrecy and I am honored to have played a minor role in it. The Sum Total During my thirty-seven years at DePaul, I feel that I have accomplished a great deal in terms of giving something back to humanity and serving God on earth by serving the needs of humankind. There have been many rewards in my life. My academic work is highly recognized as I pioneered the discipline of international criminal law and worked for the establishment of the International Criminal Court. One of these rewards was to be elected unanimously by 160 countries to be the chair of the Drafting Committee of the U.N. Diplomatic Conference, which produced the Treaty and Statute for the Establishment of the International Criminal Court.11 During my career I have received numerous awards and several medals from Egypt, Austria, Italy, and the U.S. In 1999, my greatest reward came when I was nominated to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.12 My university has also given me many awards and has supported me in all my endeavors, and that is why I never accepted other enticing academic offers. My colleagues at DePaul have been particu-

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larly supportive, and I never felt any bias or prejudice by my Jewish colleagues, which speaks so well of them. My many friends on the faculty over the years and my former students have given me the greatest satisfaction for which any academic could hope. I am eternally grateful to them. It is uncanny that, while I was at the College of the Holy Family in Cairo between 1947-1955, I volunteered to work in the charitable St. Vincent DePaul Society, and since 1964, I have been working in the shadow of St. Vincent at DePaul University. His motto, “to serve God by serving the needs of man,” became mine. I have been blessed during my lifetime to have had many friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and former students who have expressed to me their affection and demonstrated their support. Without them, and particularly without my family, I would never have been able to accomplish what I did. I owe a great deal to my mother and father, and to my wife, Nina. I also owe much to my former teachers, particularly one of them, the late Hassan el-Sayyed, who was my mentor. I must say that I am blessed by the Lord for evoking such feelings and responses in others. It was also my good fortune not to have made enemies, though, regrettably, I have not been able to avoid the jealousy and pettiness that one commonly encounters in life. My only regret is to have encountered some ethno-political bias in the United States. It was never at the personal level, but it manifested itself on many occasions where career or professional opportunities existed. I frequently had the feeling that I had to do twice as much to get half as far because of where I came from. Israeli/Jewish politics in the U.S. are regrettably a zero-sum game. As I frequently encountered this type of hidden but yet very much felt ethno-political prejudice working against me, I could not help but feel the irony of having risked my life for Jews in Egypt, only to be discriminated against by some Jewish organizations and some Jews in the United States. This is the contextual background, or, if you will, the brief profile of the person who, at the end of 1992, was asked to investigate violations of international humanitarian law in the former-Yugoslavia while the war was ongoing and in the face of much adversity. My work was inspired and motivated by the following Talmudic wise guidance: “The world rests on three pillars: on truth, on justice, and on peace.” —Rabban Simeon ben Gamaliel (1 Abot I8)

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A Talmudic commentary adds to this, saying: “The three are really one, if justice is realized, truth is vindicated and peace results.”

*

*

*

The creation of the Commission of Experts by the U.N. Security Council was unprecedented. Its work was both exceptional and extraordinary, especially given the fact that it was conducted during an ongoing war and in the face of great opposition. This step set the stage and served as a model for the Rwanda Commission, which was established in July 1994,13 and hopefully for similar undertakings in the future. Its accomplishments may be dwarfed by subsequent events, but such is the case with all breakthroughs as they become superceded by the greater accomplishments for which they paved the way. A new, action-oriented body of this sort required a great deal of support from the U.N. structure, with which the bureaucracy had difficulty coping. There were, of course, understandable administrative reasons for some of the Commission’s start-up difficulties. To this, one must add the problems of a cumbersome U.N. bureaucracy and the fact that the OLA, which serviced the Commission, was saddled with too much to do and had too few people to do it. Above all, it was difficult to understand why no resources were made available by the General Assembly and why so few voluntary contributions were obtained from governments. Toward the problems in the future, the Security Council should allocate from its peacekeeping budget a sum for such commissions when it establishes them. As time passed, it became clear that the Commission should have been kept with a different mandate, that of a Truth Commission. I had suggested it to the secretary-general in the fall of 1993 after consulting with my colleagues on the Commission. The reasons were that a Truth Commission could do what the ICTY could not do, and that is to shed light on different events without the concerns for their relevance to prosecutions. Truth, as we felt, was a necessary component to bring closure for people, and to contribute to reconciliation. But, even in the absence of such a new mandate, we felt that the Commission should at least continue for a few months as necessary for an effective transition. All of these considerations were presented in writing to the U.N.’s Legal Counsel Mr. Fleischauer.

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The premature termination of the Commission therefore cannot be explained. Could it have been a purposeful political action to prevent the further discovery of the truth, which at that time was not a politically propitious one? Or was it simply an unwise administrative decision? Or perhaps it is the nature of the U.N. beast—part political, part bureaucratic—that accounts for what I believe to be an unconscionable outcome, no matter what the reason. Despite the difficulties surveyed in this article, the Commission produced some extraordinary results. Without the foundation laid by the Commission, Prosecutor Goldstone would have had nothing with which to start in the pursuit of his prosecutorial endeavors, even though many specific investigations needed to be conducted to convert the Commission’s findings into indictable cases. Quite clearly the fact that the first indictments concerned events in Prijedor on which Judge Greve produced an impressive report indicate how useful the Commission’s work had been at the early stages of the ICTY.14 More recently, the Foca convictions for rape were another confirmation of the value of the Commission’s work. And, I suspect that as prosecutions commence for the siege and shelling of Sarajevo, the Commission’s extensive report documenting the daily shelling and casualties will prove most useful. The Commission’s work gave it credibility, which in turn brought credit to the United Nations. As the Security Council stated it in its Resolution establishing the ICTY, it also relied on the Commission’s recommendation. Prosecutor Goldstone always graciously acknowledges the contributions of the Commission and my efforts to help him in his first days on the job. The Commission established a significant, public record of violations that no one can ignore. Since then, justice has been in the hands of the ICTY, which has established an excellent record, not withstanding the criticism sometimes directed against it. As I stated in the Final Report: It is particularly striking to note the victims’ high expectations that this Commission will establish the truth and that the International Tribunal will provide justice. All sides expect this. Thus, the conclusion is inescapable that peace in the future requires justice, and that justice starts with establishing the truth.The Commission would be remiss if it did not emphasize the high expectation of justice conveyed by the parties to the conflict, as well as by victims, intergovernmental organizations, non-governmental organizations, the media and world public opinion. Consequently, the International Tribunal must be given the necessary resources and support to meet these expectations and accomplish its task. Furthermore, popular expectations of a new world order based on the interna-

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tional rule of law require no less than effective and permanent institutions of international justice. The International Tribunal for the Prosecution of Persons Responsible for Serious Violation of International Humanitarian Law Committed in the Territory of the Former-Yugoslavia since 1991 must, therefore, be given the opportunity to produce the momentum for this future evolution.

In August 1993, I was nominated by the secretary general to be the first prosecutor of the ICTY, but the United Kingdom opposed my appointment. After a vote of seven for, seven against, and one abstention, my nomination was discarded. If I had played the game of realpolitik, I might have been appointed. I am convinced, however, that I did the right thing by trying to overcome every hurdle placed before me in search of the truth. The justice that the victims of the conflict sought became my duty and I had to document, as best I could, the crimes they endured and the tragedies they suffered in the hope that the perpetrators would be punished, and the victims would know that their suffering had not gone unnoticed. I felt that I owed it to the victims to bear witness. To do any less would break faith with them and with humanity. Admittedly, I would have liked to have received the deserved recognition of becoming the ICTY prosecutor, and that has left me with some regret, but no bitterness. That regret, and a quadruple bypass heart surgery which followed the completion of my task, was the physical and emotional price I had to pay for doing what I believed was right. Since 1994, no U.N. assignments of this sort were given to me, even though I was repeatedly nominated for commissions that investigated similar tragedies in the Great Lakes area in Africa and East Timor. Nevertheless, in 1998, I was appointed the independent expert of the United Nations Commission of Human Rights on issues of victim reparation and Secretary-General Kofi Annan frequently expressed his appreciation for my work. Despite all of the hurdles I faced, the human significance of my work was confirmed by events that occurred in a United States court thousands of miles from Bosnia. Several women who had been interviewed during the rape investigation in 1993-1994 were encouraged by Professor Catharine MacKinnon and others to file a civil suit against Radovan Karadic, the leader of the defunct Republika Srpska, who is indicted by the ICTY as a war criminal. I served as an expert witness in two cases, which went to trial during the summer of 2000, some six years after the Commission’s rape investigation.

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Because of the United Nations’ rules of confidentiality, I could not testify at trial without permission from the secretary-general. The letter that authorized me to testify was signed by Mr. Ralph Zacklin. This gesture closed the circle of antagonism that had surrounded our working relationship while I served with the Commission. In 1993-1994, I had interviewed three of the five women who were plaintiffs in one of these cases. I remember their deep sorrow and discouragement when I spoke to them then. Now I saw them as they sat in the wood-paneled chambers of a United States district court in New York. They were being heard. Officially, no one before but the Commission had listened. When the jury came back with a verdict in their favor, the women who had been victimized by the worst crimes of war now stood upright. They had been given back a part of the dignity that had been taken from them. They were being made whole again, if that is ever possible. I realized that what I did in the former-Yugoslavia was not about an abstract game of politics but about people. It was about giving victims an opportunity to reclaim what had been taken from them.15 The pursuit of truth and justice requires, among other things, moral courage, at times physical courage, the strength to overcome fear, and fighting off the temptations of reward for ignoring wrongs. It also requires determination, willingness to sacrifice, a sense of honor and dignity, and perseverance when things seem impossible. I frequently remembered Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If.” Most of us do not know if we have these qualities, or whether, if we do, that they will not desert us on occasions or in situations like the ones I have faced. We can only hope to be able to say when we meet our Maker that we did the best that we could, and that, as we learned more, we tried to do better. I know that it is never enough, but I have always tried, my weaknesses, errors, and transgressions notwithstanding. To save one life, as the Old Testament and the Qu’ran state, is to save all of humanity. That is why those who can, must act, or at least bear witness. In so doing, to paraphrase George Santayana, we can avoid being condemned to repeat our mistakes. We must do so because, as John Donne said: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main... Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee...”

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Notes 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

The facts referred to in this paper and concerning the former-Yugoslavia are based on publicly available information and on documentary evidence in the possession of the writer. It includes official U.N. documents, official correspondence, and secondary sources such as media reports. The Carter Center in Atlanta, Georgia published a booklet entitled The United States and the Establishment of a Permanent Criminal Court in 1997 where they included on page 35 a picture taken by Colonel Anton Kempenaars, as I pointed to the damage in Room 745, in which I look quite shaken. During the rape investigation, I had the ten psychiatrists and one psychologist on the team bring as much medication as they could which we left to a number of hospitals. They mostly came from Rush Medical School of Chicago. On February 21, 2001, the Trial Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former-Yugoslavia handed down three guilty verdicts in connection with the rapes that occurred at Foca of sixteen women who testified in that trial. This was the first conviction by the ICTY of rape as a crime against humanity. Dragoljub Kunarac was sentenced to twenty-eight years, Radomir Kovac was sentenced to twenty years, and Zoran Vukovic was sentenced to twelve years. See Prosecutor v. Kunarac, Kovac and Vukovic (“Foca” Case), International Criminal Tribunal for the formerYugoslavia (Judgment February 22, 2001); Marlise Simons, “3 Serbs Convicted in Wartime Rapes,” New York Times, February 23, 2001, p. A1. General Tamir is among the small group of experts working on establishing a regional security regime in the region, which I have the honor of coordinating and is referred to below. In 1957, Professor Graven and his son, who later succeeded him in that criminal law chair, worked on a model Ethiopian Criminal Code that they introduced in the Code provisions on genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. Jean Graven was proud of that Code and frequently mentioned it to me. In 1993, while Chairman of the Commission of Experts, I was in my U.N. office in Geneva when I received a call from a senior U.N. staff person who asked if I could see a Mr. Wujira, Special Chief Prosecutor of Ethiopia whose task it was to prosecute the crimes committed by the Marxist Mengitsu regime that committed untold atrocities on the Ethiopian people. We met and he asked for my assistance to identify what law to apply to these prosecutions, and, to his surprise, I directed him to the Criminal Code prepared by the Gravens. One of my professors was the late Paul Guggenheim, a distinguished scholar of international law. He had opposed Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, and supported the Franco-British military attack on Egypt. In his seminar I chose as my paper topic “The Legality of Egypt’s Nationalization of the Suez Canal,” knowing full well his position. To his credit, he gave me the highest grade in the class, though expressing his disagreement with my conclusions. Later, in 1965, I revised my paper and it was my first published law review article as an assistant professor. It was published in the DePaul Law Review. Professor Guggenheim told us in class of a tragic story in which he was involved in during 1943. Some 10,000 Jewish children who had escaped Nazi Germany were to be sent to foster homes in the U.S. Their documents were submitted to U.S. immigration, which denied their entry into the U.S. because the “German quota” was filled. A special bill was then introduced in Congress, but it died in Committee, probably due to anti-Semitism. I was shocked by that revelation. America, the country of liberty, had turned down children who were stranded or in hiding in Europe, and who could face extermination like their elders. It was beyond belief,

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8. 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

and I was beside myself. I went to see Guggenheim in his office to confirm these facts, and express my profound sadness and we connected, notwithstanding his aloofness and reserve. I never forgot that tragic story of the Jewish children. How could anyone, any country, turn their backs to refugee children? In 1998, a friend and colleague at DePaul, Professor Stephen Landsman, decided to write a book comparing the Finta and Eichmann cases, and I was able to assist him with it. IHRLI has benefited from the University’s support from its inception, and from the succeeding deans of the College of Law, John Roberts, under whose watch the Institute was established, and particularly under Dean Teree Foster, who is the present dean. Without their support and that of the faculty’s, the Institute would not have been able to accomplish what it did. Unrelated to these matters, in 1999-2000 I became involved in the efforts to secure the release of thirteen Iranian Jews who had been arrested in Iran for allegedly spying for Israel. Prior to that I was elected vice chairman of the G.A. two succeeding committees between 1995-1998 working on preparation of the Draft of the ICC Statute. Fickle as it may be, one way of assessing impact is through media coverage. In the span of twenty years, there have been a total of over 930 print articles in magazines, newspapers, and press agency reports about me, in which I was mentioned or which I authored. I have been on over 100 radio interviews that have been broadcast over 2000 radio stations, and made over 200 television interviews that have been aired over 500 times. These articles, broadcasts, and television programs have been in the most leading newspapers and major television and radio programs in over twentyeight countries. That Commission, however, worked only for three months and conducted one brief visit to Rwanda. It did not engage in evidence collection or investigation as did the Commission of Experts. It was designed to achieve an interim political purpose, which was the establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. Bruna Molina-Abrams, former deputy secretary of the Commission of Experts, served as secretary for the Rwanda Commission, and she modeled the Report of the Rwanda Commission on the Final Report of the Commission of Experts. The Commission work on the Vukovar/Ovcara mass grave, the Report on the Medak packet, the report on the siege of Sarajevo, and the rape investigation have all been useful to the Prosecutor’s office in connection with several cases. The team of lawyers at the Constitutional Rights Foundation and those working with Professor Catharine MacKinnon deserve high praise for their exceptional work in these two cases.

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19 Totally Unofficial Man1 Raphael Lemkin Editors’ Introduction Steven Leonard Jacobs and Samuel Totten Dr. Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959), a transplanted Polish jurist and an advisor to United States Justice Robert Jackson at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Germany, is commonly acknowledged as the “father of genocide studies.” Not only did he coin the term “genocide,” but he was the motivating force behind the 1948 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Though his large scholarly output, not to mention his voluminous correspondence, went largely unpublished—with the exception of his 1944 magnum opus, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace)—Lemkin established the foundation upon which the first generation of scholars of genocide have built “genocide studies.” The passage of the aforementioned United Nations Convention was his crowning achievement and a fitting tribute to one man’s vision and perseverance. Among Lemkin’s more than 20,000 pages are at least three versions, one typed and two handwritten, of his unpublished autobiography, Totally Unofficial Man: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin. What follows is a rather extensively co-edited (by Totten and Jacobs) excerpt from that autobiography, with redundancies elimi365

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nated, and explanatory notes supplied where necessary. The story he tells is understated, but dramatic nonetheless. Among the issues he addresses in his autobiography are: his own experiences in a genocidal state, his advocacy for the establishment of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, and his commitment to international law and a strong human rights regime. Once his manuscripts, articles, and correspondence, as well as this autobiography, are fully in print and subject to the rigorously appropriate analyses of scholars of genocide, what will no doubt emerge is a true hero of the twentieth century who has laid the foundation for caring in the world of the twenty-first. (Note: Jacobs, co-author of this introduction, has spent the past decade cataloging these 20,000 pages, now nearing completion; and published one edited manuscript, Raphael Lemkin’s Thoughts on Nazi Genocide: Not Guilty? [Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993]. He is in the process of editing others, most noticeably Lemkin’s three-volume History of Genocide [I. Ancient, II. Medieval, Ill. Modern]; several essays, and papers delivered at many academic conferences, all to growing appreciation of both the man and his contributions.) Introduction Since my very young days, I was interested in creating international protection for national, racial, and religious minorities against extermination. I read in history many such examples of such extermination. After a war is lost, a nation may rebuild its technical and financial resources, and may start a new life. But those who have been destroyed in genocide have been lost forever. While the losses of war can be repaired, the losses of genocide are irreparable. In my mind, [as] a young and inexperienced man, was always alive an episode of Jewish history in Russia. Under Tzar Nicholas I, the persecutions of the Jews were very sharp. Not only [did] pogroms [take] place, but the Tzar directed his attacks against Jewish children. The Jews were in great despair. Naturally they turned to God for help. When a very religious man died, the rabbi used to put in his grave a letter addressed to God in which it was said that this man without sin will go to Heaven and he will appear before God. An appeal was made to God to listen to his story about the Jewish sufferings and to give help. When the Russian authorities found out

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about it, they ordered courts martial of the rabbis who wrote letters to God. As a young man, under the influence of these stories, I felt that the highest protection should be given to minorities. When I studied law, I became interested in a special field of international law, namely, international criminal law, which is a quite narrow subject, highly technical. I felt that if the killing of one man was a crime, and is not a matter of negotiations between the guilty and policemen, the destruction of millions of people should also be a crime, and, moreover, it should be an international crime to the effect that the guilty, whether heads of states or private individuals, should be held responsible as criminals. Killing of nations is not a political matter that permits interpretations and negotiations. For these reasons, at the Conference of International Law Experts, which worked in close contact with the old League of Nations, I submitted in 1933 a draft international law that would propose to make an international crime the destruction of national, racial, or religious groups. I started to campaign for this idea in many capitals of Europe. Cold water was poured on me, and I was urged not to go on with fantastic predictions and with the formulation of laws which are not necessary, because they apply to crime(s) which occur seldom in history. I [always] felt that history is much wiser than are lawyers and statesmen. If history shows that the crime of genocide repeats itself almost with a biological regularity, we cannot close our eyes and put our heads into sand like an ostrich. In 1939, when the first bombs fell on Warsaw, the city in which I lived, I knew that this was more than war, that this was the beginning of genocide, on a large scale. After many months of observing horror and death, I found my way to Sweden and then to the U.S. I was appointed advisor on foreign affairs to the U.S. War Department, and in this capacity I urg[ed] the U.S. Government to take steps against genocide. In 1945, I went to London and succeeded in having inscribed the charge of genocide against the Nazi war criminals in Nuremberg. Everything seemed to proceed successfully with the genocide charge against the Nazis until things started to be spoiled at Nuremberg. The Tribunal, after a very prolonged session, decided that acts amounting to genocide are punishable only in connection with war(s) of aggression. To put it bluntly, genocide was made a part of war.

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Under these rulings, crimes committed by Hitler before the war were exempt from criminal responsibility. When the Nuremberg Judgment was pronounced, I was not in Nuremberg. At that time, the Peace Conference with the Satellite Axis Powers was taking place in Paris. I went to Paris and tried to include genocide in the clauses of the peace treaties. The delegates to the Peace Conference listened to me, but their minds were elsewhere. Under the stress of this work, I became ill and was confined to the American military hospital in Paris. For years, I tried to establish genocide as [an] international crime both in time of war and peace, and what I obtained in Nuremberg was fragmentary treatment of the problem—the exclusion of responsibility in time of peace and only partial responsibility in time of war, namely, when these crimes are committed in connection with aggression. In this predicament, I turned my eyes to the United Nations. I returned hastily from Paris to New York and arranged, within a couple of days, that the governments of Cuba, India, and Panama sponsor my resolution that genocide is a crime under international law, without any limitations to war or peace. The resolution also called for the preparation of an international treaty against genocide. During the subsequent years, the work of the genocide treaty proceeded with changing success and governments supported the Genocide Convention with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Earliest Beginnings I was born in a part of the world, historically known as Lithuania or White Russia, in which various nationalities lived together for many centuries. They disliked each other, and even fought each other, but in spite of these turmoils, they all had a deep love for their towns, hills, and rivers. It was a feeling of common destiny that prevented them from destroying one another completely. These groups were the Poles, Russians (or, rather, the White Russians), and the Jews. This area was confined between ethnographic Poland to the West, East Prussia to the North, the Ukraine to the South, and Great Russia to the East. While the Russians and the Poles had fought through [the] centuries a battle for political supremacy in this area, the Jews had struggled for bare survival. I was born and lived my first ten years on a farm called “Ozerisko,” fourteen miles from the city of Wolkowysk. Through this city marched

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the Swedish and Napoleanic armies, and innumerable tussels in this area took place between the Russians and the Poles, Lithuanians and Ukranians, and earlier, among the Mongols and the Tartars. The farm of “Ozerisko” lay in a large clearing between huge forests. It was a joint tenancy of two families, my father’s and that of my uncle. The children, who were mostly of the same age, spent their days together in one happy gang. The forest was the heart of the farm. The ground of the forest was covered with dried leaves and pine needles, which was a ready-made bed for tired heads of children explorers, hungry for dreams. This was my world that I learned to love and that gave me the first lessons in aloneness. From my early years I took a special delight in being alone, so that I could think and feel without outer disturbances. At that time I did not understand the meaning and purpose of this feeling, but I fully enjoyed the delight of contemplation. Lost from my companions, I spent hours in the forest listening through my third ear how the story of life was sung by the sparrows, robins, crows, and blackbirds, innumerable mosquitoes, and insects. Though they were playing on discordant instruments, they still were producing harmonious melodies. Not far from our houses stood the dwellings of the farm hands. We played sometimes with their boys and girls, but we were always aware of the differences between us. Our lives on the farm moved in accordance with the rhythm of nature. And yet, my personal life and the life of the two families around this farm were illegal. For many years the Russian Czars issued a decree which forbade the Jewish population from dwelling upon or owning farms. Jews could only live in cities and villages of a certain size. This decree, however, was circumvented by bribing the authorities, and especially the police authorities of the locality concerned. My parents were compelled not only to pay tenure for the farm, but [additionally] a special sum to the police official concerned. The evenings were a delight. My mother gathered us near the warm stove. She taught us to sing songs and taught us poetry through the songs [by Nadson]. [Editors’ note: Siemlon Nadson (1882-1887) was a Russian nationalistic poet whose works were translated into Polish by Zaruskie in 1887, thirteen years before Lemkin’s birth.] As I [try] to reconstruct the content of these sonnet-songs, the following picture of the world appears from them. There is much evil

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on earth and there is much injustice. The innocent and the poor suffer. They are often murdered in cold blood. People bow to false gods, which are the gods of greed and power. The poor and the innocent must be helped. Those who suffer must be loved and raised from their destitution. The songs offered hope for a betterment of the world, for the cessation of evil, for the protection of the weak. The appeal for the protection of the innocent from destruction set a chain reaction in my mind. It followed me all my life. When I learned to read, I started to devour books on the subject of persecution of religious, racial, or other minority groups. I was startled by the destruction of the Christians by Nero. They were thrown to the lions while the Emperor sat laughing in the Roman arena. A book on the subject by the Polish writer Henryk Sienkiewicz, under the title Quo Vadis, made a strong impression on me and I re-read and discussed [it] many times. I was indignant at the French king, who watched the hanging of the Hueguenots from his balcony. The king ordered [that] more light [be thrown] on the scene so that he might better see the tormented faces of the dying. All my inner self protested when I read that the Hueguenots in Lyon were compelled to sit with naked bodies on heated irons and [be] roasted alive. The Moors, in the fifteenth century, were deported on boats, and, while on the decks, they were stripped of their clothes and exposed to the sun, which finally killed them. Why should the sun, which brought life to our farm and reddened the cherries on our trees, be turned into an agent of murder? News of a pogrom in the city of Bialystok, fifty miles away, came to our farm. The mobs opened the stomachs of their victims and stuffed them with the feathers from the pillows and feather comforters. A line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Bialystok. l could not define history with my childish mind, but I saw it vividly and strongly with my eyes, as a huge torture place of the innocent. And, in my childish way, I joined with Nadson in protesting the grotesque mockery that men have perpetrated on (other) men. Our mother [also] read to us [Aesop’s] fables. Equity, justice, and fairness are basic elements of reason. The unjust is made a fool because he destroys the reasonable bases of life. To us, the lesson from these fables was plain: the unjust are basically fools. I grew up with a strong sense of feeling that persecution must cease and that justice

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and love will finally prevail. I did not differentiate at that time between human beings, animals, and birds. When winter came, we moved to Bella’s house where the [Hebrew] teacher lived. More boys from the village joined us in common classes. Because our parents taught us well to read Hebrew we were able to join higher classes in studying the Bible. The chanting voice of the teacher would set the tone. The brevity of the Hebrew language consisting of words loaded with meaning made a lasting impression on my style in writing and speaking in other languages. I felt deep compassion for the prophets who had to suffer for what they believed. The lives and deeds of poor men, who challenged kings and priests to obey the religion of the heart, kindled fire in the heart of a small village boy studying the Bible. In 1915, the Germans occupied the city of W. [Editors’ note: Lemkin is possibly referring to Warsaw or Wolkowysk] and the entire area. I began at this time to read more history to study whether national, religious, or racial groups as such were being destroyed. The truth came out only after the war. In Turkey, more than 1,200,000 Armenians were put to death for no other reason than they were Christians. After the end of the war, some 150 Turkish war criminals were arrested and interned by the British Government on the island of Malta. The Armenians sent a delegation to the peace conference at Versailles and demanded justice. Then one day, I read in the newspapers that all Turkish war criminals were to be released. I was shocked. A nation that killed and the guilty persons were set free. Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual? I didn’t know all the answers, but I felt that a law against this type of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world. In Lwow University, where I enrolled for the study of law, I discussed the matter with my professors. They evoked the argument about sovereignty of states. “But sovereignty of states,” I answered, “implies conducting an independent foreign and internal policy, building of schools, construction of roads, in brief, all types of activity directed towards the welfare of people. Sovereignty,” I argued, “cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people.” In 1926, just after obtaining my doctorate of law, another bomb exploded. In a rare moment of clarity that a seething indignation instills, I further understood the concept of the crime I was trying to

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establish. In Paris, Scholom Schwartzbart, a Jewish tailor, whose parents perished in a pogrom in the Ukraine in 1918, shot the Ukranian minister of war, Semion Petliura, a man generally blamed for the massacres. After the Schwartzbart trial, I wrote an article in which I called the act of Schwartzbart “a beautiful crime.” I deplored that there was no law for the unification of the moral standards of mankind in relation to the destruction of national, racial, and religious groups. Gradually, but surely, the decision was maturing in me that I had to act. However, I knew that I needed an appropriate forum.... In 1929, I was appointed to the position of deputy public prosecutor of Warsaw. Other appointments followed soon, including the appointment as secretary of the Penal Section of the Polish Committee on Codification of Laws, where I worked on the Polish penal code; representative at the International Bureau for the Unification of Penal Law, which met every year in another capital of Europe; [and] secretary general of the Polish Group for the Association of Penal Law. I was soon on friendly terms with the highest judicial authorities and leading intellectuals in Western Europe. In October 1933, an international conference for the unification of Penal Law was meeting in Madrid. I considered the time was ripe for me to put before the conference my idea that had been maturing for so many years. Now was the time to outlaw the destruction of national, racial, and religious groups. I thought the crime was so big that nothing less than declaring it an international offense would be adequate. This should be done by international treaty or convention. Hitler had already promulgated, at that time, his blueprint for destruction. Many people thought he was bragging, but I believed that he would carry out his program if permitted. Now was the time to establish a system of collective security for the life of the peoples. I moved fast. In September 1933, I sent a second report on the same subject to the secretariat of the Bureau for the Unification of Criminal Laws. I formulated two crimes: the crime of barbarity and the crime of vandalism. The first consisted in destroying a national or religious collectivity by means described in the draft; the second consisted in destroying works of culture, which represented the specific genius of (these) national and religious groups. Thus, I wanted to preserve both the physical existence and the spiritual life of these collectivities.

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When a nation is destroyed, it is not the cargo of the vessel that is lost, but a substantial part of humanity with a spiritual heritage, in which the whole world partakes. These people are being destroyed for no other reason than they embrace a specific religion, or because they belong to a specific race. They are destroyed not in their individual capacity, but as members of a particular collectivity of which the oppressor does not approve. The victims are the most innocent human beings of the world. They are those innocents of which my mother sung to me in the songs of Nadson. I sent the report to Madrid and asked my publisher Pedone, who was the publisher for the League of Nations, to publish it. It was circulated among many important institutions around the world. I was ready to go to Madrid for the big fight. And then one evening my phone rang. A justice of the supreme court, who was my associate at all international conferences, was on the line. He was the chief delegate. In a friendly voice but with tones of embarrassment, he informed me that the Minister of Justice opposed my going to Madrid. He referred also to articles that appeared in the anti-semitic [but] influential paper Gazeta Warszawska, where an attack was launched against my proposal for outlawing acts of barbarism and vandalism. The newspaper wrote that I was acting solely for the protection of my own race. This article was widely discussed in Warsaw at that time. The point was stressed that I was public prosecutor and it implied that the wrong impression could be gained from my act, that is, that I was acting in the name of the government. Nothing could be changed. Although I could not win the battle in Madrid, I had at least started a movement of ideas in the right direction. The Flight On the 6th of September (1939), I was walking through the blacked-out Marszalkowska Street in Warsaw to the railway station. It was only six days, since the Nazi armies had attacked Poland, but already the defenses of the country were disintegrating. Nazi tanks rolled onto the Polish highways from the West, from the North, and from the South. An order had been broadcast half an hour previously by the Polish authorities that all able-bodied men were to leave Warsaw immediately. I obeyed. I had with me only a kit with shaving material and a summer coat on my arm.

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The train moved slowly and cautiously like a tired old man. For a while a feeling of unnatural ease entered the compartment. The natural gregariousness of the Poles was returning. “Two Germans, an army; two Poles, a parliament,” says an old proverb. Suddenly, a powerful detonation made the train tremble. Somebody screamed: “Everybody lie on the floor.” We obeyed. Another detonation, closer and more powerful, followed. Then a commanding cry made us all shiver: “The train is bombed, leave the train.” We began jumping from the train through the doors and windows. I lay with my body pressed to the ground. The locomotive was stretched on the slope like a dead black horse. A short distance away I saw a forest, and I entered the shadow of the trees and heard many voices. In the midst of my thoughts about food, I fell asleep heavily and dreamlessly. I must have slept many hours. A strong detonation and the noise of a falling tree awoke us. More detonations followed. After the bombing was over, we discovered that three of our companions were killed. The balance of the first day of my exodus was clear to me: I saved my life from the bombed train, but I lost one day. Time is especially precious [during] a flight. My instinctual preference was [to make it to] Lithuania and Sweden. The former minister of justice of Sweden, Karl Schlyter, was an old friend. He would facilitate my entry, if only I could reach a point from where I could send him a cable abroad. It was also clear to me that I must see my parents before I leave. They lived in the eastern part of Poland, some eight hours by train from Warsaw. This distance appeared to me now insurmountable. I was a man without a tomorrow. I ate breakfast in silence and thought of the farm on which I was born and raised in eastern Poland. (...SEVERAL PAGES MISSING...) Reuniting with My Parents The disaster that befell Poland continued in the midst of one of the most beautiful Septembers in the recent history of the country. In the daytime the planes controlled the sky with a terrifying furor, and continued to rain their relentless fire and destruction. As we moved further south, we noticed that there were fewer and fewer bombings. One day they ceased altogether and we decided to

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walk more during the daytime. On this flight from our own country, we discovered how beautiful some of the landscapes were. I felt I was conveying greetings and at the same time saying farewell to my country. One day we heard that the Russians had entered Poland. This explained to us the ominous silence in the sky during the recent days. If I reached Vilnius before it was taken over by the Lithuanians, I would find myself in a neutral country. This was the plan, but I still was far from carrying it out. I was now in the province of Wolynia, in a little town difficult to describe in terms of American and West European conditions. There are many hundreds of such towns in Poland and Western Russia. For centuries they were inhabited predominantly by Jews. The Russian Tsars established an area in which Jews could live. This was the so-called Pale of Settlement. They could not live on the land, however, but only in towns. By bribing the police, many succeeded in living on farms in spite of the law. It was a freezing November night when I came to the city Wolkowysk where my parents and brother lived. A problem arose: to go at night into the city, where I was bound to be stopped by Soviet soldiers, or to wait until early morning? I hid in the men’s room of the station. When the clock struck six in the morning, I moved out. This was my city and I had to sneak into it like a thief. My steps sounded frighteningly loud to me as I walked through the side streets to the house of my brother, who lived closer to the station. I had to avoid the main street. I knocked gently at the window, holding my breath, and then pronounced my name against the frozen glass. Joyful cries of my mother answered, crying my name gently in a diminutive form, and my father said, “God, he is here with us!” I wanted so much at that moment to become a child again, a carefree happy child as in the golden days of riding horses without permission or tearing my trousers while plucking cherries. Late in the afternoon the conversation inevitably led to some decisions. I read in the eyes of all of them one plea: do not talk of our leaving this warm home, our beds, our stores of food, the security of our customs. We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow. What did I have to offer them? A nomadic life, a refugee’s lot, poverty. So the question resolved itself: I would continue as soon as possible to Lithuania—alone.

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I stayed another day. I tried to live a year in this one day, to borrow time from the future, to absorb the whole soul of my home. When their eyes became sad with understanding, I laughed away our agonizing thoughts; but I felt I would never see them again. It was like going to their funerals while they were still alive. The best of me was dying with the full cruelty of consciousness. I told them of my plans to go to Sweden and then to America. The evening of the last day came cruelly and quickly. I had decided to leave the city at night by cart. We moved almost mechanically, determined not to show too much feeling. When I left them, I took with me the image of these dear faces— solicitous, loving, concerned, but calmed with the happiness that we were all still alive. I had fulfilled my desire—I had seen my family. Neither the German nor the Russian armies had stopped me. Vilnius and Beyond I arrived at Vilnius several weeks before the Lithuanians took over the government. The city was full of refugees. In the meantime, the Russian troops were dismantling machines in some of the factories and printing shops. They were buying everything in the stores. On the whole, the presence of the Russian army appeared to be an economic occupation rather than a political one, although propaganda [was] not missing. Polish refugees roamed the city. At that time, the Ghetto was not yet established in Warsaw, and it was easier to smuggle out people from that city. Several days after my arrival at Vilnius, I sent several cables abroad. One was to Karl Schlyter, the former minister of justice in Sweden; the other was to Count Carton de Wiart, president of the International Association of Criminal Law and former president of the League of Nations. We had worked together for many years at international conferences. I informed them of my intentions to go ultimately to the U.S.A., and asked whether they could arrange for my temporary entry into Sweden and Belgium. I also wrote a letter to Professor Malcolm McDermott, at Duke University in North Carolina. A friendship had developed between us and we had even published together a book on the Polish Criminal Code that was put out in 1939 by the Duke University Press. A letter arrived from my parents. They wrote how happy they had been to have us all together again. Everything was all right—the

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usual subdued optimism, with ill-concealed worries. They never wrote about sad things, but I could always read between the lines. One week later I boarded a train to Kaunas. I wanted to be closer to the Swedish consulate, as I expected a visa from Sweden. I stayed in the house of a lawyer to whom I had been directed by friends in Vilnius. My host’s family was in Switzerland. He had free time and like most lawyers he liked to talk in monologues. I experienced a reenactment of my life as a lawyer in Warsaw—a Kaunas edition. For the first time since I had left Warsaw, I lived among people who were not refugees themselves. They were unaware of their future. There were three things I wanted to avoid in my life: to wear eyeglasses, to lose my hair, and to become a refugee. Now all these things [had] come to me in implacable succession. I knew I could change my refugee status only through my spirit: by continuing my intellectual work and by enlarging the concept of my world-awareness, or rather of the oneness of the world, despite its desperate division at that time. The consulate of Sweden phoned that my visa had arrived. The Swedish consul affixed a huge royal stamp on my passport, and wished me luck. Next day I was on the train to Riga, the capital of Latvia, another neutral Baltic state, where I had to wait several days for a place to Sweden. The famous Jewish historian Professor Simon Dubnov lived in Riga. I went to pay him a visit at his home in Kaiserwald near the capital. There I turned the conversation cautiously to my plan to outlaw the destruction of peoples. His reaction was vivid. “The basic value of your plan lies in the legal recognition of the act,” he said. “Obviously if killing one man is a crime, killing of entire races and peoples must be an even greater one.” “Killing an individual is a domestic crime. Every nation deals with it through its courts and on its own initiative,” I said. “But murder of a whole people must be recognized as an international crime, which should be condemned not just by one nation, but by the entire world. Nations will have to cooperate in punishing such criminals to prevent future mass murders. Should such a thing start again, the nations would have to act. Moreover, the offender will face judgment, also by history.” “The most appalling part about this type of killing,” said Dubnov, “is that in the past it has ceased to be a crime when large numbers

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are involved and when all of them happen to belong to the same nationality, or race, or religion. These things must be discussed openly. Let nations take their choices whether they want to belong to the civilized world community. I have always felt that history must sit in judgment.” The great historian was evidently thinking about this judgment of history a year and a half later, as well, when he was led to execution by the Nazis. Friends told me that at this supreme moment of his life, he called to the people who saw him as he was led to his death: “Write it down, write it down!” It was a historian’s testament. The next day, as I was flying to Stockholm through the icy air of the Baltic, I felt that I might be leaving this part of Europe forever, and that my parents would (then) be alone in whatever danger may threaten them. After a few days in Stockholm, a letter arrived from Count Carton de Wiart advising me that a visa was awaiting me at the Belgian Legation. At that time I intended to use Belgium as a transition point to the U.S.A., but nothing definite was heard yet from Professor McDermott of Duke University about an appointment. I had not stopped worrying about the people in Poland. I wanted to find out what the Nazis were doing there. As a lawyer, I knew the significance of official documents for the understanding of policy. I knew I could read the intention of the Nazi government only from legal enactments such as decrees and ordinances. A decree is objective and irrefutable evidence. In the peaceful library of Stockholm, I saw an entire race being imprisoned and condemned to death (i.e. Jews). Central and Western Europe were occupied almost entirely. A New European Order was proclaimed. The dehumanization and disintegration had already begun; when would the hour of execution come? Would this blind world only then see it, when it would be too late? The only help could come from America, which itself had been born out of moral indignation against oppression and had many times in its history acted according to these feelings. My impatience to go to America was increasing. The United States was formally a neutral country, but its expressions of human concern were warming Europe like the Gulf Stream. But I was powerless, caught in this pocket between Russia and Germany.

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The United States As the year 1941 started, two events occurred which helped me break out of my Swedish isolation. My appointment at Duke University in the United States came through. Also, rumors had started that the Soviet Union might permit refugees to travel through its territory. One of the conditions for obtaining a Russian visa, they told me, would be a Swedish passport for stateless persons, as Russia did not yet recognize the Polish government in London. There was a feeling in Stockholm among the refugees that now was the time to go to the U.S.A., because in the summer “something” might happen again. I wrote my parents that the door to the United States seemed to be opening for me. They replied—in one of their last letters to me—urging me to go. It had been my strongest desire to go to the United States. From there, I hoped I could explain to the Allies and friendly neutrals the real purpose behind the Nazi war policy. They had to be made to see that this war was being waged by the Nazis not only for frontiers, but mainly for the alteration of the human element within these frontiers. This “alteration” meant that certain peoples were to be annihilated and supplanted by the Germans. Their destruction would be irrevocable, not only because the dead cannot be revived, but also because their cultures (were being) erased forever. I realized that the real issue at stake in the war was not civilization as a propaganda slogan, but as a palpable reality. The Nazi plan was so outrageous that nobody believed it in time to try to forestall it. It was not the first time in history that Poland had been subjected to genocide. Exactly 700 years earlier, in 1241, the Mongul hordes had first over-run Russia, then Poland, Silesia, and Hungary. I hurriedly assembled the necessary visas: the American, the Russian, and the Japanese. [The] next morning I was [off] to Moscow. Instinctively, when boarding the plane, I looked to the southwest: this was the general direction of the town where my parents lived. What were they doing now? We refugees, several hundred of us, traveled by the Trans-Siberian railroad, and the trip from Moscow to Vladivostok was to take us ten days. After a day or so in Vladivostok we were driven to the foot of the mountain where the harbor was located, and jammed into a small boat to the Japanese port of Tsuruga. To add insult to injury,

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this boat, which we dubbed “Floating Coffin,” ran into many storms on this three-day journey. We were called on day and night to help remove the water that seeped constantly into the lower deck. Landing at Tsuruga, under a bright April sun, was a great relief. We were free of each other until the following week when we were to embark at Yokohama on our American journey. The duality of human nature that is so striking in Japan permitted not only an internecine warfare, but also one of the most atrocious cases of genocide, which occurred there in the seventeenth century. At that time there were about 30,000 Japanese Catholics, converted by the Portuguese and Spanish missionaries. A persecution started early in the seventeenth century, which lasted almost 200 years. It is estimated that during this period of time all the Catholics in the country were destroyed. Such a persecution must have had an impact on the persecutors themselves—200 years of cruelty (with all possible outlets for the imagination) cannot leave a nation unaffected. Many of these records come from Japanese literature itself. There is an abundant correspondence that shows that this incidence of genocide was encouraged by the Dutch and the British. Next day we embarked on a ship bound for the United States. The ship, “Heian Maru,” was modern and beautifully equipped, very different from the pirate boat that had brought me from Vladivostok to Tsuruga. A cheerful crowd waved goodbye from the dock as the ship tore itself loose from the shore’s embrace. The voyage was restful and uneventful. We arrived at Vancouver (Canada) at night. This was finally the New World. Europe and Poland were very far away. That night we sailed to Seattle (Washington)—our final port. The American sun was shining bright on my pillow the following memorable morning. I was too excited to understand its reality. When we got off the boat we were asked to go down to customs. My valises were lined up on the table and the friendly eyes of a huge customs officer looked first at them, then at me. The huge customs official gave my valises a superficial examination, then told me, “I’m from over there myself. My mother still lives in Shannon.” Then his big hand landed on my shoulder, squeezed it warmly, and his deep voice boomed out, “Okay, boy—you’re in!” Durham, North Carolina, and Duke University I slept through my first night in America deeply and peacefully. When I arrived in Chicago after one and a half days of continuous

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travel, I was told that this was only half the way to Durham. In Chicago I sent a telegram to Professor McDermott at Duke University telling him that I was on my way. The train stopped at Lynchburg, Virginia, and it was here that I saw, for the first time, in the rest rooms of the station, the inscriptions “For Whites” and “For Colored.” These intrigued me and I innocently asked the Negro porter if there were indeed special toilets for Negroes. He gave me a puzzled look mixed with hostility, and did not answer. After seventeen years in the United States I understand now that he must have thought I was making fun of him. As the train moved south I kept thinking about those inscriptions with all the naivete of a newcomer. I remembered that in Warsaw there was one single Negro in the entire city. He was employed as a dancer in a popular nightclub, where he pounded the floor with both feet as if to destroy it. Everyone enjoyed his dancing and tried to invite him for drinks. A feeling of curiosity and friendliness prevailed towards this lonely black man in Poland. But toward the Jews, I could not help thinking, there was not the same friendliness, three million of them, in the trades, in the professions, in other work, and their competition was felt. In the afternoon, a day and a half after leaving Chicago, my train arrived at Durham and Professor McDermott was waiting at the station. There was always around him an air of confidence-inspiring friendliness. In the car my friend kept inquiring about my travels, but when he saw after a few questions that I had tears in my eyes he stopped. Since I had arrived at the university around the end of the semester, there was no teaching schedule set for me. I had time to look around and to plan. I liked to drop in from time to time at the office of Judge Thaddeus Bryson, who taught North Carolina statutes. He was an old man with a handsome, dreamer’s face, somewhat of a mystic. He had a Polish first name, which was given to him by his parents to honor the Polish hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko, who came to these shores to fight for American independence. Once Judge Bryson looked at me significantly as we were talking together, then lowered his voice as if to give his words more weight: “I have no doubt that you were saved from the European Holocaust for a special purpose,” he told me. “It is bigger than you are, or than any of us—wait and you will see.” He repeated this several times but did not explain precisely

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what he meant, and I departed in a state of embarrassment. I have often thought of his words since, however, and have somehow felt strengthened by them in my singleness of purpose, and in the midst of many of the difficulties I have met. One morning in June, 1941, when I opened my box at the university office, popularly called the Duke Station, I found a letter from my parents, in a tired envelope. It had been en route more than two months. “We are well,” they wrote, “and happy that this letter will find you in America.” It was written on a scrap of paper, perhaps a quarter of the size of a normal piece of paper. The quality of the paper spoke eloquently of the extreme poverty in which they were living. Something within myself told me that in this letter they were saying goodbye. I chased the thought away, as I would a mosquito, but it came back to me in the evening, as I walked through the campus. The letter itself had a tone of subdued despair, in spite of my parents’ efforts not to alarm me. It was the last letter I ever received from them. Several days later, on June 24th, I turned on the radio during breakfast, and the words of an impersonal newscast fell on me sharply, (shrillingly,) cutting deep into my flesh: “The German Army has invaded Eastern Poland.” In 1915, the German Army invaded my hometown; in 1920, the Russian Army [moved through on its way to the capital], and in 1939, I was bombed out from smoking Warsaw. Now they invaded, through barking radio words, my refuge on the Duke campus. What [would] happen to my family now I could realize only through shudder. Later I learned that during the Nazi blitz, the largest area of the city, including the place where my parents’ home had stood, burned down. The population, some 20,000 people, was crowded into a few small houses near the railroad station. This happened more than a year prior to moving my parents, together with others, to [Editors’ note: Illegible word] to be gassed. On to Washington, D.C. In June 1942, a telegram was lying on my table that meant the beginning of a new phase in my life and work. The Board of Economic Warfare in Washington was offering me an appointment as chief consultant to the Board. I wired acceptance. In my agency I found complete unawareness that the Axis planned destruction of the people under their control. My first attempts to educate my office were discouraging. The problem I tried to bring

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up appeared too theoretical and even fantastic to them. [M]any still remembered “atrocity” stories about the Germans in the First World War. I thought: genocide is so easy to dismiss because people do not believe it until after it happens. I met Henry Wallace, chairman of the board and vice-president of the United States. He was known throughout the country for his experiments in cross-breeding corn. My friends advised me to talk with Mr. Wallace about my foreboding. I explained my idea. I looked hopefully for a reaction. There was none. It suddenly dawned on me that these conversations were futile. Where could he find in nature so much cruelty as we find in men? The earth is not destructive, but man has chosen martyrdom as his blinding guide. How could he believe in the finality of genocide, this man whose whole spirit was so deeply [Editors’ note: illegible word] in the perpetual regeneration of life in the fields? I confided to a friend that I would like to approach President Roosevelt. The reply came quickly. I was asked to write a memorandum on one page. He promised to give to it his attention. For several days I worked on this one page. How could I compress the pain of millions, the fear of nations, the hopes for salvation from death in one page? I suggested in this page the adoption of a treaty that would make genocide a crime—the crime of crimes—which would have to be adopted by the nations of the world. I was urging speed. It was still possible to save at least a part of the people. The Allies still had access to the parliaments of most of the nations of the world. A treaty branding genocide a crime could still be enacted and applied by many governments. A warning had to be issued to Hitler concomitantly with the treaty. I gave the page to my friend. The agonizing hours of waiting were painfully slow. Several weeks later my phone rang. My friend came running to my office: the president replied that he is aware of the danger, that he sees, however, difficulties in adopting a treaty now. He urges patience. A warning will be issued later. Patience. [B]ut I could bitterly see only the faces of the millions awaiting death and the rope already around the neck of the victims. That night I realized that I was following the wrong path. In a matter of such magnitude, where the lives of entire nations are involved, I should not rely on statesmen alone. It became clear to me that I must appeal directly to the American people. But how? All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the

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blood of my brethren. Let me now tell this story to the American people, to the man in the street, in church, on the porches of their houses, and in their kitchens and drawing rooms. I was sure they would understand me. I spent three days in writing an outline. It consisted of an analysis of Axis Rule in different fields, such as administration, law, economics, and the labor plan. After that I had a conversation with George Finch, director of the International Law Division of the Carnegie Endowment Fund. He encouraged me to complete the manuscript and promised to start at once printing the sections already finished. I worked feverishly. Rumors ran through Washington that mass executions were taking place all over Europe, that the Jews were being deported for annihilation. But nobody could lay his hands on such reports. Were these reports being suppressed? But they [the rumors] kept recurring even with greater intensity. The impression of a tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air. There was no escape from this feeling. No explanation for such a conspiracy was morally possible. A double murder was taking place. The silence started the day when the first reports from Warsaw of mass executions reached London late in 1942. It lasted until December 1944, almost two years. No acknowledgment was made of the death of a nation which had given the world the belief in one God, whose Bible was still read every Sunday in the churches of the Allies. It was the murder of the truth: suppression of the notice of murder. My nights turned into nightmares. In the midst of this turmoil, I was writing feverishly. My health was deteriorating, the beginning of another struggle. [F]riends made an appointment for me to see a doctor. “Nervous exhaustion, high blood pressure, slow down, rest, relaxation.” Birth of the Convention The Nuremberg judgment relieved only in part the moral tensions in the world. [T]he purely juridical consequences of the trials were wholly insufficient, [i.e.] the refusal of the Nuremberg Tribunal to establish for the future a precedent against this type of international crime. In brief, the Allies decided in Nuremberg a case against a past Hitler, but refused to envisage future Hitlers, or like situations. They did not want to or could not establish a rule of international law that would prevent and punish future crimes of the same type.

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Genocide was included in the indictment of the war criminals in London in late (?) August 1945 as a war crime. The [Editors’ note: Word missing, possibly “Allies.”] had thrown out this charge. The Tribunal declared that it is bound by the Statute of the International Military Tribunal, which did not contain the charge of genocide. In brief, the Germans were punished only for crimes committed during or in connection with the war of aggression. About six months before the Nuremberg Tribunal issued its verdict, I published several articles on genocide in the American Scholar in New York, in the Belgian Review of Penal Law and Criminology, and in the Norwegian magazine Samitisen (Modern Times). I sincerely believed that a modified plan of my proposal made in Madrid in 1933 could be enforced through the U.N. Even my most modest expectations were deceived. I had to appeal directly to the U.N. The Washington Post was the first paper in the whole world to write an editorial on genocide on December 3, 1945. I knew I could count on their support. Time was short and I had to move fast. I knew that I could hardly count on the big powers to introduce the resolution to the U.N. I turned to the small nations. I wrote a draft resolution on the soft sofa in the Delegates’ Lounge. I asked modestly the U.N. to study genocide with the view of establishing it as an international crime. I stressed that genocide happened throughout history, and inflicted great losses on mankind and culture. I thought the draft should not demand too much, and to let the delegations make it stronger. When the resolution was ready, I approached the smallest Latin American delegation headed by Dr. Ricardo Alfaro, the minister of foreign affairs, and former president of Panama. With a smile, which brought heaven and earth together for me, he signed the resolution and wished me luck. [Then, a]s soon as Mrs. Pandit (of India) signed the resolution, I rushed to the secretary general’s office and deposited the document. I was like an intoxicated man. I visited the newspaper correspondents in the U.N., and favorable reports began to appear in the press. I had the ambition that the United States should propose in the steering committee the inclusion of the genocide item on the agenda. The traditional help and concern of the United States for the peoples of the world, I thought, predestined America for this role.

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The day of the meeting of the Steering Committee came. This Committee consists of the president and vice-president of the assembly and of the six Committee chairmen. It is considered to be powerful because it approves the agenda of the Assembly. When the item of genocide was reached, Adlai Stevenson asked for the floor and proposed in the name of the United States of America to include this item on the agenda. But the Russian delegate opposed. I expected unanimity and this was a surprise to me. Most delegates supported the inclusion and it was finally adopted. The resolutions of the Steering Committee had to be approved by the General Assembly. I wanted to prevent making the item controversial and facing another fight in the Assembly. [In the 1946 Assembly], Russia cooperated fully and even made fiery speeches in favor of the Convention. [Editors’ note: Lemkin writes that, initially, the Russians did not see the need for such legislation as necessary, possibly because of their own perceived vulnerability for genocidal acts after World War II, but continuous conversation ultimately brought them around.] The Belgian minister of foreign affairs, Paul Spaak, presided over the Assembly meeting when it adopted, without one word of discussion, the resolution to include the item of genocide in the agenda. The next step was to prepare for the meeting of the Legal Committee. Again, I distributed among the delegates copies of my book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, and reprints from my articles on genocide in the American Scholar, and a pamphlet in French published by the French Ministry of Information. Charles Fahy, the delegate of the United States, declared that the United States “feels strongly about genocide.” The jurists were swimming in the sea of humanitarian enthusiasm. They were trying to outdo one another and there were some sixty of them. The discussion promised to last some time. A special subcommittee of the Legal Committee was set up to prepare the text of the resolution on Genocide. Charles Fahy was the chairman. In the course of the work of the subcommittee, the attempt was made to delete the word genocide and to replace it with the word extermination. It was decided to preserve the term genocide, but I realized how close I came to losing. The subcommittee decided to include, in the resolution, a declaration that genocide is a crime under international law, a condemnation of this crime by all civilized nations, and the decision to prepare a convention on the prevention

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and punishment of the crime of genocide and to present it to the next Assembly. [Editors’ note: Part of the linguistic give-and-take was the result of political infighting on the part of the various delegates.] [C]opies of this resolution were lying on the desks of all delegates of the Legal Committee. The delegates started to assemble. Genocide was the first item on the agenda. The chairman beat the gavel and my heart started to beat too. The discussion was not too long. A feeling of accomplishment was visible on all faces. Terse statements followed. It was voted unanimously. Several days later the resolution was adopted unanimously by the General Assembly. The first stage of the birth pangs of the Genocide Convention was over. The world knew what happened, but it hardly knew at that time how much more would be required and how tremendous the opposition would be. Now that the groundwork for the Convention was laid, I could rest for a while. Geneva One morning in July 1948, I [went] to my office at Yale Law School and I found a cable on my desk. Ambassador Perez Perozo, the delegate of Venezuela at the U.N. attending the session of the Economic and Social Council in Geneva, said that the Council would take up the report on genocide. The Council’s approval was of value for its adoption by the General Assembly scheduled to meet in Paris in September. It was clear that I had to go to Geneva at once. Every action at the U.N. must be prepared. One must know the distribution of sympathies and animosities in advance in order to get favorable results. I glanced with melancholy at a page of my manuscript [History of Genocide], interrupted by fatigue last night, on the destruction of the Moors in Spain. My chapters on genocide had to be submitted to the delegates either in the Economic and Social Council or in the General Assembly. Historical cases of genocide must be communicated to those who would decide about the fate of the Genocide Convention. Let history make a plea to them. As a spokesman for the Convention I must be strengthened by the voices of the past. After reading and rereading these cases of genocide, I always became more articulate and determined. Several days later, the lights of Geneva were seen from the descending plane. I had not been here since 1938. Somehow I felt that

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something good might happen. The new surroundings gave me a new surge of energy and even aggressiveness. There were still three weeks before the Economic and Social Council would start discussing the Genocide Convention. I felt that the issue must be made important in the eyes of the delegates. Major John A. F. Ennals (of the World Association) organized two lectures on genocide: one in the building of the United Nations to which the delegates were invited, the other in the summer school that the World Federation of the U.N. Associations was running for foreign students. After both lectures a discussion followed. Interest was aroused by my historical examples dating from antiquity through the middle ages to modern times. Then questions were asked. I did not refrain from reading aloud from my historical files in considerable detail. In such a way I conveyed the impression that genocide is not the result of a casual mood of a ruler but that it has its place in history. “What can you do to prevent such a thing from happening?” “You do exactly the same as to prevent other crimes. We have to deal with this matter on two levels: national and international. Nationally, we must make it a crime in our criminal codes and punish through national courts in the same way as we punish for larceny and arson. “On the international level,” I continued, “we must make every nation responsible to the world community, either by bringing up cases of genocide in the World Court of Justice in the Hague to which all civilized nations belong or in all organs of the U.N. The main thing is to make the nations of the world feel that minorities and weaker nations are not chickens in the hands of a farmer, to be slaughtered, but they are groups of people of great value to themselves and to world civilization.” Although not one night passed that I did not think about the Genocide Convention and not one day elapsed when I did not do something practical for the Convention, I still felt as though I were moving in a big void. I did not see around me persons with the fighting gleam in their eyes on whom I could rely. I knew that such a fight was unavoidable and somewhere, somebody must be found who had power, imagination, and determination. One night an unforeseen event happened that almost seemed to be a miracle. It was 1 A.M. I turned, and in the light of the moon I recognized the delegate of Canada, Dana Wilgress. I let him talk,

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and I suddenly felt as though he was trying to win me over to the Genocide Convention. When I accompanied him back to his hotel he told me that it would be very good for us, and I heard distinctly this saving phrase “for us,” to win the support of the future president of the Assembly in Paris. He was Wilgress’ personal friend, Dr. Herbert Evatt, the minister of foreign affairs of Australia, now sleeping innocently on the third floor of the same hotel. I counted every minute until I heard the voice of Ambassador Wilgress telling me that Dr. Evatt would see me at 11 A.M. He said simply, “I promise to conspire with you to get this thing through in Paris.” I told Dr. Evatt that the Assembly in Paris would acquire a deeper meaning if under his leadership the Genocide Convention would be adopted. The last case of genocide happened in Europe and the answer to it should come from Paris, which would act in this case not only as a capital of the world but also as a spokesman for the martyrdom of Europe. Dr. Evatt understood fully. Soon, in a very business-like manner he called his personal secretary and gave him instructions to be ready at all times for my proposals and to act as a liaison officer between him and myself. I had finally found a fighting statesman in the big arena of world affairs who could meet the opposition with the strength of his own conviction and with diplomatic skill. Finally the day arrived when the Genocide Convention was to be discussed. However, the Council did not go beyond creating this favorable climate. Many reasons were found to transmit simply the Convention to the General Assembly at Paris. The easiest way was found, and this was not to prejudice the decision of the General Assembly. But I knew very well that a great breakthrough had been achieved and that the eighteen-member delegations of the Council had become thoroughly educated. The Assembly was scheduled for the 15th of September, and it was now the end of August. I decided to take a short vacation. Soon my ten-day vacation ended and I returned to Geneva. The station at Geneva was full of delegates. The president of the Social and Economic Council, Ambassador Charles Malik, greeted me with the words, “Good that I see you now; this very afternoon I signed a paper passing on the Genocide Convention to the General Assembly in Paris.” So we went to Paris, both the Genocide Convention and I.

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Paris The opening of the Assembly was still several days off. I walked over to the Palais de Chaillot where the carpenters were still busy preparing for the big event. But the U.N. offices were already active. I spent the following day learning the composition of the delegations and [in] lining up strategic forces. I made a bold plan. Why should we not try, I asked myself, to convert the entire Legal Committee into one big working group? Every delegation [c]ould express its opinion directly and there w[ould] be ample time to adopt the Convention. Why not sidestep altogether? All that was needed was the decision to do this by the Legal Committee. The unusual procedure was adopted. From now on unusual efforts were required. The Legal Committee proceeded with the actual work on the Convention. At present, the main task was to keep the interest of the Legal Committee constantly alive with new stimulating material. My book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, was made available to the delegates. But the Nazi experience was not a sufficient basis for a definition of genocide for international purposes. One cannot describe a crime by one criminal experience alone; one must (rather) draw on all available experiences of the past. A definition of a crime involving the participation of societies must fit all social structures. It is necessary to describe the division of the roles, and to foresee all modalities, all possible techniques. In brief, the formulation must be made valid for all times, situations and cultures. The formulation of the definition must be as complete as possible. Otherwise the criminal would escape through the loopholes of the law. In brief, it was necessary to start digesting historical cases of genocide and submit them to delegates in the form of memoranda. I had to organize myself for the big task. I stopped worrying that my book on the History of Genocide was not published yet, because through the short memoranda (illustrating a point under discussion) I could make more progress. I did not miss even one meeting of the Committee, although I used to come to the meeting in the morning with a heavy head, tired after a sleepless night of worries followed by early morning dictation. But there were clouds in the sky of Paris. I was waiting nervously for the first open attack. It came! The British delegate, Sir Hartley Shawcross, the attorney general of his country, declared that his del-

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egation could not support the Genocide Convention. Nuremberg was enough. I felt that the work must be strengthened by (the injection of) support from the people. I began with religious leaders. I went to see several times the papal nuncio, Cardinal Roncali, who was as learned as he was clever and understanding. [Editors’ note: Roncali became both supportive and an advocate, even writing letters on behalf of passage of the Genocide Convention.] In the Legal Committee, the problem of including political groups in the definition of genocide was raised. Some delegates desired to protect not only national, racial, religious, and ethnic groups, but also political groups. I felt that this issue might divide the Committee almost evenly and would be an obstacle to the adoption of the Convention. I myself thought that the destruction of political opponents should be treated as the crime of political homicide, but not as genocide. Every revolutionary regime comes to power by destroying some of its opponents. Later this regime is recognized by other nations, sometimes by the whole world. Should political groups be included in the definition of genocide, recognition of a revolutionary regime in these conditions would imply acceptance of genocide as legal. This would kill the Genocide Convention before it takes root in world society. My apprehension was justified. A vote was taken, and, by a small majority, political groups were accepted. I considered it as a blow to the Convention. I felt that unless the vote was reconsidered, there would be no Convention. So it happened. Next day a move for reconsideration of the vote started in the Legal Committee. On the third day, the vote took place and political groups were omitted. This hurdle was out of the way. I could hardly stand on my feet when I emerged from the Legal Committee. I took a cup of tea, instead of dinner, and went immediately to bed. Then I suddenly realized that I did not thank Evatt for his help. I phoned his hotel, left a message and fell asleep as if I had just completed a long journey. The next day I was waiting quietly for the next hurdle. I realized that if my work should have any effect and if I should outlast all storms, I would have to preserve my nervous energy. There w[ould] be more obstacles, [thus] some smaller ones should be left alone. I w[ould] fight only the big battles, which are of real importance to the Convention. I decided also to participate more fully in the social

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life of the Assembly. So I went to receptions, drank cocktails and danced, joked and refused to speak about genocide. When somebody would start a conversation about the Convention, I would simply ask, “Genocide, what’s that?” They laughed, and I laughed too. Still I was condemned to loneliness. This was the essential condition of my life. For I felt that only lonely persons can reach beyond the borders of the unconscious and are able to achieve a stage of intuition which was so necessary for appraising situations at once and for acting quickly. This intuition was most valuable part of my equipment for many years. We again s[at] in the long drab chamber of the Legal Committee. The article saying that genocide is a crime both in time of war and peace seemed to be self-evident and was adopted. The delegates seem[ed] to be lost in an endless discussion on the motives of the crime of genocide. Erling Wikborg, of the Norwegian delegation, proposed to include in the definition also the destruction of a group “in part.” He argued that when intellectual leaders, who provide the forces of cohesion to the group, are destroyed, then the group is destroyed as such, as a group. Finally the following formula emerged from the discussion: “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life, calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” In order to avoid misapplication of this article in cases when people objectively suffer from bad conditions such as extreme poverty, unsanitary conditions and the like, which generally prevail in a country or locality, the Committee required that the intent to destroy the groups should be strengthened by two additional expressions of intent such as “deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about...” Of considerable interest to the Legal Committee was the scope of persons liable to punishment for the crime of genocide. I was glad that the Legal Committee did not change substantially the provisions on responsibility. I felt that the Genocide Convention and the Declaration on Human Rights projects must be kept apart and each (of them must be) treated on its own merits. The differences appeared obvious to me. The Declaration of Human Rights is only an enunciation of general principles. It has no binding force as international law. It contains no provisions on enforcement and being a declaration it cannot be enforced as law. It cannot be signed by representatives of governments or ratified by parliaments, because it is not a treaty between nations.

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On the other hand, the Genocide Convention is an international treaty. It can be enforced both as an international law and as a domestic law. Dealing with international crime, it carries with itself penalties and the highest degree of legal and moral condemnation. The Genocide Convention is a definite and precise commitment before the world not to murder peoples and races. Therefore, it must be signed by representatives of governments and then ratified by the parliaments. The Declaration of Human Rights is only an engagement; the Genocide Convention is a marriage. I also thought that in the present age, when the world is trembling under convulsions of change, impatience, fear, and anxiety, genocide is a real danger. It claimed already the lives of so many millions and many more millions might die. We proceeded now faster with the drafting of the Convention. We reached the article on cultural genocide. This idea was very dear to me. I defended it successfully through two drafts. It meant the destruction of the cultural pattern of a group, such as the language, the traditions, monuments, archives, libraries, churches. In brief: the shrines of the soul of a nation. But there was not enough support for this idea in the Committee. After having overcome so many hurdles and with the end of the Assembly in sight, I questioned the advisability of engaging in still another battle. Would it not endanger the passage of the Convention? So with a heavy heart I decided not to press for it. [I]f the Convention is adopted, it would always be possible to adopt an additional protocol on cultural genocide. Indeed, with the Paris Assembly, the golden age of the U.N. was ended as far as humanitarian treaties were concerned. Now we reached the implementation stage in the drafting. It was clear that genocide must be punished first of all by national courts, and penalties must be provided by national laws. In case, however, a nation does not do it, then international action should be sought either through the U.N. or through the International Court of Justice in The Hague, a familiar institution to all civilized nations of the world. I thought it would be enough to make all nations accept the principle that in cases of genocide they should drop the requirement that their permission was necessary for proceeding before the International Court of Justice in The Hague. A mention of the International Criminal Tribunal was included in the Convention, but a provision was also included that should such

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a Tribunal ever be created, it would be binding only on such nations that would accept its jurisdiction. The Legal Committee continued its daily work. The basic task now was to reconcile differences and to avoid long discussions. The time element became suddenly of great importance. It was necessary to accelerate the drafting. The article on extradition was adopted. It was self-evident that those who will commit genocide should not enjoy asylum in other countries. The moral and legal standards of mankind in respect to this crime should be equalized so that we can really speak about a unified ethos. A Convention must spell out the rights and duties of the parties; these cannot be left to interpretation. With the adoption of Article IX on the International Court of Justice all substantive articles of the Convention were finished. The Committee then suspended its activities and elected a subcommittee to draft the final clauses. I sighed with relief; I was so tired that I could hardly stand on my feet. Later I found out that I had no right to be tired at that time. The opposition used this occasion to put in a few Trojan horses in the text of the Convention. What were the Trojan horses? In Art[icle] XIV a provision was adopted which limits the basic duration of the Convention to ten years from the time of its coming into force. The other Trojan horse was Art[icle] XVI, which permits revision of the Convention at any time. This is, on the whole, unusual for this type of a Convention. The Legal Committee finally approved the text of the Convention and submitted it to the General Assembly for final action. I was glad, to put it mildly, that we had reached this stage, but in my exhaustion my mind failed to grasp fully the significance of this event. I walked and talked automatically, as in a dream. I noticed everything around me, but I did not react as I should have. I awoke from my “dream” for an hour or so when the Assembly started its crucial discourse on the Genocide Convention on the 9th of December. Sir Zafrullah Khan said this new law should be called the “Lemkin Convention.” Nobody voted against. Basically, the vote was then unanimous. A storm of applause followed. I felt on my face the flashlight of cameras. The world was smiling and approving and I had only one word in answer to all that, “Thanks.” A short word for acknowledging this new partnership between two worlds: my own world of long, frustrating efforts, hopes, and agonizing fears and this new official world which now made a solemn pledge to preserve the life of the peoples and races of mankind...and so I under-

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stood finally, almost physically, the power and significance of the Genocide Convention. The jubilant mood of the Assembly communicated itself to the gallery. Later the press came to interview me. Two days later the representatives of twenty-two nations signed the Convention. [A s]ignature meant the intention to ratify by the parliament. It is an act of government, which must be followed up later by an act of parliament, if a nation decides to ratify a treaty. And then the lights in the Palais de Chaillot went out. The Assembly was over. Delegates shook hands hastily with one another and disappeared into the winter mists of Paris. The same night I went to bed with fever. I was ill and bewildered. The following day I was in the hospital in Paris where I was sick for more than three weeks. Nobody had established my diagnosis. I defined it myself and called it Genociditis: exhaustion from the work on the Genocide Convention. A month later I was returning by boat to New York. [Upon my return,] I could engage only in small talk and avoid anything that would draw me into a serious conversation. Instinctively, I was defending myself against something that, as I thought, almost destroyed me in Paris. I was gathering myself for the struggle ahead. [Editors’ note: Lemkin is here referring to the battle for ratification on the part of the various countries, including the United States, which would not ratify the Genocide Convention until 1988, almost four decades after his death.] I was back at Yale with my students. I could not, however, regain my health completely until May of 1949 came. Then new life started on the campus and also in me. My classes were small and I was able to know my students intimately and had many searching conversations with them. I gave a course on genocide. They understood and approved of the humanitarian aspects of the Genocide Convention, but could not see immediately and readily the implications of genocide in terms of cultural losses. Although my classes were given to law students, I stressed the interdisciplinary approach and introduced concepts of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and even economics. Of course, I was continuing to write the history of genocide and also brought in history into the classes. I felt I should resume my U.N. activities. The U.N. Assembly was meeting in the spring in Lake Success as a continuation of the As-

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sembly in Paris. It had to deal with the problem of Korea, which was left over by the Assembly of 1948. I went to Lake Success. On the first of May 1949, Ethiopia became the first country to ratify. Ratification My plan was to obtain from the start at least twenty ratifications so that the General Assembly of 1950 [could] draw up the protocol about bringing the Convention in[to] force. To reach my goal for 1950 I thought I should concentrate on Latin America, on the small nations who need the protection of international law more than big nations. Those populations, two or three times as small as the number of Jews murdered by Hitler, could easily see the reality of the genocide threat. Slowly but surely the Latin American nations started to work on ratification. Later, Ecuador became the first Latin American nation to ratify the Genocide Convention. I firmly believed that the Convention would obtain, during the Assembly, the number of ratifications necessary for its coming in[to] force. Before leaving for New York and Lake Success, I received from Ambassador Machadro of Cuba in Washington the news that the government of Cuba, in recognition of my work for the Genocide Convention, awarded me the Grand Cross of Manuel Cespedes, [named after] the founder of Cuba. The Cuban delegation was one of three original sponsors of the Genocide Convention in 1946. I was calm and collected and tried to hide my pride as best as I could. But my friends, especially those from Latin America, became so conscious of the great honor bestowed upon me and showed it so profusely that I could not bear the appearance of angelic modesty any longer and succumbed to human frailty with grace. Of course, I made a speech and thanked the government of Cuba. I could not miss the occasion to stress the importance of the Genocide Convention at this hour of human history. Again, there was a flash of cameras...and off I went to New York and Lake Success for the opening of the crucial U.N. Assembly in 1950. It was a mixture of innocent joy, great success, distress, deceit, and danger to my life and health. I did not see at once the blows and knives which were put in the body of the new born baby, the Genocide Convention, which was permitted to be brought into force for the purpose of bringing it to death a little later. So, at least, hoped the opposition at that time. The drama before my eyes gradually unrolled. I was so

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wrapped up in my aim of bringing the Convention into force that I could not realize that the opposition was working quietly and astutely with superior techniques on the destruction of the very building I was erecting. [Editors’ note: Lemkin is here referring to the potential conflict with those who wished to see the United Nations ratify the Universal Declaration of Human Rights instead of the Genocide Convention.] Here we are again in 1950 where we started in 1946: the life of nations is to be kept in jeopardy and the enforcement to be made dependent on opportunities’ consideration [Editors’ note: Politics over against morality.] My problem now was not to lose my head. It was hard especially at night when I was alone with my thoughts. It was like standing constantly over an abyss. Gradually I decided to go on with my original plan as to bringing the Convention in[to] force. The opposition will not give up and I am, in fact, convicted to a constant struggle, until the end of my days. The Convention will become positive international law and the opposition will have more difficulties in destroying it. At least they will have a hard time explaining why they are destroying a positive law so much needed in this turbulent world. With this in mind, I resumed my activities with the delegations from whom I was expecting the deposit of instruments of ratification. As I see all this confusion from the vantage point of the present day, I realize that I did well in not inquiring too much into the details of these [oppositional] plans. It might have turned me away from the plan of making the Convention positive international law. I refused to believe that law can be handled in another way, other than by open and legitimate processes. If there is due process of law in the treatment of individuals, why should the same principles not apply in the handling of the law itself? In the middle of October, twenty-four delegations deposited their documents of ratification: four more than was required to bring the Convention in[to] force. The Convention would actually come into force ninety days after the deposit of the necessary ratifications. Thus the plan for which I had worked so many years was finally materializing. I hardly could believe it. I was asking myself: Is this the moment for which I was hoping and working so many years? My joy was mixed with anxiety and fear. I could not even reproach myself [for] being an habitual pessimist, of not being able to enjoy joy.

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[T]he entire world read the next day that the U.N. signed a protocol for bringing the Genocide Convention into force. The people in all corners of the globe believed in what they read: that the U.N. is bringing in[to] force an actual law for stopping the slaughter of the innocent. I hoped they rejoiced. This was enough. For the time being, my purpose was achieved, even if I had to pay a heavy price for it later. [Editors’ note: Lemkin is, again, alluding to his increasingly poor health and exhaustion.] Previously, I was living on a [special] diet because of bad health, and now I found myself suddenly exposed to the food of cheap restaurants. My health was deteriorating from one day to another. When in the U.N., I could hardly stand on my feet and had to look for the support of a wall or a sofa. In the night I felt a strong pain in my stomach. The doctor had a bewildered look on his face and advised immediate hospitalization. I found myself in the hospital at Bellevue, New York, before the Assembly acted on the resolution of the Legal Committee [i.e., not to refer the actual text of the Genocide Convention to the International Law Commission for an advisory opinion]. I could not possibly organize an opposition as I did in 1947 to this resolution from my hospital bed. Braving the doctor’s orders, I sent out in the night telegrams to my friends in the delegations. It was, however, like a “cry” in the wilderness. The resolution of the Legal Committee was adopted and the Genocide Convention was submitted to the International Court of Justice for an opinion on reservations. My health was deteriorating rapidly. The pain in the abdomen did not let me sleep. When I was being prepared for the operation, and had to sign papers which hinted ominously to the possibility of death, a great calm enveloped me. I knew that I would not die. I could not die for the simple reason that I was convinced that my work would have died with me. I did not have the good sense to prepare enough disciples to continue my work. I was constantly under strain and did [not] have time to do it. The strong feeling that my mission depended so much on this harassed body made my inner will issue orders to this body: do not cease to exist! The days in the hospital were a reminder that I was a human being again, that I was wanted and cared [for], that my progress meant something. I thought that all persecutees, even those self-appointed, should be permitted to enter a hospital to undress, to lie in a bed, and to be asked how they feel. Only after that they could be tormented again.

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As health was returning, so did my problems and worries. It was impossible to keep serene all the time while I knew what was happening. However, I knew also that I needed my health soon for the new phase of the fight. *

*

*

Editors’ Note: Lemkin’s unfinished autobiography ends here. Ultimately, Lemkin was to die alone at age fifty-nine, heavily in debt, and surrounded by his papers which would later be dispersed to three primary locations: the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, Ohio; the American Jewish Historical Society in Waltham, Massachusetts; and the 42nd Street Branch of the New York Public Library in New York City. His crowning achievement—the United Nations Convention on the Punishment and Prevention of the Crime of Genocide—successfully ratified in 1948, would later, under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, be affirmed by his adopted country almost four decades after his death. In the last half of the twentieth century, the Convention has been applied sporadically and selectively, and remains a source of continuing debate and discussion among legal and genocide scholars the world over. To this day, however, it remains the cornerstone of international legal and moral-ethical reasoning regarding genocide and its prevention. Acknowledgement: Grateful thanks is herewith expressed to the Raphael Lemkin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lennox and Tilden Foundations for permission to Steven Jacobs to continue the task of editing for publication his more than 20,000 pages of material, including his autobiography. Note 1.

The title is taken from a New York Times editorial of Sunday, October 20, 1957, entitled “The Crime of Genocide,” the last sentence of which read, “Something might be learned from that exceedingly patient and totally unofficial man, Professor Raphael Lemkin, who has been urging the Genocide Convention day-in and dayout, session after session, and who has now won his fifty-sixth victory.”

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20 The Call Gregory H. Stanton Formative Years I probably have human rights in my family unconscious, if there is such a thing. I am a descendant of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a founder of the Woman’s Liberation Movement, and of Henry Brewster Stanton, an ardent abolitionist. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s portrait hung over my great-grandfather’s mantle in Johnstown, New York. I grew up in the home of Howard Stanton, a Presbyterian pastor, and Alison Stanton, an English teacher. While my father was a student at Oberlin in 1942, he led the first sit-in in the United States, to integrate the town barbershop. In the small Illinois town where I grew up, Dad was the pastor of the elite church in town. When community leaders asked him to head the campaign to raise funds for a new swimming pool, his barber tipped him that they intended to exclude Negroes. Dad went to them and quietly told them that he would not only refuse to raise the money if they did so, but would denounce a segregated pool from the pulpit. The leaders backed down, Dad raised the money, and the town got an integrated swimming pool. The secret of Dad’s influence was that people knew he loved them. He persuaded the manager of the largest factory in town, a member of his church, to give African-Americans jobs other than janitor. He formed an inter-racial council to get realtors to stop confining African-Americans to the other side of the tracks, bringing housing integration long before it was mandated by law. Sometimes it took courage. We once had a brick thrown through our front window after Dad preached a sermon denouncing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s politics of character assassination. 401

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My parents taught us that true meaning in life comes from service to God and to other people, not fame or fortune. Just before I began high school, I committed my life to God. It was a conversion experience, the sort William James writes about, and it changed my life. Like Martin King, Jr., my theology is “personalist.” I have a personal relationship with God and also believe that it is between persons that God’s presence can be most palpably experienced, through love and justice. I have prayed about every important decision in my life. In the final judgment, I believe that we should not be concerned about our own salvation, but about the suffering of others, about healing the sick, clothing the naked, and feeding the hungry. That is what Jesus and the prophets taught, and their teaching is what guides me. I was a voting rights worker in Leake County, Mississippi, in 1966 and still think it was the most dangerous place I’ve ever worked, including Cambodia and Rwanda. Two of my friends were wounded one night when the Ku Klux Klan shot up the house the group was staying in. I joined the Peace Corps after college and then attended Harvard Divinity School to prepare for a secular ministry. But my personal call to work against genocide came only after I had completed my Ph.D. course work in cultural anthropology at the University of Chicago and enrolled at Yale Law School. Learning About the Cambodian Genocide First-Hand In 1980, while in my second year at Yale Law School, Church World Service (CWS), the relief arm of the National Council of Churches, U.S.A., called me and asked me to become the Phnom Penh Field Director for a consortium of American relief groups that included CWS, CARE, and Lutheran World Relief. I was to plan and set up a relief and rehabilitation program that would not only bring in immediate food aid, but also provide longer-term assistance to Cambodian recovery, including veterinary medicine, irrigation engineering, rice seed production, and primary school education. I had not sought the job. CWS, though, called me because my college roommate was in charge of the CWS program in New York and figured I was tough enough to take the assignment. At first, I asked CWS to try to find someone else. My wife, Mary Ellen, and I hoped to start a family, and thought that service in Cambodia would postpone our dream. Little did we know!

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Six weeks later, CWS called back and asked again, and I promised that I would pray about it. It was a fateful promise. I don’t hear voices or see visions, but I do believe in God’s inspiration. The response to my prayers was consistent and clear. As my favorite labor law professor, Jack Getman, who is Jewish, told me, “Greg, you have to go. You’ve been called.” What I did not expect was that I had been called to witness the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide. It was a call that changed my life. In the months before I left for Cambodia, I read the accounts of the Khmer Rouge killing fields. Haunting images of Cambodian refugees were appearing on the covers of magazines, and tales of the Khmer Rouge atrocities were finally being told to a world that had not wanted to believe them. Books like Murder of a Gentle Land by John Barron and Anthony Paul and Cambodia Year Zero by Francois Ponchaud had been dismissed as anti-communist propaganda by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in After the Cataclysm. Now, as the weight and consistency of the refugee stories became overwhelming, and as the mass graves were opened, the world saw that the bloodbath predicted by “anti-communists” was a fact. As a student of international law, I realized that because Cambodia was a state-party to the Genocide Convention and because the Khmer Rouge still held Cambodia’s seat in the United Nations, a compelling case could be taken against Cambodia to the World Court for breach of the Genocide Convention, and the very people who committed the crimes would still be legally required to answer the charges. It was a unique opportunity. I figured that a well-organized group of human rights investigators, preferably an already existing, well-financed group like the International Commission of Jurists, could gather the evidence of genocide because the Khmer Rouge no longer controlled Cambodia, and then find a state-party to the Genocide Convention to charge Cambodia with violation of the Convention before the International Court of Justice. I discussed the idea with Yale Law Professors Myres McDougall, Michael Reisman, and Burke Marshall, and all thought my idea sound. In June 1980, on my way into Cambodia, I met David Hawk (the former executive director of Amnesty International, U.S.A.), who was then working for the World Conference on Religion and Peace in Bangkok, and proposed my plan to him. It was the first time he

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had heard the idea, and he encouraged me to contact leaders of human rights organizations in New York about it when I returned to the U.S. In Cambodia, I discussed my idea with government officials. Ben Kiernan, currently professor of history at Yale University and director of the Yale Genocide Studies Program, was in Cambodia doing research for his Ph.D. dissertation on the Khmer Rouge, and we also discussed the plan. Ben proved to be enthusiastic about it. Ben and I have worked together ever since to document the crimes of the Khmer Rouge and to bring their leaders to justice. Ben and I were among the first Westerners to see the newly opened mass grave at Choeng Ek, where the Khmer Rouge buried over 7,000 victims of the Tuol Sleng extermination prison in Phnom Penh. There were so many bodies in the mass graves that the decomposition was not yet complete. Flesh still clung to human bones. The stench of death seared my nostrils. The stories of survivors still haunt me. Every Cambodian had lost family members, and their stories crushed my soul. In our interviews in Cham Muslim villages, Ben Kiernan and I learned that the Chams and other minorities were singled out for extermination. Sop Pidas, a Cham Muslim grandmother, told me through her tears how she had lost her entire family when the Khmer Rouge on one terrible night in 1977 beat 5,000 Chams to death. Her husband, a leader in the Cham community, was singled out, soaked with gasoline, and set on fire. Her infant grandchild was murdered by dashing her brains out against a tree. Gai Marianne, another Cham woman, told me that she had helped her sister-in-law suckle her newborn infant. Both women and their babies were moved to a new commune, but the sister-in-law fell behind, leaving Gai Marianne to care for both babies. A Khmer Rouge cadre took the sister-in-law’s eight-week-old baby and threw him into the jungle to die. “You have no need for two small babies,” he explained. Cham children were taken away from their parents, put into youth communes, and all Chams were forbidden to speak the Cham language. This intentional destruction of the Cham ethnic and religious group was clearly genocide under the Genocide Convention. Daily, I saw beggars in Phnom Penh, the maimed victims of American cluster bombs and Khmer Rouge mines. Lars Salemark, a Swedish Red Cross surgeon, told me of operating on a boy who was born

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with congenital defects in his right leg and left hand. While taking his water buffalo to pasture, he stepped on a newly laid landmine that destroyed his left leg and right hand, leaving him crippled in all four limbs. The stories of the orphans were the hardest to drive out of my mind. Chuan Phalla, a fifteen-year-old orphan, told me how she had managed to survive only by hiding under the body of her dead sister in a mass grave. The orphaned son of the Phnom Penh train stationmaster had watched the Khmer Rouge disembowel his parents before his eyes. They left a hole in his heart that couldn’t be filled by all his tears. At the Choeng Ek mass grave, I wept when I found a Mickey Mouse T-shirt on a tiny skeleton. Who, I asked, could commit such monstrous crimes? Returning to Yale in 1981, I should have been elated to come home. A mission accomplished. A bright future. But instead I slid into a deep depression. I finally consulted a doctor who told me, “Depression is repressed anger. What are you angry about?” I answered, “I’m angry at the Khmer Rouge—about the terrible injustice in Cambodia. They have gotten away with mass murder.” It was then that I realized that instead of turning the anger destructively upon myself, I should carry out my plans to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. And so, The Cambodian Genocide Project was born. What that doctor at Yale told me about repressed anger has also helped me understand many of the experiences I have had in the human rights field since. If we do not convert our anger into constructive actions, it can leak out sideways, so to speak, and be displaced upon the very people with whom we should be working. The result is a phenomenon that is paradoxical: that people in the human rights movement can be even more turf-conscious, back-stabbing, and self-righteous than people in other fields. The internecine battles among Cambodia scholars and human rights advocates are among the bloodiest cases of academic fratricide I have ever experienced. The attacks on Ben Kiernan by Stephen Morris, The Wall Street Journal, and Congressman Campbell were examples of such vicious character assassination. Claiming that Kiernan had supported the Khmer Rouge in an undergraduate article in 1975, they attacked his credentials to lead the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale. They ignored the fact that in 1978 Kiernan had publicly said he was wrong (something many have yet to do), and has spent the past twenty

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years documenting the crimes of the Pol Pot regime. Ben was untenured at the time of the attacks, and they were aimed not only at his work to document the crimes, but also at wrecking his professional career. Fortunately, he withstood them, and they did not succeed. It may be that such vicious personal attacks are indirect reflections of the evil we confront (see Kiernan, 2000, April/June). The Cambodian Genocide Project In the spring of 1981, after returning to the U.S., I went to New York lawyer William Butler, chairman of the board of the International Commission of Jurists headquartered in Geneva, and asked his organization to document the Khmer Rouge crimes and call for a nation to take the case to the World Court. I was surprised when he sent me a reply saying that he had subsequently discussed the idea with the U.S. State Department, which opposed the plan, and he questioned whether the killings in Cambodia constituted “genocide.” Such “definitionalism” has plagued the anti-genocide movement since Stalin got political mass murder removed from the UN Genocide Convention in 1948. It has paralyzed the will of thousands of lawyers. Stalin’s ghost must snicker that he again used the appearance of law to deny justice. We were again to see “definitionalism”; this time, as grotesque denial in the State Department’s refusal to use the term “genocide” to describe the mass murders in Rwanda. Personally, I accept the definition of genocide in the Genocide Convention, “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, as such.” But I am equally horrified by political mass murder, one more form of mass killing because of group membership. Debating whether mass killing fits the conventional definition of genocide is most often an excuse for non-action, as it was in the Jurists’ refusal to investigate in Cambodia and the West’s failure to stop the Rwandan genocide. It is true that most of the Khmer Rouge killings were political, so not technically genocide. But they also singled out the Muslim Cham, Buddhist monks, Christians, and ethnic minorities, thus committing classic “genocide.” One point many “definitionalists” often overlook about the definition is the “in part.” The mass killing does not have to be with the intent to kill an entire group for it to be genocide. They also often confuse “intent,” which is what a reasonable person would conclude to be the consequences of his acts, and motive—the motive of genocide may be to seize

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property or power, but the only intent a prosecutor has to prove is the intent to kill part of a group because of their national, ethnical, racial, or religious identity. In late 1981, David Hawk called me, and asked me to solicit a contribution from CWS so that we could travel together to Phnom Penh to begin the project I had proposed to him in 1980. I was delighted, wrote the letter to CWS, which gave us funding, and then I obtained visas that enabled us to travel through Vietnam to Cambodia. We traveled to Phnom Penh together in the spring of 1982, and obtained the permissions necessary to collect the evidence we needed. That summer I incorporated the Cambodian Genocide Project, Inc. as a 501(c)(3) tax exempt, non-profit organization. (Hawk later established his own separate Cambodian Documentation Commission.) I eventually became a law professor at Washington and Lee University School of Law, and Ben Kiernan finished his Ph.D. and became a history professor at the University of Wollongong in Australia, and then at Yale University. We continued to work together through the 1980s and 1990s, doing research together in Cambodia under the auspices of the Cambodian Genocide Project, Inc. with a grant from the Lewis Law Center of Washington and Lee University. In 1986, we worked together in Australia to get the Australian government to take the case. In the U.S. in the 1990s we worked on the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge. Since 1980 we have read and commented on each other’s papers (though Ben is a far more eminent and prolific scholar than I could ever be), defended each other against scurrilous attacks, celebrated each others’ children, and enjoyed the fullest and warmest professional relationship. In 1986 we discovered the Cambodian equivalent of the yellow star. The Khmer Rouge had evacuated the entire Eastern Zone in 1977-1978 because, according to their ideology, the population had “Khmer bodies but Vietnamese minds.” At the end of a hard day of interviewing and videotaping witness testimony in a Cham village, as we sat on a bamboo floor above the squawking chickens of a house where we would spend the night, Ben began to ask about the evacuation of the Eastern Zone, when the Khmer Rouge had forced everyone in Eastern Cambodia to leave for labor camps in central Cambodia. Being a cultural anthropologist with a keen sense of the importance of symbols, I asked what people wore during the evacuation. Black clothing and headscarves, we were told. But then I asked, “What color were the head scarves?”

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Everyone said, “They were blue and white.” I asked if the Khmer Rouge cadres wore the same color. “No,” was the reply. “Blue and white scarves were reserved for the evacuees.” “What did the color signify,” I asked.” “It was the killing sign.” A cold chill of recognition shot through us. We had discovered the equivalent of the Nazi yellow star. We learned that evacuees from the Eastern Zone received the scarves near Phnom Penh, evidence of the Communist Party Central Committee’s direction, and were required to wear them at all times in public, just as Jews had been in the Third Reich. Chris Munger, a professional filmmaker, accompanied me on one of my trips in the summer of 1986, and his steady hand on the video camera produced tapes that I hope will someday be made into a documentary film about the Cambodian genocide. The Cambodian Genocide Project won a grant from the United States Institute of Peace to produce a rough cut of a film, but we have never secured adequate funding to complete the film. I have turned over all the videotape to the Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale, and also have originals, so I still hope a documentary filmmaker will be able to use the witness testimony we collected. Leo and Hilda Kuper became the most important influences on my thinking about genocide. I first got to know them through their books, particularly Leo’s seminal work on genocide, but we soon began to correspond, and they invited me to come out to Westwood (in Los Angeles County) to visit them on numerous occasions. Leo was not only a great sociologist and lawyer, but also a wonderful mentor. I loved to go for walks with him and their dog in the California sunshine. Hilda, a fellow anthropologist, also shared my love of poetry, which she wrote beautifully in English and Siswati (I was later told in Swaziland). Hilda and I discussed Swazi rituals, and I later became a Fulbright Professor of Law in Swaziland, where I was able to help arrange an invitation for Hilda to make a triumphal return to her anthropological homeland, where she was quite literally royally received. Leo invited me to become the American vice president of International Alert Against Genocide, an organization based in London that he helped found. Leo became disappointed that International Alert mostly held academic conferences and had never issued an interna-

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tional alert against genocide. He was convinced that a new organization was needed for early warning and political action to prevent and stop genocide. In the late 1980s, Leo and I made a futile trip together to New York to try to convince Human Rights Watch to establish a special project to be called Genocide Watch, but the executive director was too busy to meet with us, so we had coffee with an intern. I never gave up the idea and established Genocide Watch in 1998, though it would be far more effective if it were part of Human Rights Watch. It was created in order to organize the International Campaign to End Genocide, which I will describe in more detail below. In 1986, I spent part of the summer in Australia attempting to convince the Department of Foreign Affairs to take the case to the World Court. Australia was a good choice because it had no reservations to the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice. Many countries, including the United States, require consent to the ICJ’s jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention’s Article 9, a reservation that could have been invoked reciprocally by the Khmer Rouge to get the case thrown out on technical grounds. Australian citizens had been murdered at Cambodia’s infamous Tuol Sleng prison. Australian Foreign Minister Hayden announced his support for a tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge the day after my first appearance on Australian television and radio. I lived at Wesley College of the University of Sydney, and acted as a consultant to the Department of Foreign Affairs in Canberra. But the Australian government ultimately declined to take the case on the erroneous ground that to do so would be to “recognize” the Khmer Rouge—even though cases in the World Court are brought by states against other states, not by governments as governments. I also later learned that the Australians had consulted the U.S. State Department, which remained opposed to the prosecution because it might legitimize the Vietnamese-backed regime in Phnom Penh and undermine the opposition coalition backed by Washington, a coalition that included the Khmer Rouge. Neither David Hawk, who took the case to Sweden, nor I could convince any other government to take the case to the World Court. I had learned lesson number one about the struggle against genocide: Genocide continues and its perpetrators escape with impunity because of failure of political will to enforce the law. The Genocide Convention is international law. But law is not effective until there is

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the authoritative decision to enforce it. So, a group of Cambodia activists centered in Washington, D.C., New Haven, and Virginia set out to change the political will of the U.S. government. Since the State Department was opposed to prosecuting the Khmer Rouge, we had to take the battle to the United States Congress. Sally Benson, a veteran Washington peace activist, Ben Kiernan, and others formed a coalition called the Campaign to Oppose the Return of the Khmer Rouge (CORKR), and we hired Craig Etcheson to run it. Etcheson, a political science Ph.D., had written The Rise and Demise of Democratic Kampuchea, one of the first analyses of the Pol Pot regime. Jeremy Stone, president of the Federation of American Scientists, provided us with office space. I served as cochairman of CORKR’s Justice Committee. Working with the staff of Senator Charles Robb (D-VA), the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act was drafted and attached to the State Department’s appropriation, which forced the State Department to establish an Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations by July 1, 1994. (The State Department predictably opposed the Act because it earmarked funds for investigation of the Cambodian genocide.) Passed by overwhelming votes in both the House and Senate and signed by President Clinton, the Act declared that it is U.S. policy to support creation of a tribunal to try the leaders of the Khmer Rouge for genocide and other crimes against humanity. In 1992, I joined the State Department Foreign Service, and, in 1994, was assigned to work on the steering committee of the Office of Cambodian Genocide Investigations, under the superb leadership of Al LaPorta, who was rewarded for this service with the Ambassadorship to Mongolia. The act earmarked $800,000 for the project, and a competition was held to allocate $500,000 of it to conduct the main investigation in Cambodia. I recused myself from the decision about who would win the competition, but Yale’s Cambodian Genocide Program, led by Ben Kiernan and Craig Etcheson, unanimously won the contract to carry out the work of the Cambodian investigation. The Cambodian Genocide Program established the Documentation Center in Phnom Penh, which is ably headed by Youk Chhang, a university-educated Cambodian citizen who is tri-lingual in Khmer, English, and French, and who, more importantly, has the courage to ignore political pressures from the government and carry on the investigation in spite of many threats to his life from the Khmer Rouge. Within the U.S. State Department, when it became evident that we

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knew the exact location of Pol Pot and could possibly encourage a commando raid from Thailand to seize him, several members of the War Crimes Working Group and Southeast Asia Bureau met to consider the matter. We jokingly referred to ourselves as the “Pol Pot Posse.” I wrote a paper entitled “Options to Try Pol Pot” on international or U.N.-assisted Cambodian tribunals to try the Khmer Rouge. The paper was cleared at the top levels of the Asian, Legal, Human Rights, U.N., International Organizations, Political, Deputy Secretary’s and Secretary of State’s offices and became U.S. policy. The U.S. took that policy to the U.N., which created a commission of experts to recommend how to bring the Khmer Rouge to justice. The U.S. supported the creation of an international or mixed international/Cambodian Tribunal, a policy adopted by the U.N. Security Council. The political will of the U.S. and the U.N. had finally been changed. At the time of this writing (January 2001), the Cambodian National Assembly finally passed the legislation to establish the tribunal. It still remains to be seen whether the current Cambodian leadership will allow the timely establishment of the tribunal to try the Khmer Rouge leaders. Pol Pot is already dead; the others are old men protected by amnesty deals. If the tribunal is finally established it will be, for me and for many Cambodians, a dream long denied, but finally realized after twenty years of very hard work. The Rwanda Tribunal Creating the political will and establishing an international tribunal to try the perpetrators of genocide was much faster for Rwanda. Unfortunately, the political will to prevent the genocide came too late to save the 800,000 people who were murdered. In July 1994, I was assigned to the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs as the Africa officer in its Office of U.N. Political Affairs. I was responsible for coordinating and writing U.N. Security Council resolutions on Africa, and also became a member of the Interagency War Crimes Working Group. The latter group was formed in the aftermath of the Bosnian massacres to establish the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and to coordinate U.S. assistance to that tribunal. In the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, Rwanda was added to its agenda. It was composed of representatives from the Legal, Human Rights, and International Organizations’ Bureaus at the State Department, the Peacekeeping

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and Legal Offices at the Pentagon, and key officials at the Justice Department, and the National Security Council (NSC). By the time I arrived in Washington from Thailand in July 1994, the Rwandan genocide was nearly over. The appalling cowardice in the State Department in April 1994, particularly in the Legal Adviser’s Office by Joan Donoghue, Ted Borek, and George Taft in the Africa section and others higher up, who denied that the Rwandan mass killing met the legal definition of “genocide” is well known. Worse yet, and little known, was the decision of the Interagency Peacekeeping CORE Group, led by the National Security Council’s Susan Rice and the State Department International Organization Affairs Bureau’s Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary George Ward, to recommend withdrawal of the 2,500 UNAMIR peacekeepers in Rwanda. (Dr. Rice was later promoted to assistant secretary of state for African Affairs, and Mr. Ward became ambassador to Namibia. He is now the director of the Training Program at the U.S. Institute of Peace.) In the fall of 1994, The War Crimes Working Group decided to undertake an inquiry into why the U.S. had made such terrible policy mistakes so they would happen “never again.” I was warned by the desk officer for Rwanda, “The State Department doesn’t make mistakes. You will be ending your career if you do this.” He was right. For my work that year, I won the American Foreign Service Association’s W. Averell Harriman Award for “intellectual courage and creative accomplishment,” while that same year, my supervisor, Ann Korky, wrote an evaluation designed to be fatal to my foreign service career, recommending against granting me tenure. What I learned was that Secretary of State Warren Christopher had received a call from the Belgian government saying that Belgium was withdrawing its contingent after ten of its peacekeepers had been murdered and mutilated. Belgium called on the U.S. to support withdrawal of all UNAMIR peacekeepers so the Belgian withdrawal would not appear to be the act of cowardice that it was. The Peacekeeping Core Group was convened by Dr. Rice and Mr. Ward in the conference room of the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. There, without dissent, it was decided that the U.N. Peacekeeping Operation in Rwanda could not stop the killing in Rwanda without exceeding the mandate given to it by the U.N. Security Council. Burned by the “mission creep” that resulted in the deaths of eighteen American troops in Somalia, the group never con-

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sidered changing the mandate. In an informal session of the U.N. Security Council on April 18 attended by the representative of Rwanda, which sat on the Security Council, U.S. Ambassador Karl Inderfurth announced that it was “inappropriate” for UNAMIR troops to remain in Rwanda. The next day, the interim Rwandan cabinet met and decided to extend the genocide to southern Rwanda. An instruction cable was dispatched by the State Department to Ambassador Madeleine Albright to vote on April 21 for U.N. Security Council Resolution 912 to order the 2,500 UNAMIR peacekeeping troops to leave Rwanda. The UNAMIR troops should have been reinforced and their mandate strengthened to defend the thousands of Tutsis who had gathered in churches and stadiums for protection. General Romeo Dallaire, commander of UNAMIR, begged for such a mandate, and estimated that the troops already on the ground could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. When I invited General Dallaire to Washington to speak at the invitation of the War Crimes Working Group, George Ward came into my office shaking with rage, and my supervisor, Ann Korky, tried to block the visit up to the last moment when General Dallaire was at the Montreal airport. In August 1994, I was lent to the United Nations Commission of Experts on the Rwandan genocide and contributed to its first report, which recommended creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). Returning to the State Department, I drafted U.N. Security Council Resolution 955, which created the ICTR, and U.N.S.C. Resolution 978, which called on all U.N. members to turn over suspects to the tribunal. The way for the Rwanda Tribunal had been cleared in 1993 by the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). The two tribunals are joined at the head, with a common appeals chamber and a common chief prosecutor. In the Statute attached to Resolution 955, several problems were corrected that had arisen in the ICTY Statute. We eliminated the requirement that war crimes be committed in the course of an international conflict, and we incorporated Common Article 3 and Optional Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions as crimes within the jurisdiction of the tribunal. Common Article 3 criminalizes war crimes that are not committed during an international war, a point that was overlooked in the statute for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, and that was especially important for a civil con-

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flict like Rwanda. Optional Protocol 1 broadens the prohibitions of the Geneva Conventions, applies them to non-state armed forces, and extends further protections to civilian populations. These were significant advances in international humanitarian law. Some of the lawyers in the legal adviser’s office questioned whether we could do this, since this was not yet accepted international law and the U.S. is not even a party to Optional Protocol I. I simply pointed out that law is made by authoritative decision, in this case by the U.N. Security Council. The Security Council could make new law. Getting the Rwanda Tribunal up and running was another matter. The State Department Legal Adviser’s office wanted a common prosecutor for the ICTY and ICTR, and even talked about having both tribunals sit in The Hague. I insisted that the trials be held in Africa as near to the site of the genocide as possible, so that witnesses could be available, and the tribunal would not be seen as “white man’s justice.” I also recommended separate prosecutors, because I doubted that a single prosecutor in The Hague could devote himself or herself adequately to both tribunals equally. The unity of international criminal law could be maintained simply with a common appeals chamber for the ICTY and ICTR. When I was advising the U.N. Commission of Experts, I visited the U.N. compound near Nairobi, which has huge, well-equipped hearing rooms already wired for simultaneous translation, as well as adequate office space. I recommended that the ICTR be located there. But Kenya did not want it, due to connections between President Moi and the former Rwandan regime. So Arusha, Tanzania was chosen instead, requiring years of preparation of courtrooms, offices, and prison cells. An ineffective deputy prosecutor, a retired judge from Madagascar, was sent to Kigali, and in a nearly fatal mistake, a U.N. legal officer was chosen as tribunal registrar and sent to an area near his ethnic homeland, where all the pressures of nepotism came to bear, and he soon padded the payrolls with his Luo (ethnic group) compatriots. The Tribunal judges did not arrive in Arusha until 1996. In 1996, I was sent by the State Department to investigate the ICTR’s problems, wrote a terse three-page list of necessary reforms, including replacing the deputy prosecutor and registrar, and forwarded it to the U.N. Office of Internal Oversight Investigations. Changes soon followed.

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The Rwanda Tribunal holds some of the top leaders of the Rwandan genocide. It has succeeded in capturing many of the “big fish” such as Interim Prime Minister Jean Kambanda, and the main propagandist and arms procurer for the genocide, Theoneste Bagasora. But meanwhile, over 100,000 prisoners rot in Rwandan jails without being formally charged because the Rwandan justice system lacks the personnel and resources to process them. The huge cost of the ICTR should be more than equaled by investment in rebuilding the Rwandan judicial system, a policy I proposed as the Great Lakes Justice Initiative. It was adopted by the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (U.S.A.I.D.), and announced by President Clinton on his trip to Africa in 1998. It has become a cornerstone of U.S. assistance in the region and has disbursed over thirty million dollars to date. In 1996, I moved to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor in the Department of State, but remained actively involved in U.S. policy on central Africa. I strongly advocated sending a U.N. force to drive the ex-Rwandan Army and Interahamwe militias from control of the Rwandan refugee camps, so the refugees could return to Rwanda. Otherwise, I had predicted in a memo written in 1994, we were “drifting toward Cambodia” and doomed to repeat the mistakes of allowing a group of genocidists to hold hundreds of thousands of refugees hostage and providing them with base camps at huge expense to the international community. In 1997, the Rwandan Patriotic Army invaded the camps instead, and hundreds of thousands of Rwandans came home. Other thousands fled into the jungle. I was in Kigali when the Rwandan Army invaded Zaire. During this period, I had driven up to Gisenyi to see Rose Carr, an American who had lived in Rwanda for many years, when our car was engulfed by the human tide of refugees that was flowing back to Rwanda. Having been freed from their Interahamwe captors, they were finally going home, with hope and exhaustion engraved on their faces. It was a human flood of biblical proportions. Among the refugees was an eleven-year-old orphan who was lame. He begged for help. There were many others who were sick. Although a skittish U.S.A.I.D. official I was with would not let me stop to take pictures and protested when I stopped for the boy, I nevertheless gave him and a sick pregnant woman a lift to the Ruhengeri Hospital where they could be cared for.

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That night at the American Club in Kigali, Ambassador Richard Bogosian, U.S. Coordinator for the African Great Lakes, was having dinner with Ambassador Robert Gribbin, U.S. Ambassador to Rwanda. Bogosian joshingly said to me, “Well, Greg, do you still think we need that U.N. force?” I could only reply, “No, Ambassador, it’s too late now.” As more and more reports came in of slaughters of Hutu refugees by the Rwandan Army and the forces of Joseph Kabila, I began to ask for more information from American intelligence about what was going on. In spite of my top secret code word security clearance, I could never get an answer. So I decided to find $50,000 outside the normal Human Rights Bureau budget and hire private investigators through human rights groups who would find out what was going on. They confirmed my worst fears—a revenge genocide was in progress. Working with colleagues from other countries— particularly Australia, Canada, and New Zealand—we put together a resolution for the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to establish a Commission of Inquiry to investigate the reports of human rights violations in what had now become the Democratic Republic of the Congo under President Joseph Kabila. Kabila refused to cooperate with it. The U.S. waffled and a new U.N. commission with a different chairman was appointed. Kabila wouldn’t cooperate with the new chairman either. So the mass murders at Mbandaka and south of Kisangani and throughout the Kivus have remained uninvestigated and unprosecuted. The Rwandan Army soon broke with Kabila and a deadly civil war has ensued, drawing in most of the Congo’s neighbors. An estimate by epidemiologist Dr. Les Roberts, a consultant for the International Rescue Committee, is that the war has cost 1.7 million lives. When there is no force of law, the world will be ruled by the law of force. Current Projects The International Criminal Court (ICC) Ann Korky’s recommendation against my tenure finally had its effect. Tenure was denied, and my contract with the State Department ended. So I left the State Department in 1999 and went to work on initiatives that are either being opposed by or cannot be accomplished by the U.S. government.

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From January 1999 to March 2000, I was employed by the World Federalist Association, U.S.A. to serve as coordinator of the Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court, a coalition of human rights, religious, legal, and veterans groups that support creation of the ICC. I remain actively involved. Enforcement of the Genocide Convention has long been frustrated by the lack of the international institutions needed to enforce it. For two years both the Clinton administration and Congress opposed, rather than supported, the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The U.S. wanted no international institutions created in which it lacks a veto. In July 1998, the U.S. was one of only seven nations to vote against the Rome Treaty to create the ICC. We were in illustrious company— Iraq, Sudan, and China. The real reason is that as the sole remaining superpower, the U.S. wants to be able to use its power with impunity. The U.S. wants no one to judge its actions, its leaders, or its troops. The U.S. even wanted immunity for official acts of government officials, a position that would set international humanitarian law back fifty-five years, to before the Nuremberg Tribunal. It would allow any tyrant to simply declare his mass murders “official acts” in order to become immune from judgment. It is a preposterous policy— more fitting for a nineteenth-century imperial power than for a twentyfirst century advocate of democracy and the rule of law. From January 1999 to March 2000, I served as coordinator of the Washington Working Group on the International Criminal Court, a coalition of human rights, religious, legal, and veterans groups that support creation of the ICC. I remain an active member. Our objectives are to educate policymakers and the public about the ICC, and to defend the ICC from retrograde views like those of Senator Jesse Helms. It was also to secure the signature of the United States on the Rome Treaty by December 31, 2000, the final date for signatures without simultaneous ratifications. We have been successful. The U.S. dropped its insistence on “official acts immunity.” In 2000, Congress did not consider Senator Helms’ misnamed “American Servicemembers Protection Act,” which Congressman Patrick Kennedy said should be retitled the “War Criminals Protection Act,” because it would make the U.S. a haven for war criminals. And President Clinton authorized Ambassador David Scheffer to sign the Rome Treaty on December 31, 2000. I had worked closely with David for years and knew privately how much he wanted the U.S. to sign. It was a sweet victory.

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Unfortunately, even when the ICC comes into existence in a few years, the U.S. will not have ratified the treaty, and China and India will not sign—nearly half the world’s population. (India abstained, rather than voted against the treaty in 1998, but is unlikely to sign.) Most of the worst genocide perpetrators (Sudan and Iraq, for example) won’t join. The ICC will not have universal jurisdiction unless the U.N. Security Council refers a case or situation to it. So the court will lack jurisdiction over crimes committed in the territories of Sudan or Iraq unless the Security Council grants it. The ICC will have no retroactive jurisdiction over crimes committed before the ICC is created. Many genocidists are therefore still likely to escape judgment. But the ICC is an important step toward a world ruled by law. Eventually the U.S. must join the rest of the civilized world and ratify the Rome Treaty. A Standing, Volunteer U.N. Rapid Response Force Currently, there is no powerful international Rapid Response Force that could intervene quickly when genocide threatens or begins. I assisted Don Kraus of the Campaign for U.N. Reform in drafting the McGovern-Porter U.N. Rapid Deployment Peace and Security Act of 2000, which supports creation of such a force. It has two dozen co-sponsors, and it is an idea whose time will come. America should not and cannot be the unilateral policeman of the world. A step toward this standing rapid response force is the Danish and Canadian proposal for a U.N. Standing High Readiness Brigade (SHIRBRIG) of 5,500 light infantry troops ready to fly to any place on earth within three weeks of orders by the U.N. Security Council. The command center in Copenhagen is already operational. “SHIRBRIG” will be made up of national units, so it suffers from the weakness that nations may decide not to participate at the crucial time when they are most needed. Such a force needs to be enlarged and its mandate extended to Chapter Seven operations (mandatory, forceful peacekeeping without the consent of all parties) as well as Chapter Six operations (pacific settlement of disputes, with the consent of the country where peacekeepers will be stationed). But it is progress toward ending genocide. Genocide Early Warning The United Nations needs an effective early warning system for genocide, ethnic cleansing, and political mass murder that will daily

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keep track of incidents in countries with potential ethnic and religious conflicts and that will forecast long-term problems. The U.N. Secretariat now holds monthly meetings of the Interdepartmental Framework for Coordination to keep watch on regions of special concern. From March to July 2000, I worked with the Open Source Solutions Genocide Early Warning Project (a private consulting firm) that provided daily and monthly reports to the Interagency Genocide Working Group led by Ambassador David Scheffer of the State Department’s Office of War Crimes. We are now working with the United Nations to extend this Early Warning capability to U.N. agencies and the U.N. Security Council. In August 2000, a U.N. Commission on Peacekeeping Operations led by Lakhdar Brahimi recommended creation of just such an Early Warning operation in the U.N. Secretariat. The International Campaign to End Genocide Currently, there is no international movement on the order of an Amnesty International dedicated to ending genocide in the twentyfirst century. At the Hague Appeal for Peace in May, 1999, a coalition of ten organizations from the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Israel co-founded a new coalition called the International Campaign to End Genocide. The coalition included Genocide Watch (USA), The World Federalist Association (USA), the Campaign for U.N. Reform (USA), the Cambodian Genocide Program (USA), International Alert, Physicians for Human Rights (UK), The Leo Kuper Foundation (UK), The Committee for an Effective International Law (Germany), The Institute on the Holocaust and Genocide (Israel), and Prevent Genocide International (USA). Our first major action was in the East Timor crisis, when we worked together with other human rights, religious, and relief organizations to lobby the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, and Australia to put pressure on Indonesia to stop the rampage of militias and Indonesian troops in East Timor following the referendum for independence. We were quite successful in talking with leaders of these countries, who, in turn, put direct pressure on the leaders of Indonesia. The U.N. authorized the extremely rapid deployment of the Australian-led multinational force that stopped the bloodshed. Catholic Relief Services sent in tons of food and medicines. And Amnesty International succeeded in getting a Special Session of the U.N. Human Rights Commission convened, only the fourth in its history. I wrote an options

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paper (“War Crimes, Genocide, and Crimes Against Humanity in East Timor: Options for an International Criminal Tribunal”) calling for the creation of a tribunal to try those who were committing crimes against humanity. The day after our members presented it to Foreign Secretary Robin Cook in London he publicly called for the creation of an international tribunal. The paper was also shared with the U.N. Commission, which made the same recommendation. My employer, the World Federalist Association, U.S.A. had agreed to act as coordinator of the international coalition, but in March 2000 the new CEO of the World Federalist Association - U.S.A., John Anderson, reversed the decision the WFA-USA Executive Committee had passed in July 1999. He claimed that a national branch (WFAUSA) could not coordinate an international coalition, ordered me to work exclusively with U.S. organizations, and to terminate my work with overseas groups. It seemed shortsighted for an organization whose very name denies the primacy of divisions created by national boundaries. I therefore resigned from my job with the World Federalist Association, U.S.A. in order to continue the international coalition’s work. I hope the movement the coalition was building around the world will not be lost. Genocide Watch, which I founded in 1998, has taken over coordination of the international coalition. The International Campaign’s Steering Committee met in London in October 2000 to plan future directions and outreach to other groups. The Aegis Trust, a new think-tank on genocide prevention based in Nottingham, England, joined the International Campaign. The Campaign’s Steering Committee agreed that I would continue as coordinator, that we would assemble a prestigious board of advisors, and we would undertake a fundraising effort. What Is to be Done? *1.5 million Armenians. *3 million Ukrainians. *6 million Jews. *260,000 Roma (Gypsies). *10.5 million Slavs. *25 million Russians. *25 million Chinese. *1 million Ibos. *1.5 million Bengalis. *1.7 million Cambodians. *250,000 Burundians. *500,000 Ugandans. *2 million Sudanese. *800,000 Rwandans. *1.7 million North Koreans. *10,000 Kosovars. Genocides and other mass murders killed more people in the twentieth century than all the wars combined. “Never again” has turned into “Again and again.” Again and again, the response to genocide has been too little and too late.

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During the Armenian genocide and the Holocaust, the world’s response was denial. In 1994, while 800,000 Tutsis died in Rwanda, U.S. State Department lawyers debated whether it was “genocide” and the U.N. Security Council withdrew U.N. peacekeeping troops who could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Genocide is the world’s worst intentional human rights problem. But it is different from other problems and requires different solutions. Because genocide is almost always carried out by a country’s own military and police forces, the usual national forces of law and order cannot stop it. International intervention is usually required. But because the world lacks an international rapid response force, and because the United Nations has so far been either paralyzed or unwilling to act, genocide has gone unchecked. The International Campaign to End Genocide is an international coalition dedicated to creating the international institutions and the political will to end genocide forever. The International Campaign to End Genocide has four goals: 1.

The early and effective functioning of the International Criminal Court.

2.

The creation of an effective early-warning system to alert the world and especially the U.N. Security Council to potential ethnic conflict and genocide.

3.

The establishment of a powerful United Nations rapid response force in accordance with Articles 43-47 of the U.N. Charter.

4.

The provision of public information on the nature of genocide and creation of the political will to prevent and end it.

This Campaign is a de-centralized, global effort of many organizations. In addition to its work for institutional reform of the United Nations, it is a coalition that will bring pressure upon governments that can act on early warnings of genocide through the U.N. Security Council. The Campaign will establish its own NGO early warning system and has its own website (www.genocidewatch.org). Bypassing the secrecy of government intelligence services, the Campaign hopes to facilitate establishment of truly confidential communication links that will allow relief and health workers, whistleblowers, and ordinary citizens to create an alternative open source intelligence network that will warn of conflict before it turns into genocide.

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The International Campaign to End Genocide covers genocide as it is defined in the Genocide Convention: “the intentional destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” It also covers political mass murder, ethnic cleansing, and other genocide-like crimes against humanity. It will not get bogged down in legal debates during mass killing. Building the political will for action is the major task. Among the defense mechanisms used to justify non-action is denial of the facts. So the first job in preventing and stopping genocide is getting the facts in clear, indisputable form to policymakers. Most of that job is done by CNN and the news media. But conveying the information is not enough. It must be interpreted so that policymakers understand that genocidal massacres are systematic, or that the portents of genocide are as compelling as warnings of a hurricane. Then options for action must be suggested to those who make policy, and they must be lobbied to take action. The International Campaign to End Genocide works to create political will through: 1.

Consciousness raising—maintaining close contact with key policy makers in governments of U.N. Security Council members, providing them with information about genocidal situations.

2.

Coalition formation—working in coalitions to respond to specific genocidal situations and involving members in campaigns to educate the public about solutions.

3.

Policy advocacy—preparing options papers for action to prevent genocide in specific situations, and presenting them to policymakers.

The International Campaign to End Genocide concentrates on predicting, preventing, stopping, and punishing genocide and other forms of mass murder. It brings an analytical understanding of the genocidal process to specific situations. It does not simply study genocide or hold conferences, but attempts to prevent genocide, and build institutions that can end genocide forever. The International Campaign’s headquarters location in Washington, D.C. permits it to influence U.S. foreign policy, a key to forceful humanitarian intervention when genocide threatens. But it is also an international effort that will work with governments of other U.N. members to create the political will for United Nations, rather than unilateral, intervention.

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The Importance of Our Call I believe the international campaign to end genocide in the twentyfirst century will some day be seen in the same way we see the antislavery movement of the nineteenth century. It is time in human history to end genocide, the worst of all crimes against humanity. There were those in the nineteenth century who said that slavery couldn’t be ended because the economic forces that supported it were too great, that it was human nature, or even worse, that it was ordained by religion. There will be similar defeatism about the movement to abolish genocide. There has always been genocide, so it must be part of human nature. The world political order is not yet developed enough to prevent and stop it. Or, worst of all, genocide is ordained by jihad or ethnic purity or religion. But those who say we cannot abolish this curse upon mankind are no more right than those who said slavery could not be defeated. It is a matter of human will. And we make that human will. As Archbishop Tutu is fond of saying, “God is a God of justice. But to do justice, God depends on us.” God depends on us. It was a call to do justice that I answered in 1980 when I went to Cambodia. I had no idea what paths that call would lead me down. And I do not yet know where this call to do justice will lead me in the future. But neither did the Wise Men when they were called. There’s an old evangelical saying, “God has a wonderful plan for your life.” I’ve always been tempted to reply, “Yes, but I wish God would show me the map.” A map would have been a much easier way to find Bethlehem than a star. But it wouldn’t have required any faith. Ultimately, reaching our goal, fulfilling our call, depends on our faith. I have faith that we will succeed in our struggle whenever I look at our daughter. Birth On November 16, 1980, a month before we left Cambodia, a newborn baby was abandoned at the entry to the National Pediatric Hospital. The chief doctor couldn’t keep her at the hospital where an epidemic of hemorrhagic fever was raging, and at the orphanages newborns had only a fifty percent chance of survival. So the doctor brought her back to our hotel, walked into our prayer service that Sunday morning, and laid her in my wife’s arms. She asked us to

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care for the child until the government could determine what to do. We had told no one of our hopes to start a family, and certainly didn’t expect to adopt a baby in Cambodia, which no foreigner had done since 1975. We were the wrong nationality, wrong religion, wrong ideology, and wrong race. Our own country still had Cambodia on its “enemies list,” under the Trading With the Enemy Act. All the barriers known to man stood between us. But there is a personal force in the world that changes hearts and that can also change the course of history. I knew from my study of the personalist theology of Martin Luther King, Jr. that if we took that baby to the Foreign Ministry, and if we ourselves went in person, our request to adopt her would become an entirely different issue than if we simply wrote a letter, which I had also done. So we bundled her up in a zip-open Grasshopper suitcase made into a bed, and took her to the Foreign Ministry. The Deputy Foreign Minister strolled in and when he saw her, he was clearly moved. We explained what had happened, and our desire to adopt her. Then he began to speak to her in Khmer, “You are in God’s hands. I will pray for you.” The decision could not be made by the Foreign Ministry alone. It had to go to the Revolutionary Council. Five weeks later the Revolutionary Council itself gave us permission to adopt her. (The permission was the first official act of that government ever recognized in a U.S. court.) We named her Elizabeth Chantana, which means “gift of God.” We returned to the United States on Christmas Eve, 1980, and she was baptized by my father, Reverend Howard Stanton, at the Christmas Eve service in the First Presbyterian Church, Racine, Wisconsin. When I went back to Cambodia in 1982 to found the Cambodian Genocide Project, I asked the officials at the Foreign Ministry, “Why did you let us adopt her?” They said, “Because we knew that she needed you. And we knew that you needed her.” That is love. Love is God’s force personally expressed. Justice is God’s force socially expressed. Evil and death and genocide are not the most powerful forces in Cambodia or Rwanda or anywhere else. Love and life and justice are. Through love outstretched across thousands of miles, across political, ideological, religious, and ethnic boundaries, Cambodia and Rwanda have come back to life. And to us a child has come, our gift of God, a testimony to the ultimate power of a love that transcends all boundaries.

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References Brahimi Report on UN Peacekeeping Operations (2000, August). UN Doc A/55/305, S/ 2000/809, 21 AUGUST 2000. (Available at