The Routledge History of Genocide [1 ed.] 9780415529969, 9781315719054

Table of contents :
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of tables
Acknowledgements
List of contributors
1 Introduction: Raphael Lemkin, historians and genocide
PART 1 Genocide in historical contexts
2 Genocide and mass murder in Second Iron Age Europe: Methodological issues and case studies in the Iberian Peninsula
3 Tudor Ireland: Anglicisation, mass killing and security
4 To whom do the children belong? Genocidal displacement in Europe and Australia
5 The Great Purge in Ukraine: The German Operation of the NKVD (1937–8)
6 Expulsions from Eastern Europe after 1945
7 Responding to the Holocaust: Bystanders, colonialism and conflicting priorities
PART 2 Genocide and ideologies of race, class and nation
8 The Perfect Storm: Japanese military brutality during World War Two
9 Cambodia: Paranoia, xenophobia, genocide and auto-genocide
10 The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3
11 Rethinking violence: Motives and modes of mass murder in the independent state of Croatia, 1941–5
12 Genocide in the Great Lakes
PART 3 Interpreting genocide
13 Genocide, memory, and memorialisation
14 Writing ‘history’ for Hitler: Holocaust denial since 1945
15 ‘White genocide’: Postwar fascism and the ideological value of evoking existential conflicts
16 ‘Those who have the sin . . . go to this side’: Genocide and religion
17 Cultural genocide: Destruction of material and non-material human culture
PART 4 Mass violence, war and genocide
18 The Russian state and the war in Chechnya
19 Genocide and the end of the Ottoman Empire
20 Police forces and the Holocaust: German perpetrators and local collaborators
21 Masking genocide in Bosnia
22 Nuclear weapons and genocide: Lessons from 1940
Index

Citation preview

TH E RO U TL E DGE HIS TORY O F GE N OC IDE

The Routledge History of Genocide takes an interdisciplinary yet historically focused look at history from the Iron Age to the recent past to examine episodes of extreme violence that could be interpreted as genocidal. Approaching the subject in a sensitive, inclusive and respectful way, each chapter is a newly commissioned piece covering a range of opinions and perspectives. The topics discussed are broad in variety and include: • • • • • •

genocide and the end of the Ottoman Empire Stalin and the Soviet Union Iron Age warfare genocide and religion Japanese military brutality during the Second World War heritage and how we remember the past.

The volume is global in scope, something of increasing importance in the study of genocide. Presenting genocide as an extremely diverse phenomenon, this book is a wide-ranging and in-depth view of the field that will be valuable for all those interested in the historical context of genocide. Cathie Carmichael is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia and has been Head of School since 2012. She is the author and editor of several books including Slovenia and the Slovenes: A Small State in the New Europe (2000) (with James Gow), Language and Nationalism in Europe (2000) (co-edited with the late Stephen Barbour), Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (2002) and Genocide before the Holocaust (2009). She is an editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. Richard C. Maguire is Associate Dean for Employability and Senior Lecturer in Public History in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of East Anglia. He has written on the culture of British nuclear policy and now researches public history, focusing on public understandings of African and military history.

T HE R OU T L ED G E H ISTO RIES

The Routledge Histories is a series of landmark books surveying some of the most important topics and themes in history today. Edited and written by an international team of world-renowned experts, they are the works against which all future books on their subjects will be judged. THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN EUROPE SINCE 1700

Edited by Deborah Simonton

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF SLAVERY

Edited by Gad Heuman and Trevor Burnard THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF THE HOLOCAUST

Edited by Jonathan C. Friedman

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF CHILDHOOD IN THE WESTERN WORLD

Edited by Paula S. Fass

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF SEX AND THE BODY

Edited by Kate Fisher and Sarah Toulalan

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF WESTERN EMPIRES

Edited by Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF FOOD

Edited by Carol Helstosky FORTHCOMING:

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF TERRORISM

Edited by Randall D. Law

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF GENOCIDE

Edited by Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF EAST CENTRAL EUROPE

Edited by Irina Livezeanu and Arpad von Klimo

THE ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL CHRISTIANITY

Edited by Robert Swanson

T H E R O UT LED G E HI S T O R Y O F G E NOCI D E

Edited by Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire

First published 2015 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire for selection and editorial matter; individual extracts © the contributors The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Routledge history of genocide/edited by Cathie Carmichael and Richard C. Maguire. pages cm. — (The routledge histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Genocide—History. 1. Carmichael, Cathie. HV6322.7.R686 2015 364.15′109—dc23 2014043142 ISBN: 978-0-415-52996-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-71905-4 (ebk) Typeset in Baskerville by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK

CONTENT S

List of figures List of tables Acknowledgements List of contributors

viii ix x xi

1 Introduction: Raphael Lemkin, historians and genocide

1

CA TH I E CA RMIC HAEL

P AR T 1

Genocide in historical contexts

7

2 Genocide and mass murder in Second Iron Age Europe: Methodological issues and case studies in the Iberian Peninsula

9

F E RN A N D O Q UES ADA-S AN Z

3 Tudor Ireland: Anglicisation, mass killing and security

23

DAV I D E DWARDS

4 To whom do the children belong? Genocidal displacement in Europe and Australia

38

S I M O N E GI GLIOTTI

5 The Great Purge in Ukraine: The German Operation of the NKVD (1937–8)

55

V O L O D Y M Y R S EM Y S TY AHA AN D IGOR TATARI NOV

6 Expulsions from Eastern Europe after 1945

77

B E N J A M I N L IEB ERMAN

7 Responding to the Holocaust: Bystanders, colonialism and conflicting priorities J E N N I F E R R EEV E

v

89

CONTENTS

PAR T 2

Genocide and ideologies of race, class and nation 8 The Perfect Storm: Japanese military brutality during World War Two

103 105

M ARK F E L TO N

9 Cambodia: Paranoia, xenophobia, genocide and auto-genocide

122

T . O . S M I TH

10 The Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3

135

N I CO L AS W E RTH

11 Rethinking violence: Motives and modes of mass murder in the independent state of Croatia, 1941–5

151

T O M I S L AV D U LIĆ

12 Genocide in the Great Lakes

166

R E N É L E M A RC HAN D

PAR T 3

Interpreting genocide

183

13 Genocide, memory, and memorialisation

185

R E BE CCA J I N K S

14 Writing ‘history’ for Hitler: Holocaust denial since 1945

196

M ARK H O BB S

15 ‘White genocide’: Postwar fascism and the ideological value of evoking existential conflicts

207

P AU L J A CK S ON

16 ‘Those who have the sin . . . go to this side’: Genocide and religion

227

K ATE TE M O N EY

17 Cultural genocide: Destruction of material and non-material human culture U Ğ U R Ü M I T Ü N GÖR

vi

241

CONTENTS

P AR T 4

Mass violence, war and genocide

255

18 The Russian state and the war in Chechnya

257

M I K E B O W KER

19 Genocide and the end of the Ottoman Empire

275

U ĞU R Ü M I T ÜN GÖR

20 Police forces and the Holocaust: German perpetrators and local collaborators

288

RO B B Y VAN EETV ELDE

21 Masking genocide in Bosnia

309

KATE F E RGUS ON

22 Nuclear weapons and genocide: Lessons from 1940

321

RI CH A RD C. M AGUIRE

Index

334

vii

F I GU R ES

1.1 International lawyer Raphael Lemkin helped draft the Genocide Convention, which maps out prevention and punishment for the crime of genocide. 2.1 The main Iberian Iron Age sites mentioned in this chapter. 2.2 Corpses mutilated at La Hoya (Alava). The head (bottom right) corresponds to the skeleton on the left and was found 11 metres away, with marks of amputation in the cervical vertebrae. 2.3 Corpses 1401 and 1402 on the fifteenth street of Iberian town of Cerro de la Cruz. The head and torso of one of the skeletons were destroyed, a thousand years after his death, by the construction of a medieval wall. 2.4 One of many mutilated skeletons from the conquest of Valencia by Roman armies. 11.1 Croatian victims in Jasenovac Concentration Camp. 11.2 Roma victims in Jasenovac Concentration Camp.

viii

2 14 15

16 19 160 161

TABLE

11.1 Victims in Jasenovac Concentration Camp according to ethnicity, age and gender.

ix

159

ACKNOWL E D G EM ENT S

The editors would like to thank all the contributors for their chapters. In addition, we would like to thank the following for their support: Mark Levene, Dirk Moses, Dan Stone, Simone Gigliotti, Jennifer Sutton, Jens Meierhenrich, Chris Jones, Matt Willer, Richard Mills, Alistair Dickins, Mark Vincent, Dejan Djokić, Josip Glaurdić, Matthias Neumann, Chris Sutton, Richard Deswarte, Sanja Malbaša Thompson, Nicholas Vincent, Aurèlia Mañé-Estrada, Melanie Watling, Ollie Carlisle, Caroline Woolsgrove, Sam Foster, Jordan Claridge, Bojan Baskar, Mark Thompson, James Gow, Božidar Jezernik, Christine Hassenstab and Sabrina P. Ramet. Special thanks to Amy Welmers at Routledge who guided us through the project. Thanks also to Paul Brotherston, Eve Setch and Allison McKechnie. Most fundamentally, our families gave us enormous support and love. Thank you Mike, Wendy, Oliver, Molly, Christina, Jacob, Mum, Dad, David, David, Mary, Kirsten, Paul, Roz, Pete, Clare and Olivia. Thanks to all the ‘Horners’ as well, especially Frances Carey for their love.

x

CONTRI BUT O R S

Mike Bowker is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of East Anglia. He is the author of Russia After The Cold War (2000) (edited with Cameron Ross), Russian Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (1997), Superpower Detente: A Reappraisal (1988) (with Phil Williams) and Russia, America and the Islamic World (2007). Cathie Carmichael is Professor of History at the University of East Anglia and has been Head of School since 2012. She is the author and editor of several books including Slovenia and the Slovenes: A Small State in the New Europe (2000) (with James Gow), Language and Nationalism in Europe (2000) (co-edited with the late Stephen Barbour), Ethnic Cleansing in the Balkans: Nationalism and the Destruction of Tradition (2002) and Genocide before the Holocaust (2009). More recently she has written a history of Bosnia. She is an editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. Tomislav Dulić is Director of Research at the Hugo Valentin Centre at the University of Uppsala. He is the author of Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42 (2005) and numerous articles on the history of the Balkans. David Edwards is Senior Lecturer in History at University College Cork, a Director of the Irish Manuscripts Commission, and Series Editor of Studies in Early Modern Irish History (Manchester University Press). His publications include The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642: The rise and fall of Butler feudal power (2003), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (2007), and Campaign Journals of the Elizabethan Irish Wars (2014). Mark Felton has written over a dozen books on prisoners of war, Japanese war crimes and Nazi war criminals, including Japan’s Gestapo, which was named ‘Best Book of 2009’ by The Japan Times. His most recent book is China Station: The British Military in the Middle Kingdom, 1839–1997. After a decade spent working in Shanghai, he now lives in Colchester with his wife and son. Kate Ferguson is responsible for Political Engagement Strategy for the NGO Protection Approaches. Before founding Protection Approaches, she worked as a Policy Consultant and Political Advisor in mass atrocity prevention. Kate is completing her PhD at the University of East Anglia on devolved structures of identity-based violence. She teaches undergraduate classes in gender, sexual violence, and the international justice system. xi

CONTRIBUTORS

Simone Gigliotti is a Senior Lecturer in European History at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. She is currently involved in several collaborative projects (on Holocaust geographies, and Digital Historical Thinking – funded by the Ministry of Education in New Zealand) and individual ‘postwar’ projects that follow the journeys of ‘home-seekers’(camp survivors, refugees and displaced persons) from Europe to new homelands. She is an editor of the Journal of Genocide Research. Mark Hobbs teaches at the School of Humanities at the University of East Anglia. He completed his PhD at the University of Winchester in 2013 and his doctoral thesis examined Holocaust denial and the British far right. His main area of research is genocide studies and political violence, Holocaust denial and the continuity of Nazi ideology and thought after 1945. Paul Jackson is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Northampton. He is coeditor of Wiley-Blackwell’s journal Religion Compass: Modern Ideologies and Faith, and editor of Bloomsbury’s book series A Modern History of Politics and Violence. He has published widely on the history of fascism and the far right. His books include Great War Modernisms and the New Age Magazine (2012), and he is currently writing an ideological biography of Colin Jordan, one of postwar Britain’s pre-eminent neo-Nazi activists. Rebecca Jinks received her PhD in 2013 from Royal Holloway, University of London, entitled ‘Representing genocide: the Holocaust as paradigm?’. She has a number of comparative articles on representations of genocide in press. Another forthcoming article explores the rescue of Armenian women who had been ‘absorbed’ into Muslim homes during the genocide by humanitarian organisations and the League of Nations, and this will develop into her next project on humanitarian workers in the aftermath of the First World War. She teaches at Exeter University. René Lemarchand is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida. He has published extensively on Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). His most recent publications include The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa (2009) and an edited volume, Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial and Memory (2011). He served as Regional Advisor on Governance and Democracy with USAID from 1992 to 1998, first in Abidjan, then in Accra. He has been Visiting Lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley, Brown University, Smith College, Concordia University (Montreal), and the Universities of Bordeaux, Helsinki, Copenhagen and Antwerp. Benjamin Lieberman is the author of Remaking Identities: God, Nation, and Race in World History (2013), The Holocaust and Genocides in Europe (2013) and Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (2006). He is Professor of History at Fitchburg State University. Richard C. Maguire is Senior Lecturer in Public History and Associate Dean for Employability in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of East Anglia. He has published widely on the history of nuclear weapons.

xii

CONTRIBUTORS

Fernando Quesada-Sanz is Professor of Archaeology and Director of the Department of Prehistory and Archaeology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. His main research interests are the Iron Age Archaeology of Iberia and ancient warfare. He is the editor of the journal Gladius and his accompanying series of monographs Anejos de Gladius (CSIC, Spain). He directs the research group Polemos and has supervised many PhDs on military archaeology. He is currently digging two fortified Iberian Iron Age sites destroyed during the Roman conquest. Prof. Quesada has published extensively on the archaeology of weapons and warfare and is the author of a dozen books, among them El Armamento Ibérico (1997), Armas de Grecia y Roma (2010) and Ultima Ratio Regis (2009). Jennifer Reeve is a research student and tutor at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. Her research concerns the response of the British Empire to the Holocaust. She has taught a widely commended undergraduate course on the Holocaust. Volodymyr Semystyaha is a Professor of History at the Luhansk National University, Senior Editor of Bakhmuts’kyi shliakh and Director of the NGO ‘LOO Prosvita’ imeni Tarasa Shevchenko. He has published over 300 books and articles on Ukrainian and Soviet history including ‘New Documentary Information about Maksym Bernatsk’kyi, A Leader of the Ukrainian Underground in Eastern Ukraine during World War II’, in Harvard Ukrainian Studies in 1994 and ‘The Role and Place of Secret Collaborators in the Informational Activity of the GPU – NKVD in the 1920s and 1930s’ in Cahiers du Monde Russe in 2001. T.O. Smith is Associate Professor of History at Huntington University, USA, specialising in decolonisation and political violence in South and Southeast Asia. His publications include Britain and the origins of the Vietnam War: UK policy in Indo-China 1943–50 (2007), Churchill, America and Vietnam, 1941–45 (2011) and Vietnam and the unravelling of empire: General Gracey in Asia 1942–1951 (2014). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Igor Tatarinov is a Senior Lecturer in History in the Department of Law, Luhansk Institute, Interregional Academy of Personnel Management. He is the author of: ‘Povsednevnaia zhizn’ rabotnikov tiazheloi promyshlennosti Ukrainy v 1944–1956’, International Journal of Russian Studies, 2010 and ‘Politychni repressii u Troits’komu raioni Luhanskoï oblasti: istoryko-statystychnyi vymir’, Bakhmuts’kyi shliakh, 2011. He wrote his doctoral thesis on ‘Financial and living conditions of heavy industry workers in the USSR, 1944–1956’. Kate Temoney is a PhD candidate in the Department of Religion at Florida State University and a former Auzenne Fellow and Editorial Assistant for the Journal of Religious Ethics (Wiley-Blackwell). Her dissertation examines the capacity of religious belief and practice to potentiate genocidal violence, and additional research areas include Buddhist applied ethics, the problem of evil, human rights, and the ‘just war’ tradition. Her most recent publication is a chapter on human rights discourse and film in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained: The Continuation of Metacinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

xiii

CONTRIBUTORS

Uğur Ümit Üngör is Associate Professor of History at Utrecht University and at the Institute for War, Holocaust, and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam. His main area of interest is the historical sociology of mass political violence. His most recent publications include Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (Continuum, 2011) and The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford University Press, 2011). In 2013, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences awarded him the Young Scientist Award for History. Robby Van Eetvelde was affiliated with the Department of Contemporary History of the University of Ghent (Belgium), the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies (Austria) and the Department of Politics, History, and International Relations of Loughborough University (UK). He is currently a PhD candidate at the latter university. His research interests include the history of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and perpetrator studies. His dissertation topic concerns the activity of the German police forces in occupied Belgium during the Second World War. Nicolas Werth is Directeur de recherche at CNRS Lieu Région de Paris. He is the author of numerous books on Soviet history including La Vie quotidienne des paysans russes de la Révolution à la collectivisation (1917–1939) (1984), La Terreur et le désarroi. Staline et son système (2007) and L’Ivrogne et la marchande de fleurs: Autopsie d’un meurtre de masse 1937–1938 (2009).

xiv

1 INTRODU C T I O N Raphael Lemkin, historians and genocide Cathie Carmichael

On 9 December 1948, the United Nations ratified the Genocide Convention criminalizing ‘acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. The term ‘genocide’ had not been used at the 1946 Nuremberg Tribunal at which the crimes committed by some of the most important leaders of the German Third Reich had been punished. However, the UN Convention codified what had been developing international norms for some decades and responded to a desire by many of the combatants in the Second World War to inaugurate a new era of justice. At The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, rules were set out which prohibited attacks on undefended civilians and pillaging their properties. They also planned to protect the rights of prisoners of war, who could expect humane treatment under the terms agreed. In the 1920s the Geneva Protocol to the Conventions sought to ban the use of chemical and biological weapons. The League of Nations, which has often been seen as a forerunner to the United Nations, decided to create an international court in 1937 and in Lima in 1938 the 8th Conference of American States considered criminalizing persecution for racial and religious reasons. The adoption of the 1948 Convention essentially came down to the work of one man. In his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe Raphael (Rafał) Lemkin used his new term ‘genocide’ which he had coined by bringing together the Greek word for a single people (genos) with the Latin word for killing (-cide). Although genocide was recognized as a distinct crime in international law after the Second World War and after revelations about the annihilation of the Jewish and Roma communities of Europe during the Holocaust, the term clearly has its intellectual origins in the treatment of minorities in Imperial Russia and the Ottoman Empire several decades earlier. The lawyer who coined the term ‘genocide’, Raphael Lemkin, was born in Imperial Russia in 1900 and brought up in a close Jewish family at a time when the state was becoming an increasingly difficult place for Jews to live. There had been outbreaks of violence against Jews since the 1880s generally known as pogroms. Often these started out as drunken riots fuelled by antisemitic propaganda and incitement at church services. A devastating pogrom in Kishinev in 1903 took place at Easter. Many Jews had chosen to leave rather than face further violence and had emigrated to Germany, France, Britain or the United States. Lemkin went to school in Białystok in what is today Poland, where there was a terrible pogrom in 1906. He grew up in an atmosphere in which Jews felt increasingly menaced and it is clear that the situation of minority religious groups preoccupied him from an early age. His intelligent mother Bella discussed the Nobel prize winning novel Quo vadis? by the Polish author Henryk 1

C AT H I E C A R M I C H A E L

Figure 1.1 International lawyer Raphael Lemkin helped draft the Genocide Convention, which maps out prevention and punishment for the crime of genocide. Source: © Bettmann/CORBIS.

Sienkiewicz, which had first been published in 1895 and concerned the Roman persecution of Christians.1 In Kiev, the manager of a brick factory, Mendel Beilis, was arrested on 21 July 1911, after a man testified that a murdered boy, Andrei Iushchinskii, had been kidnapped by a ‘man with a black beard’. Although Lemkin was a just a child at the time he remembered that ‘the entire world trembled with interest and indignation. Our family discussed it every day. It was a test case for justice.’2 Many also remembered the trial of Alfred Dreyfus in France in the 1890s when a Jew had been wrongly accused of treason. This trial became a cause célèbre and was pivotal in a wider international discussion of the shape of the nation and who could and who could not be seen to ‘belong’.3 In Imperial Russia, nationalist groups spread rumours about Beilis and threatened to lynch him if he were ever released from jail in Kiev. The atmosphere became increasingly polarized with students and left-wing intellectuals protesting and Christian monarchists supporting the absurd accusations against him. Beilis, who was eventually acquitted, remained quiet for much of the trial, but protested his innocence. During the Beilis trial, Lemkin recalled that ‘(a)ll Jewish pupils were called by the collective name Beilis . . . The Jewish population faced the possibility of a pogrom . . . I saw 2

RAPHAEL LEMK IN, HISTORIANS AND GENOCIDE

clearly that the lives of millions of people depended on the vote of the jury . . . As the years went by I kept thinking of these problems.’4 Lemkin also turned his mind to the situation faced by the Christian Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, who had suffered from attacks similar to pogroms in the 1890s and in 1909. During the First World War, the Ittihad regime in Istanbul used the political crisis to murder and deport hundreds of thousands of Armenians. Lemkin commented that ‘in Turkey, 1.2 million people were put to death for no other reason than that they were Christians . . . Only a handful survived, hidden by the bodies of their comrades. The Turks later accused the unarmed Armenians of having started the shooting.’5 For Lemkin, the imperative was to understand the universal. But he did not merely wish to interpret the world but also to change it and to bring in a new legal framework for prevention. In so doing Lemkin definitively rejected the notion that, as Adolf Hitler put it, ‘natural instincts bid all living beings not merely conquer their enemies, but also destroy them. In former days it was the victor’s prerogative to destroy entire tribes, entire peoples.’6 By the early 1920s Lemkin had started to study law and maintained an active interest in the treatment of Armenians. On 15 March 1921, former Ottoman grand vizier Talaat Pasha (Mehmed Talaat) was assassinated on a Berlin street by an Armenian who had deliberately tracked him down. The young man, Soghomon Tehlirian, admitted in court that he wanted to avenge the slaughter of his family. Survivors of the Armenian Genocide and Tehlirian’s landlady spoke in court and evoked great sympathy from the German people. When the acquittal was announced to a packed courtroom, there were wild shouts of ‘Bravo!’ An hour after the trial, Tehlirian left the courtroom in a car covered with flowers.7 Lemkin was extremely perplexed by the Tehlirian case, noting that the law as it stood did not make a distinction between individual and mass murder (i.e. the destruction of an entire community). He had been shocked when Tehlirian had been released: ‘Had he acted as the self-appointed legal officer for the conscience of mankind? Can a man appoint himself to mete out justice? . . . I didn’t know all the answers, but I felt that a law against this sort of racial or religious murder must be adopted by the world.’8 Some years later, in 1926, Symon Petlura, who had been Hetman of the Ukrainian Directorate during the Civil War, was shot by Sholom Schwartzbard in Paris. Schwartzbard freely admitted that he had pulled the trigger. As in the Tehlirian case, survivors of the Ukrainian Civil War spoke in court. Schwartzbard was defended by Henry Torrès (who also helped to defend the Jewish assassin Herschel Grynszpan, whose actions were the excuse given for the Kristallnacht pogroms in Austria and Germany in November 1938). After the jury had deliberated for 24 minutes, Schwartzbard was acquitted to the wild approval of a packed out courtroom. At the time of the trial, Lemkin described the murder of Symon Petlura as a ‘beautiful crime’, stressing the fact that there was no international law for penalizing the destruction of national, ethnic or religious groups.9 Although genocide is essentially a legal concept, it clearly presents great challenges to historians. Acts ‘committed with intent to destroy a nation in whole or in part’ were committed well before the twentieth century and in many different parts of the world. But can we apply a twentieth-century legal term to the sixteenth or even nineteenth centuries? Does it make sense to apply a legal term which essentially demands a verdict to events that occured centuries ago? This book attempts to grapple with that problematic and each individual essay looks at the problem from a different perspective. 3

C AT H I E C A R M I C H A E L

Not all the authors come to a final conclusion about the historical applicability of the term ‘genocide’ in the case that they are examining, but instead use the term as a framework for thinking about particular historical events in a wider context. The book is divided into four main sections, each presenting fresh ideas about the interpretation of genocide. The first section on genocide in a historical context looks at several important case studies on Iron Age Europe by Fernando Quesada-Sanz, early modern Ireland by David Edwards, the response to the Holocaust in the British Empire by Jennifer Reeve, the German populations expelled from Eastern Europe in the mid-twentieth century by Benjamin Lieberman and the displacement of children in Europe and Australia by Simone Gigliotti. As a thinker, Lemkin was historically minded and did not believe the epoch in which he lived was unique in terms of the extent of cruelty. Nor did he believe in progress per se: ‘It required a long period of evolution in civilized society to mark the way from wars of extermination, which occurred in ancient times and in the Middle Ages, to the conception of wars as being essentially limited to activities against armies and states. In the present war, however, genocide is widely practiced by the German occupant.’10 The second section looks at the role of ideology in genocide, particularly ideologies of race, class and nation. Lemkin recognized that ideology was crucial and that genocide signified ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.11 Mark Felton examines Japanese ideologies in relation to war crimes committed during the Second World War, Tim Smith and Nicolas Werth both look at the genocidal intent of communist regimes of Cambodia and the Soviet Union respectively. René Lemarchand examines the competing extreme nationalisms of the Great Lakes region of Africa and their impact on interethnic relations. Tomislav Dulić looks at the fascist Ustaša regime in Croatia between 1941 and 1945. The third section largely concentrates on the interpretation of genocide which draws on recent research and highlights the increasing range of specialisms within genocide studies. In this section there is a chapter on heritage and remembering the past by Rebecca Jinks. Paul Jackson looks at contemporary fascism and Mark Hobbs at holocaust denial. In her chapter, Kate Temoney examines the role of religious ideas in extreme violence. Uğur Ümit Üngör analyses the destruction of property, culture and art that goes hand in hand with attacks on people. Chapters in the last section look at the relationship between war and genocide. Genocide is often committed during war and the chaos of war brings opportunities that are rarely given to leaders during peace time. Wartime digressions from behavioural norms were sometimes accepted with fatalism as if human beings always behaved differently in extremis. In the final months of the war in Berlin when the inhabitants of the city died from bombing or suicide, and many women were raped by the Red Army, some made a conscious decision to not to speak about what they had been through: ‘C’est la guerre. N’en parlons plus.’12 The intention to commit genocide may also be the reason to go to war in the first place and ideologies of annihilation are often crucial to the outcome. In this section there are chapters on the Chechen war by Mike Bowker and the war in Bosnia by Kate Ferguson. Robby Van Eetvelde examines the behaviour of police forces during the Holocaust. Uğur Ümit Üngör looks at the breakup of the Ottoman Empire and the destruction of ancient communities. The final chapter by Richard Maguire looks at importance of nuclear weapons to debates about genocide. 4

RAPHAEL LEMK IN, HISTORIANS AND GENOCIDE

Notes 1 Samantha Power, A ‘Problem from Hell’: America and the Age of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 20. 2 Donna-Lee Frieze, Totally Unofficial: The Autobiography of Raphael Lemkin (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2013), p. 19. 3 Cathie Carmichael, Genocide before the Holocaust (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2009). 4 Frieze, Totally Unofficial, pp. 18–19. 5 Ibid, p. 19. 6 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008), p. 81. 7 Jacques Derogy, Opération Némésis (Paris: Fayard, 1986). 8 Frieze, Totally Unofficial, p. 20. 9 Power, A Problem from Hell, p. 1. 10 Raphäel Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (New York: The Lawbook Exchange, 2008), p. 80. 11 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 79. 12 Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin: Tagebuch-Aufzeichnungen vom 20. April bis 22. Juni 1945 (Munich: btb Verlag, 2008), p. 202.

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Part 1 G E NO CI D E I N H IS T O R IC A L CO NTEX T S

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2 GENOCI DE AND M A S S M UR D ER I N SE COND IRON A G E EUR O P E Methodological issues and case studies in the Iberian Peninsula Fernando Quesada-Sanz

The concept of ‘genocide’ presents several definitional dilemmas in the contemporary world. There are literally dozens of cogent definitions of the concept, which are quite distant and distinct.1 These dilemmas increase almost exponentially when we start to apply them to the ancient world, to the extent that some of the more important recent syntheses practically omit the period.2 To begin with, it is often difficult to differentiate the legal concept of genocide from mass murder, although in the present era it is a very pertinent difference with regards to the law. It is also difficult to apply the very precise and often criticized definition of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide from 1948 to the ancient world.3 This defined genocide to be acts carried out (whether successfully or not) with the intent to destroy ‘in whole or in part, of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’. Other categories of violence, directed on the basis of class, gender, politics or age were not included.4 Despite much written or visual documentation or witness testimonies, it is not always easy to demonstrate the concept of ‘intent’ in genocide.5 Additionally, it is often difficult to distinguish the concept of ‘combatant’ from the ‘civilian’ or ‘noncombatant’, although this distinction remains critical both to legislation and ethical notions intended to limit the devastation and savagery of war. It is therefore likely that in late Prehistory and the Iron Age, in contexts far removed from the great classical cultures, war was proportionately even more deadly than in the modern era.6 There is some discussion of the actual demographic scale slaughter must reach for it to become ‘genocide’. In antiquity, as in the contemporary world, complete annihilation or genocide was more of an aim than a realistic possibility. More frequent were what we might define as ‘genocidal massacres’, which were more limited in extent than genocide and often conceived as ‘object lessons for other members of the group’,7 but a term that could be applied to the most remote Prehistory.8 Some authors maintain that actions such as mass enslavement9 or mass deportations10 that could have a devastating effect even though they did not involve the physical extermination of a population, should be considered genocidal. This definition might relate more to the concept of ‘ethnic cleansing’,11 which was perhaps more common in antiquity than today. Even the term ‘ethnocide’ which has been proposed for a cultural rather than physical destruction, is directly related to genocide.12 The most applicable term for the Iron Age would be a looser and intuitive, though legally imprecise, definition of genocide which would essentially be of an anthropological nature.13 9

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If all these issues are thorny in the contemporary world, it is clear that the methodological and conceptual dilemmas multiply when applied to antiquity. For this reason, most recent work on genocide in the ancient world avoids being too precisely bound by theory, and suggests intuitive parameters not based upon current legal terminology.14 It even questions the use of the term ‘genocide’, preferring the category of ‘genocidal massacres’ which itself was not specified in the 1948 Convention.15 In particular, modern legal and even ethical conceptions of ‘war crimes’, which are often associated with – and committed during – genocide, but remain distinct from it16 are difficult to apply to the classical world. This problem is amplified by a paucity of written sources.17 The term ‘atrocity’ would perhaps be more appropriate for many of the examples documented through archaeological sources in the Iron Age. The concept of ‘collateral damage’ is alien to the ancient world as such, but it could be argued that in many cases it could apply as long as mass death was not the desired outcome, but an almost predictable result of those actions deemed necessary to achieve political, religious or military goals.18 The Late – or Second – Iron Age in Europe and the Mediterranean is an archaeological and chronological concept that, in the case of Greece and Rome, overlaps with the concept of ‘classical culture’. Periclean Athens, (scenario of the terrible Peloponnesian War which saw some of the worst and most well documented massacres in antiquity), seems distinct from the proto-historic cultures of ‘La Tène I’ in Central Europe or the Iron Age in the east of the Iberian Peninsula. Yet these societies were strictly contemporary and remained fairly closely linked. In those contacts between them, some of the more obvious instances of what might be considered ‘genocide’ occurred. There is no doubt that the city-states of Classical Greece or Republican Rome carried out massacres and deportations on a sufficiently large-scale for the category of ‘genocidal massacre’, and in some cases, that of ‘genocide’ to be applied. Yet it would be much harder to attribute other modern notions associated with the concept to these cultures, especially the moral (social) and the ethical (personal). That is partly due to the absence at that time of formal international laws of war19 of military regulations, or indeed of ‘rules of engagement’. Similarly, many ‘laws’ of war among primitive peoples both in the ancient or modern eras developed in the context in which they lived. Concepts like ‘humanitarianism’ or ‘the rights of non-combatants’ are not really applicable.20 We must deduce much the same for the European Iron Age. This is mainly due to the fact that there was no ethical rejection of the very idea of violence and war in ancient times; although it might be an evil, it was considered inseparable from civilization and even necessary.21 Nor was there a moral rejection of its consequences such as mass slaughter and slavery, except by isolated minds ahead of their time. The summary of Polybius on the views of contemporary Greeks over the final destruction of Carthage, in a war that we judge iniquitous today, is very illustrative.22 On the contrary, the idea of total annihilation of the Trojans seemed reasonable and normal to the minds of most listeners of Homer.23 That does not mean that war in classical cultures was always wild and total. Several strongly ingrained cultural constraints in the social fabric, especially those associated with religious or sacred places often (but not always) served as regulators of violence. The capacity for wholesale destruction and slaughter was in itself limited by available technology, basically human and animal strength. In fact, ancient warfare, as modern, was usually limited, and the concept of annihilation was rarer than is generally accepted. On the other hand, war was not always highly ritualized and relatively benign as some modern theorists have maintained, offering inadequate ethnographical parallels.24 10

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Predictably war was often at its most brutal in conflicts between states with a high degree of urban development and ethnic groups perceived as ‘barbarian’ i.e. different.25 What the Helvetii did to the Gallic tribe of the Aedui in their southward migration in the year 58 BC (destruction of their cities, devastation of fields, enslavement or death of their inhabitants) perhaps falls short of genocide.26 But when Caesar intervened, the killing of 258,000 of the Helvetii (warriors, but also women and children) by his legions certainly goes beyond the concept of simple mass murder, even if up to 110,000 survivors of the tribes that tried to migrate south were finally allowed to return, utterly defeated and humbled, to their land of origin.27 Later, other polities such as the Eburones suffered a similar if no worse fate, and vanished from history28 although they could perhaps later reappear as the Tungri. Where conflicts between polities which shared the same tradition (linguistic, cultural, etc.) dragged for years or decades, such as in the case of the Peloponnesian War, war could reach new heights of cruelty, and very high rates of destruction. The chilling ‘Melian dialogue’29 contains a rational and cold narrative of the Athenian’s justification of their unrestrained exercise of the ‘might is right’ belief, and its terrible consequences for all the inhabitants of Melos. The text is still studied by political scientists and contemporary philosophers of history, and is consistently one of the examples cited with reference to genocide in antiquity30 or even more generally.31 And the fate of Melos is not an isolated case if one thinks of the earlier First Sacred War and the fate of Kirrha.32 But here our interest is not simply in the classical world, but in the perspective of ‘the other’ contemporary cultures of the Iron Age. These were proto-historic societies which in their final stages were familiar with writing, coined currency and organization close to that of a state (within the limited use of the concept of ‘state’ usually employed for that period), but did not have demographic resources available to Athens and its Delian League, or to Rome and its Italian allies. By contrast, these societies occupied spaces which were sparsely populated, especially in the interior of Central Europe or in the Iberian Peninsula, and developed political organizations which were less complex. We know from multiple layers of sources (Greek and Roman etnographical descriptions, but especially from very substantial archaeological information of all kinds) that the various peoples of these archaeologically defined cultures usually waged war with each other, with neighbouring ethnic groups, and ended up fighting for their survival against Rome. It is only during this last phase of the Iron Age, from the 3rd Century BC, that Greek and Latin sources begin to show real interest in Iberians, Celtiberians, Gauls, Germans and Britons, but archaeology proves beyond reasonable doubt that the phenomenon of organized war was much earlier in these societies. Its study often requires the methodology of the prehistorian rather than that of the classicist, but it can and should be illuminated by classical sources. Even if the relationship between ‘state’ and ‘genocide’ has been seen as a direct one33 the very definition of ‘state’ in antiquity is flexible. There is no doubt that, although Iron Age societies in Western Europe were not states in the sense that Athens, Sparta or Rome were, they were perfectly capable of mass-killing and of committing ethnic cleansing, ethnocide and genocide in proportion to their own geographical and demographic capabilities. There is no indication in the European Iron Age that large-scale killings were carried out on the precise grounds of religion or ‘race’ in the sense that these concepts have been understood in Europe since the nineteenth century. However there is no doubt that the great classical cultures completely destroyed other ‘cultures’ and ethnic groups. In some cases, these were cultures on the same cultural, economic and military level. The final, 11

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cynical destruction of Carthage in 146 BC is a good example,34 although it can hardly be accepted as the first documented case of genocide.35 In other cases, the ‘barbarians’ were ethnic groups that had much lower demographic and military capabilities, and whose capacity for long-term resistance was negligible. This finally led to their destruction as ethnic groups, either by physical extermination, forced mass deportation, or assimilation. There is evidence that similar phenomena occurred in the ‘non-classical’ Late Iron Age, although at a smaller scale. But we must remember that the impact of a massacre or geographical dispersion in the survival chances of an ethnic group does not really depend on the absolute number of murdered or enslaved individuals, but on the capacity for physical and cultural survival of the remaining members of the group, and this capacity can be applied to a relatively small absolute number of people.36 In the absence of literary sources, archaeology can hardly document ‘intent’ as it now exists as a basic concept in contemporary jurisprudence. Instead we can examine the results archaeologically: since the Early Bronze Age we have examples in which killing, enslavement and forced migration resulted in a real genocide, such as in the case of the so-called ‘A-Group’ of the Nubian Culture during the birth of the Pharaonic Egyptian state.37 For even earlier periods, it is difficult to prove conclusively that archaeological evidence of massacres are tantamount to the destruction of an ethnic group, however striking the remains are (Kiernan 2007: 1), although it has been proposed that there were cases of catastrophic levels of mortality in prehistoric and proto-historic times.38 In this context, several recent or ongoing archaeological projects in the context of the Late Iron Age Gaul or Iberia demonstrate the potential of archaeology for the study of generalized violence in the form of widespread massacres or even genocide, but only with the concurrence of literary sources that can be clearly associated with the event. Growing evidence from the proto-historic era39 shows increasing proof of the highly destructive nature of war in period, compared to our earlier more benign visions of pre-state warfare. Anthony Snodgrass has warned about the danger of the ‘positivist fallacy’, based on the tendency to consider important what is observable (‘positive’), i.e. the temptation to view our archaeological data as reflecting particularly relevant events of the past, especially those well documented by literary sources.40 Certainly, as David Clarke indicated long ago archaeological data are not ‘history’ in themselves.41 Snodgrass criticizes attempts to associate certain traces of violence, destruction and death with very specific historical events, and probably rightly so, given the complexity of the events and the inevitably limited nature of archaeological research. But Snodgrass also omits to point out that in many cases a very accurate identification is in fact attainable, even to a precise year, thanks to inscriptions on weapons (e.g. the siege of Olynthus by Philip of Macedon in 348 BC), or to many elements combined, as in the case of the Roman sieges of Numantia (133 BC), Alesia (52 BC) or Masada (73 AD). Of these sieges, the first example – the destruction of the Arevaci – could be considered genocide and this can be shown by a combination of archaeological and literary sources which indicate the physical annihilation of most of the inhabitants of Numantia, and the deportation and enslavement of the survivors, followed by repopulation of the region with more submissive indigenous people.42

The Iberian Peninsula The ‘archaeology of genocide’ that Jones demands does not yet exist,43 but many scholars are taking steps in that direction. The signs of progress, however, are promising, 12

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in theory and in practice. Greek or Latin literary sources occasionally cast light on aspects of the peninsular Iron Age societies, and illuminate a situation which suggests the existence of the full range of violence that we have already described, from massacre to genocide through ethnic cleansing and atrocities. The existence of serfs and slaves in the Iberian Iron Age is well documented,44 either individually or in complete groups as a result of military defeat, including the reduction to a state of servitude or dependence of compete oppida. This process seems to have grown exponentially from the end of third century, first with the Carthaginian and later with Roman presence, coming close to current categories of ethnic cleansing and genocide.45 The cold policy of intimidation and terror developed by Rome, well documented by classical sources, certainly contributed to this.46 Francisco Gracia recently tested this hypothesis on Iron Age Iberia, based primarily on sources.47 To this can now be added the growing mass of archaeological data, much more direct and therefore often more expressive, more horrific and more personal. Modern archaeological excavations cover small areas of land, often tens or at most a few hundred square meters per field season, where a century ago the excavation areas were measured in thousands of square meters. That scale of fieldwork allowed an overview of whole neighbourhoods of cities, though at the price of a much lower detail than at present. In both cases, but especially in recent excavations, the archaeological evidence of intentional destruction and accompanying massacres (that may or may not correspond to a genocide-level action) usually amounts to a small statistical sample, and further extrapolation is often problematic. In many cases this positive evidence cannot be directly related to literary sources, and therefore its importance in historical terms is somewhat speculative. The notion that mutilated human remains might prove violence but not necessarily war does not arise in the Iron Age case-studies we present here.48 Some examples are known in Celtic Europe, such as the large-scale massacre recently discovered at the Ham Hill Hillfort (Somerset), associated with the Roman conquest. Here we will focus on other case studies taken from recent archaeological research in the Iberian Peninsula. In the examples given here we can trace at least seven, and perhaps the nine relevant factors in ancient massacres summarized by Bishop and Knüsel: ‘victims have little capacity to resist; perpetrators have superior/overwhelming force; a history of mutual hostility; a call to rally immediately prior to the massacre; surprise attack; a loss of control by the perpetrators; ethnic or ideological differences; a high level of military activity; following extremely dangerous moments such as an assault on fortified positions’.49 A methodological problem is raised by the results of the excavations in the town of the Late Iron Age La Hoya (Alava) (Fig. 1).50 In a general layer of destruction of the town (dated to a unspecified moment in the Celtiberian phase of the town, perhaps during the third century BC) many skeletons have been found, some of them not only beheaded, but with their heads removed from the body. Others show limb amputations and perimortem wounds (Figures 1 and 2a-b). Originally these decapitations were seen as examples of the well known Celtic tête coupée rite.51 However, the archaeological context of widespread destruction, the abandonment of valuables under the ruins of houses, the forced position of the skeletons – often lying on the pavement of the streets–, and the multiple wounds – beheading is just one of them –, rather indicate that the attackers massacred the inhabitants, and also any domestic animals they happened to find in the streets, whose remains also were left in situ. However, the excavated area is a small fraction of the total of the oppidum (6230 m2 excavated, 15.5% of the total area), and so far it is impossible to gauge the volume 13

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Caring Caring

Caring Caring Caring

Caring

Caring Caring

Caring Caring Figure 2.1 The main Iberian Iron Age sites mentioned in this chapter.

of deaths in relation to the survivors, or even the fate of these survivors. Nor is it possible to know whether the case of La Hoya can be extrapolated to a large segment of the ethnicity of the Berones beyond the purely local impact. It does not help that the excavations have not been published in detail, but it seems that the site survived the massacre, although languishing. A different scenario is provided by the abundant mutilated human remains recently excavated in cities whose destruction, partial or complete, can be confidently associated with the process of Roman conquest (second century BC), or with the Civil Wars of the Roman Republic from Sertorius to Caesar during the first half of the first century BC (both moments are ‘Late Iberian’ in the Iron Age archaeological terminology). In these cases the archaeological layers can be dated very accurately, and it is often feasible to associate these destructions and massacres with relevant events narrated in Latin literary sources. A particularly significant case is that of the destruction of the Iberian town of Cerro de la Cruz (Córdoba) (Fig. 1). Our recent excavations covering an area of about 1,100 m2, with a large central excavated area and some smaller trial trenches, sampled much of the total surface of the town, estimated to total about 4 hectares.52 In all these sectors we have documented an identical pattern: large-scale destruction by fire, and the resulting collapse of large two-storey buildings. Under the rubble we find warehouses filled with amphoras, looms, rotary mills, quern-stones with cereal grain already prepared for grinding, all types of tools and farm instruments, even wagon wheels. In summary, the town was torched by surprise in its heyday. The fire was definitely deliberate: it lasted a long time, and in many cases the rammed earth or mud brick walls were almost baked by the intense heat; once the fire extinguished by itself, 14

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Figure 2.2 Corpses mutilated at La Hoya (Alava). The head (bottom right) corresponds to the skeleton on the left and was found 11 meters away, with marks of amputation in the cervical vertebrae (Plains after 2005 and 2007–8). Source: © Fernando Quesada-Sanz.

no one removed the ruins to rescue valuables, tools or any items of household furniture. In fact, the oppidum – fortified town – was abandoned and the site remained so for almost one thousand years, until the Middle Ages. But the most revealing and gruesome finding was that of at least seven human skeletons, more or less incomplete, slumped over a space of only twenty meters along one of the main streets of the town.53 Two of these skeletons, both adult males (nos.1401 and 1402), show terrible perimortem mutilations in the extremities and pelvis, including the almost total amputation of legs, and also burns in the phalanges of the fingers not consistent with the massive fires. As these two bodies were found lying on the pavement of the main street, where it opens into a square, it could be evidence of torture prior to murder. Belt buckles, brooches and other items of clothing have not appeared alongside the skeletons, so I would suggest that they could have been naked at the time they were hacked to death by the sword, and their bodies were left locked together in terrible agony (Figures 3 and 4). A few meters to the southwest along the street, under the debris of the collapsed buildings, we found the more incomplete remains of another individual, perhaps a woman. Finally, and among the rubble of a building, the remains of three of four individuals were found, skulls and bones crushed by the fallen walls and partially burnt by the fires. One of them was an adult male and other a young woman. These people probably fled or hid upstairs in a place with no escape, and were burned to death or were crushed by the collapsing structure. 15

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Figure 2.3 Corpses 1401 and 1402 on the fifteenth street of Iberian town of Cerro de la Cruz. The head and torso of one of the skeletons were destroyed, a thousand years after his death, by the construction of a medieval wall. Details of amputations (after Quesada). Source: © Fernando Quesada-Sanz.

It is important to emphasize that, despite the systematic destruction and killing, there is no evidence of combat. Except for a single Roman arrowhead, there are no weapons (like sling bullets or javelins) in the streets, and the types of visible injuries on both nearly complete skeletons are particular to the slaughter of unarmed prisoners, and not battle wounds. The position of the three bodies found on the street shows that they were abandoned on the ground, and did not receive any kind of funerary ritual. The bodies were not collected to be cremated and buried according to the universal Iberian funerary ritual (and the patterns of mortuary practice are important when analyzing genocide as Debra Komar has indicated). This is again evidence of an extremely violent action consistent with large-scale massacre. The destruction is well dated by coins and ceramic typology (including imported vessels) to circa 150–130 BC. This is Late Iberian period (according to local chronology) 16

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or Roman Republican from a Roman perspective. By this time, the Roman administration had settled in the fertile and open valley of the Baetis river (Guadalquivir), but still did not fully control the highlands of the Provincia Baetica, using pacts with local aristocracies to ensure order. Additionally, unconquered Celtiberia to the north was engaged in full scale war with Rome, while in Lusitania to the northwest the war leader Viriathus not only successfully resisted Roman pressure, but led his army into deep and prolonged raids into the heart of Baetica/Andalusia, even reaching the general area of Cerro de la Cruz, whose Iberian name is unknown although it is possible that it was Eiskadia. All this is well documented by literary sources, particularly Appian. If we stop our analysis here, and according to the ‘positivist fallacy’ explained above, we have no way of knowing if the destruction and massacre in Cerro de la Cruz is significant or relevant in the global historical context of the Roman conquest of Hispania. But the combination of modern, large scale archaeological excavation in a well-dated context with the study of some rather precise literary sources, helps us to broaden the perspective, allows escaping the fallacy. Indeed, in a context of c. 150/130 BC, and given overall Roman control of the Province, it is inconceivable that destruction on this scale could happen due to low-intensity internecine warfare between neighbouring towns. Only Viriathus’ Lusitanian forces, which had raided the area on more than one occasion at that time, could have caused destruction on this scale. We know that the Lusitanian leader not only fought Rome, but attacked with equal ferocity any locals that did not side with him. This was the case of two local polities, the Belli and the Titi, five thousand of whose men were ruthlessly slaughtered when they tried to oppose Viriathus’ plundering raids.54 But if – in a theoretical scenario – the people from Cerro de la Cruz, supposedly allies of Rome, had been massacred by the Lusitanians in one of these raids, it is doubtful that the destruction would have been so complete, and that the mutilated bodies would had been left desecrated without anyone carrying out the appropriate funeral rites once the raiders withdrew. Above all, Rome would have ensured that their faithful if unlucky local allies would have been properly rewarded and their town rebuilt. Nothing like this happened. In fact, available evidence leads us to believe that our oppidum probably helped Viriathus in some way, and that it was Rome who destroyed it. It is Appian again, probably using the always reliable Polybius as his own source, who provides the date, author and pretext. The struggle of Viriathus with the consul Fabius Maximus Aemilianus in 145/144 BC, seems to have centred around Urso/Osuna and Corduba/Córdoba. By 142 BC, however, the war scenario seems to have also moved eastward towards central Andalusia and the highlands of the Subbetic ranges. According to Appian in 142 Viriathus expelled the Roman garrison from Itucci (Ἰτύκκῃ), settled there for a while, and ravaged the land of the Bastetanos (Βαστιτανῶν).55 There is, however, a problem with the location of Itucci. Most researchers identify it by phonetic similarity and geographical consistency with Tucci (Martos, Jaén), the future Colonia Gemella Avgvsta (e.g. TIR 2001: 323 sv Tvcci), although some prefer to identify it with Ituci, even closer phonetically and almost certainly located in the great oppidum at Torreparedones (Baena, Córdoba), the future Caesarian Colonia Virtus Iulia.56 We do not want to delve into a complex debate,57 but if we support the hypothesis that military operations of the years 142–140 were carried not only in Western but also in Central Andalusia,58 then it is not really important whether Appians’ Ituci, where Viriathus established his winter quarters in 143/42, was today’s Martos or Torreparedones,59 because both places are in the same general area, and close to Cerro de la Cruz, about two days’ march from it to the 17

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north and northwest respectively. The really important point is that large-scale military operations were carried out in the general area by the new proconsul for 141, Quintus Fabius Maximus Servilianus, and under this pressure Viriathus had to abandon Ittuci. It is therefore very likely that the region where Cerro de la Cruz is located, in the eastern confines of Iberian Bastetania, was in the general area of military operations carried out by Viriathus and Servilianus between 142/141 BC. It is just conceivable but not probable that Cerro de la Cruz was destroyed during the course of these fluid campaigns, but there is yet another and more plausible possibility. Appian tells us that, after leaving his base at Itucci, Viriathus returned to Lusitania in 141 BC; Servilianus then carried out activity that included large-scale punishment and killing in a region that had welcomed Viriathus: ‘Servilianus . . . took the towns of Escadia, Gemella, and Obolcola, which had been garrisoned by Viriathus. Others he plundered, and still others he spared. Having captured about 10,000 prisoners, he beheaded 500 of them and sold the rest as slaves.’ 60 Such activity, which certainly goes beyond the occasional massacre to enter the scale of genocide at the regional level, is supported by Valerius Maximus61 and by Orosius62 although these are less reliable sources. We should remember that an exemplary warning at this scale, with the sacking of cities, massive beheadings and the sale of ten thousand people as slaves, amounts to the depopulation of farms, villages and of whole oppida, whose populations at this time rarely exceeded the two to three thousand people at most.63 The chronological frame for these actions fits perfectly with the dates archaeology provides us, and the systematic and brutal devastation suffered by the site at Cerro de la Cruz closely reflects events as described by Appian. Unfortunately, having only a single good literary source on this issue makes it impossible to be certain, but the overall picture we can draw provides a good fit between all types of information. During the Iron Age the basic political and ‘national’ unit in Iberia was the oppidum together with its surrounding territory, as indeed happened all over the Mediterranean.64 Consequently, the annihilation of an entire city and the killing, deportation or enslavement of its inhabitants fits well in the modern legal concept of ‘genocide’, as affecting a ‘national or ethnic group’. In the mists of European Iron Age many ethnic groups must have been destroyed in this way; the destiny of some of them we can trace through literary sources, as in the case of the unfortunate Melians cited above; only occasionally archaeology offers us a glimpse of similar dramas in barbarian Europe. When ancient literary sources tell us of olive groves completely scorched or felled, of completely devastated fields and destroyed cities, of the annihilation of entire populations, we can be tempted to dismiss them as literary exaggeration. It is certainly true, as V.D. Hanson showed many years ago, that it is very difficult with ancient technologies to completely and permanently devastate cultivated fields and groves.65 But a Roman army in the field could also be a truly devastating force. When Tacitus narrates the consequences of the Roman disaster at Teutoburg, and asserts that Germanicus’ retaliatory campaign in AD 14 was arranged so that the army systematically laid waste a strip of land fifty Roman miles wide along its axis of advance, killing without regard for age or sex, we can be sure that it was no exaggeration; it was in fact ‘standard operating procedure’, and archaeology is increasingly corroborating it. Our last case study from Hispania, an archaeological dig in which there is no doubt about the specific historical event being discovered, is also quite explicit in this regard.66 The repeated mutilations and severe injuries sustained by the people from the oppidum at Cerro de la Cruz show that the repeated descriptions in ancient literary sources to the terrible wounds caused by edged weapons such as the Roman gladius are not 18

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Figure 2.4 One of many mutilated skeletons from the conquest of Valencia by Roman armies (after Escrivá et al. 2010). Source: © Fernando Quesada-Sanz.

exaggerated at all.67 (But the skeletal evidence from Cerro de la Cruz, gruesome as it is, pales beside the cruelty and savagery documented in the archaeological site of La Almoina in Valencia (ancient Hispano-Roman Valentia, eastern Spain). After the capture of the city by the victorious Pompeian army in 75 BC during the Sertorian Wars, the victor indulged in an orgy of destruction of the captured city which had just been taken.68 In a quite small excavated area very close to the Forum of the hispano-roman city, just in front of some shops (tabernae) and the public baths, a substantial number of prisoners, unarmed and handcuffed, were tortured and hacked to death before the place was put to the torch. The scene revealed by archaeologists (Figure 2.4) is staggering: on the pavement, the mutilated skeletons of at least fourteen prisoners appear as a sobering memento of what war is really about. The victors and torturers tied one of the prisoners with a rope around his neck, placed him on his hands and knees, and impaled him thrusting a pilum, a type of slender spear with a very long iron shaft, all the way from his anus to his neck. The long iron point still remained embedded in the skeleton after two thousand years. Other men had all four limbs hacked off while they were still alive. As one of them was a very robust man, and sword cuts were not enough to completely chop off the strong muscles of the thigh and the femur, his limbs were twisted and pulled apart by hand. The conquerors beheaded another man and placed the severed head in between the victim’s legs.69 The cases we have described are not the only known cases in Hispania. For example, recent excavations in Labitolosa (Lezuza, Albacete) show strong evidence of 19

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deliberate destruction, including the remains of children left dead, head crushed, on the streets.70 There is always a darker side to conquest and subsequent assimilation, particularly during the early stages of the process. This was well described by the Roman writer Tacitus: But there are no tribes beyond us, nothing indeed but waves and rocks, and the yet more terrible Romans, from whose oppression escape is vainly sought by obedience and submission. Robbers of the world, having by their universal plunder exhausted the land, they rifle the deep. If the enemy be rich, they are rapacious; if he be poor, they lust for dominion; neither the east nor the west has been able to satisfy them. Alone among men, they covet with equal eagerness poverty and riches. To robbery, slaughter, plunder, they give the lying name of empire; they make a desert and call it peace.71 The Romans of old certainly could, like many peoples before and since, create a desert and call it ‘peace’. And when doubt is sometimes cast on the reliability of ancient sources describing gruesome massacres72 archaeology certainly proves that in many cases the classical writers did not exaggerate at all.

Notes 1 Leo Kuper, Genocide: its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 40; Mark Levene, The Meaning of Genocide (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005); Adam Jones, Genocide. A Comprehensive Introduction (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 16–20. 2 Jones, Genocide, pp. 4–6. 3 Levene, Meaning, p. 35. 4 Jones, Genocide, p. 13 ff. 5 Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil. A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Newhaven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 17; Debra Komar, ‘Patterns of mortuary practice associated with genocide. Implications for archaeological research’, Current Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2008, pp. 123–33; Jones, Genocide, p. 37. 6 Lawrence H. Keeley, War Before Civilization (Oxford University Press, 1996); Neil A. Bishop and Christopher Knüsel, ‘A palaeodemographic investigation of warfare in prehistory’, in Mike Pearson and Nick Thorpe (eds), Warfare, Violence and Slavery in Prehistory (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2005), pp. 201–216; Gianpaolo Urso (ed.) (2006), Terror et pavor. Violenza, intimidazione, clandestinità nel mondo antico (Atti Convegno Friuli, 2005); Luciano Pérez Vilatela, Lusitania. Historia y Etnología (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2000). 7 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 13. 8 Nick Thorpe, ‘The ancient origins of warfare and violence’, in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, p. 5. 9 Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge, The Cambridge History of Slavery. Volume I: The Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge University Press, 2003); Timothy Taylor, ‘Ambushed by a grotesque: archaeology, slavery and the third paradigm’, in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, pp. 225–233. 10 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, p. 10 ff. 11 Benjamin Lieberman, ‘“Ethnic cleansing” versus Genocide?’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 47. 12 Levene, Meaning, p. 49; Jones, Genocide, p. 26. 13 Komar, ‘Patterns’, p. 125. 14 Hans van Wees, ‘Genocide in the ancient world’, in Bloxham and Moses (eds), Oxford Handbook, p. 247. 15 Kiernan, Blood and Soil, pp. 3 ff; 43 ff. 16 Adam Jones, ‘Introduction: history and complicity’, in Adam Jones (ed.), Genocide, War Crimes and the West (London: Zed Books, 2004), p. 21 ff; Levene, Meaning, p. 51 ff; Peter Stoett, ‘Shades of complicity: towards a typology of transnational crimes against humanity’, in Jones (ed.), Genocide, War Crimes, pp. 31–55.

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17 Sean McGlynn, ‘War crimes’, in Gordon Martel (ed.), The Encyclopedia of War (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 18 For a discussion of the euphemistic use of the term, see Stephen J. Rockel, ‘Collateral damage. A comparative history’, in Stephen J. Rockel and Rick Halpern (eds), Inventing Collateral Damage. Civilian Casualties, War and Empire (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2009) pp. 1–93; for examples of the Roman world, see Toni Ñaco Del Hoyo et al., ‘The impact of Roman intervention in Greece and Asia Minor upon civilians (88–63 bc)’, in Borja Antela- Bernárdez and Toni Ñaco Del Hoyo (eds), Transforming Historical Landscapes in Ancient Empires (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 2009), pp. 33–51. 19 Adriaan Lanni, ‘The laws of war in ancient Greece’, Law and History Review, Vol. 26, No. 3, 2006, pp. 469–89; Pascal Payen, Les revers de la Guerre en Grèce Ancienne (Paris: Belin Payen, 2012), p. 92 ff. 20 Richard Shelly Hartigan, Civilian Victims in War (London: Transaction, 2010), p. 15 ff; Payen, P. (2012) Les revers, p. 132 ff; Paul Bohannan (ed.), Law and Warfare. Studies in the Anthropology of Conflict (American Sourcebooks in Anthropology, 1, Austin, Texas, 1967). 21 Simon T. James, ‘Facing the sword. Confronting the realities of martial violence and other mayhem, present and past’, in Sarah Ralph (ed.), The Archaeology of Violence: Interdisciplinary Approaches (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2013), p. 103. 22 Polybius, The Histories (trans. W.R. Paton) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1922–7), 36.9. 23 Homer, Iliad (trans. W.F. Wyatt) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1924), 6.55–60. 24 See for example Keeley, War Before Civilization (1996). 25 Sean McGlynn, ‘War crimes’, in Gordon Martel (ed.), The Encyclopedia of War (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). 26 Caesar, The Gallic War (trans. H. J. Edwards) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 1.11. 27 The Helvetti kept a written census, see Caesar, Gallic War, 1, 29. 28 Ibid, pp. 6, 34, 8–9. 29 Thucydides, History of the Peloponesian War (trans. C.F. Smith) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1919), pp. 84–116. 30 van Wees, ‘Genocide in the ancient world’, in Bloxham and Moses (eds), Oxford Handbook , p. 253; Lanni 2008. 31 Bosworth, ‘The humanitarian aspect of the Melian dialogue’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 113, 1993, pp. 30–44; Jones (ed.), Genocide, War Crimes, p. 8; Jones, Genocide, p. 5. 32 Pausanias, Periegesis: Description of Greece (trans. W.H.S. Jones) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 585 BC, 10.37. 33 See for example, Anton Weiss-Wendt ‘The state and genocide’, in Bloxham and Moses (eds), Oxford Handbook, pp. 81–101; Levene, Meaning, p. 101 ff; Jones, Genocide, p. 64 ff. 34 Appian, Roman History. Iberia. Africa (trans. H. White) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1912), pp. 74–93. 35 Jones, Genocide, p. 5. 36 Bishop and Knüsel, ‘Palaeodemographic’, in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, p. 201. 37 Stuart Tyson Smith, ‘A model for Egyptian imperialism in Nubia’, Göttinger Miszellen, 122, 1991, pp. 77–101. 38 Bishop and Knüsel, ‘Palaeodemographic,’ in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, p. 212. 39 See Mark Pearson, ‘Warfare, violence and slavery in later prehistory: an introduction’, in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, pp. 19–34; John Carman and Patricia Carman,‘War in Prehistoric society: modern views of ancient violence’, in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, Violence, pp. 217–224; Helle Vandkilde, ‘Archaeology and war: presentations of warriors and peasants in archaeological interpretations’, in Ton Otto, Henrik Thrane and Helle Vandkilde (eds), Warfare and society. Archaeological and Social Anthropological Perspectives (Århus University Press, 2006), pp. 57–73. 40 Anthony Snodgrass, An Archaeology of Greece. The Present State and Future Scope of a Discipline (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 41 David L. Clarke, Analytical Archaeology (London: Methuen, 1968), p. 7 ff. 42 Appian, Iber, pp. 97–98. 43 Jones, Genocide, p. 3. 44 Arturo Oliver Foix, ‘Siervos, esclavos y marginados en la sociedad ibérica’, Boletín de la Sociedad Castellonense de Cultura 81, 1–2, 2005, pp. 137–159.

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45 Francisco Marco Simón,‘Esclavitud y servidumbre en la conquista de Hispania, 237–83 a.C.’, Estudios del seminario de Prehistoria, Arqueologia e Historia Antigua de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras 3, 1977, pp. 87–103. 46 Francisco Marco Simón, Francisco Pina Polo and José Remesal Rodríguez (eds), Vae Victis! Perdedores en el mundo antiguo (Barcelona: Eds. Universitat, 2012). 47 Francisco Gracia Alonso,‘¡Ay de los vencidos! Las consecuencias de la guerra protohistórica en la Península Ibérica’, Cypsela, 16, 2006, pp. 65–86. 48 Bishop and Knüsel, ‘Palaeodemographic’, in Pearson and Thorpe (eds), Warfare, p. 201. 49 Ibid, pp. 211–212. 50 Armando Llanos Ortiz de Landaluze, Mil años de vida en el poblado Berón de La Hoya (Laguardia, Alava) (Vitoria: Diputación, 2005). 51 Armando Llanos Ortiz de Landaluze, ‘El rito de las cabezas cortadas en el poblado de La Hoya (Laguardia, Alava)’, Homenaje a I. Barandiarán. Veleia, 24–25, 2007–2008, pp. 1273–1281. 52 Ignacio Muñiz Jaén and Fernando Quesada Sanz (eds), Un drama en tres actos. Dos milenios de ocupación humana en el Cerro de la Cruz (Almedinilla, Córdoba). Oikos 2 (Córdoba, 2010). 53 cf. Fernando Quesada Sanz, Ignacio Muñiz Jaén and Inmaculada López Flores ‘La guerre et ses traces: destruction et massacre dans le village ibérique du Cerro de la Cruz (Córdoba) et leur contexte historique au iie s. a.C.’, in François Cadiou et Milagros Navarro Caballero (eds), La guerre et ses traces. Conflits et societés en Hispanie à l’époque de la conquête romaine (IIIeIer av. J.-C.) (Bordeaux: Ausonius, 2014), pp. 25–53. 54 See Appian, Iber, p. 65. 55 Ibid, pp. 65–66. 56 See José Antonio Morena López, ‘Ituci Virtus Iulia. Colonia romana en el corazón de la campiña cordobesa’, Itvci 1, 2011, pp. 12–21. 57 Quesada, Muñiz and López, ‘La guerre’, in Cadiou and Navarro Caballero (eds), La guerre, pp. 25–53. 58 Mauricio Pastor Muñoz, Viriato (Madrid: La Esfera de los libros, 2004). 59 Appian, Iber, pp. 66–7. 60 Ibid, p. 68. 61 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings (trans. D.R. Shakleton Bailey) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 2, 7, 11. 62 Orosius Historiae Adversus Paganos (trans. E. Sánchez) (Madrid: Gredos, 1982) 5, 4, 12. 63 Martín Almagro Gorbea, ‘Aproximaciones a la demografía de la Celtiberia’, in Luis Berrocal Rangel and Philippe Gardes (eds), Entre Celtas e Iberos (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2001), pp. 45–60; Joan Sanmartí and Carmen Belarte, ‘Urbanización y desarrollo de estructuras estatales en la costa de Cataluña (siglos VII-III a.C.)’, in Berrocal and Gardes (eds), Entre Celtas, pp. 161–174; Tabvla Imperii Romani. J-30: Valencia (Madrid, 2001 CSIC for demographic orders of magnitude in Iron Age oppida). 64 van Wees, ‘Genocide’, in Bloxham and Moses (eds), Oxford Handbook , p. 243. 65 Victor Davis Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece (Berkeley-Los AngelesLondon, 1983). 66 Tacitus, Annals (trans. J. Jackson) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), 1, 51 67 Livy, History of Rome (trans. B.O. Foster) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1919), 31.34. 68 Plutarch Lives: Pompey (trans. B. Perrin) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1917), 18.5; Sallust, Fragments of the Histories (trans. J.T. Ramsey) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015), 2.98. 69 Alberto Ribera ‘La primera evidencia arqueológica de la destrucción de Valentia por Pompeyo’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 8, 1995, pp. 19–40; Isabel Escrivà, Alberto Ribera and José Vioque, Guía del centro arqueológico de l’Almoina. Quaderns de difusió arqueològica 6, 2010, Valencia. 70 Héctor Uroz Rodríguez, Prácticas rituales, iconografía vascular y cultura material en Libisosa (Lezuza, Albacete) (Alicante: Universidad, 2012), p 441 ff. 71 Tacitus, Agricola. Germania. Dialogue on Oratory (trans. M. Hutton) (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1914), p. 30. 72 Jones, Genocide, p. 4.

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3 TU DOR I R ELA ND Anglicisation, mass killing and security David Edwards

To at least some of the crown’s officers who observed it, the Tudor conquest of Ireland could evoke disturbing memories. In 1558, railing against the ravages recently inflicted by both government and rebel forces on the native civilian population, the archbishop of Armagh, a leading royal councillor, described how he had ridden 30 miles through parts of the Ulster/Leinster borderlands without seeing or hearing a sign of life. Houses were burned out, villages uninhabited, all the cornfields destroyed. Nowhere were there any people or cattle, just an eerie silence; famine reigned.1 A generation later the poet, planter, and former Vice-regal Secretary Edmund Spenser recalled the dire effects of military campaigning in large parts of Munster during the Desmond war (1579–83). ‘In short space’, he wrote, ‘there were none [people or animals] almost left, and a most populous and plentiful country suddenly left void’.2 The climax of the Tudor conquest produced similar testimonies of famine and desolation. Having accompanied his master Viceroy Mountjoy on expeditions through all four provinces after 1600, Fynes Moryson later recorded: ‘No spectacle was more frequent in the ditches of towns, and in the wasted countries, than to see multitudes of these poor people dead, their mouths all coloured green by eating nettles [and] docks.’3 The demographic impact of the conquest was certainly terrible. Though historians lack the sources necessary for a precise calculation of the Irish population before or after the Tudor wars, it is generally agreed that it was significantly reduced by all the fighting. The conflict lasted nearly 60 years, beginning in the final months of the reign of Henry VIII, and continued until the death of his daughter, Elizabeth I. Though most of the campaigns were small and localised, they were many and persistent, so much so that between 1546 and 1603 there was not a year when government forces were not engaged in operations in some part of the country. Moreover, the major wars, against Shane O’Neill (1557–62, 1563–7), the fitzMaurice/Burke/Butler confederacy (1569–73), the earl of Desmond (1579–83), and the earl of Tyrone (1594–1603) were each bigger than the last, affecting wider and wider areas of the country.4 Extrapolating from available figures for the Desmond war it has been estimated that the Tudor conquest may have caused as many as 100,000 casualties.5 Given that the population of Ireland circa 1540 lay somewhere between 0.75 and 1.0 million, the conquest must rank as one of the most destructive conflicts anywhere in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe.6 But it was not simply the scale of Irish mortality that sometimes troubled the memories of Tudor-era crown servitors and commentators. It was also the knowledge that royal forces inflicted most of the deaths. Government documents of the period are 23

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quite explicit in recording how the crown’s officers and troops were expected to advance royal power and crush native opposition by waging war on the general population as well as on the rebel forces of outlying districts. While the majority of servitors passed little or no comment on the methods they had used to achieve victory, others were not quite so reticent. Despite believing unquestioningly in the legitimacy of government expansion and the quashing of native rebellion, some field officers could be genuinely disturbed by the awful effect of the methods they had been compelled to deploy.7 As Viceroy Mountjoy put it while waging a particularly grim campaign in central and eastern Ulster in 1602, ‘we kill so many churls [unarmed peasants] as it grieveth me to think that it is necessary to do this’.8

I This is all very unsettling, to be sure, testimony to the bloody efficacy of campaigns waged by Tudor crown forces in Ireland, but was it consistent with genocide? Until very recently historians would instantly have said not. The Oxford English Dictionary defines genocide as the deliberate extermination of a nation, race or ethnic group. The crown forces in Ireland killed a multitude but they did not do that; indeed, they were not constituted to do so. Genocide presupposes one nation or race setting about the annihilation of another, but in sixteenth-century Ireland none of the campaigns waged by the crown were simple English versus Irish affairs. As far back as the mid-1530s, when Henry VIII despatched a major army to confront the rebel Kildare Fitzgeralds his English forces were augmented by large contingents of native loyalists from the ‘English Pale’ around Dublin and from the ‘second Pale’ in Kilkenny and the south-east. They were also assisted by allies drawn from Gaelic regions, albeit to a smaller extent.9 Likewise the series of wars and conquests that raged during the late 1540s and 1550s: the Tudor advance into the south Leinster uplands, the colonisation of the Midlands, the crossing of the River Shannon into Connacht, and the northern push into central and east Ulster, were all in turn undertaken with ethnically mixed forces comprising ‘New English’ and Welsh, and native ‘Old English’/HibernoEnglish and Gaelic Irish troops. The east Ulster army even contained a small contingent of Gaelic-speaking Hiberno-Scots.10 This continued throughout Elizabeth I’s reign. Some of her government’s bloodiest exploits were partly the work of native supporters. The massacre of Mullaghmast of 1577, in which between 50 and 75 Midlands leaders, including several O’Mores, were invited to a parley only to be butchered on their arrival, was actively assisted by the chieftain of the O’Dempseys;11 on other occasions, the war against the remainder of the O’Mores was spearheaded by the soldiers of ‘Barnaby Fitzpatrick’, or MacGiollapadraig, the Gaelic baron of Upper Ossory. The final destruction and death of the rebel earl of Desmond in Co. Kerry in 1583 was orchestrated by his ancestral enemy the Hiberno-English magnate and principal native loyalist ‘Black Tom’ Butler, tenth earl of Ormond, and by Ormond’s kinsmen and clients among the Munster Gaelic Irish.12 Lastly, even the Battle of Kinsale of 1601–2 – the climactic event of the Tudor conquest of Ireland – was a multi-ethnic feat of arms, with the Gaelic Irish earl of Thomond, Donough O’Brien, and the HibernoEnglish earl of Clanricarde, Richard Burke, to the fore as senior commanders of the victorious crown forces.13 Genocide also presupposes a deliberate element, a plan. Tudor plans for Ireland and its better government have attracted an extensive historiography. This, tellingly, has 24

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often focused on political and administrative matters, from the formulation of crown policy to the relative importance of the viceroys, the Irish Council, and individual advisers and writers in its conception and implementation. In terms of all the fighting and campaigning, a lively debate has been conducted over the extent to which the monarchy intended to assert greater control over Ireland and its affairs by military or political means. While most scholars accept that, ultimately, the advocates of a military solution secured a strong and abiding influence, and that as a result the island was conquered piecemeal, it is nevertheless widely recognised that the Tudor monarchs usually preferred to avoid military-centred programmes of expansion, if only to escape the ensuing expense. In fact, it has been shown that non-military initiatives were often enthusiastically embraced at Whitehall. On various occasions the Tudors’ advisers contended that Ireland might be brought under tighter royal control by being made a sister kingdom of England; by the development of stronger crown institutions and the extension of English common law; by the erection of provincial councils and presidencies; by greater use of the Dublin parliament. Successive generations of Tudor officials were convinced that Ireland could be reformed by these means, thus greatly reducing the need for force. Far, then, from presenting a genocidal attitude towards Ireland and the Irish, it seems that the royal government looked to incorporate the island and its inhabitants into the Tudor state. And if cultural as much as physical extermination is vital to genocide as it is usually defined and understood, records of the Tudor court at Whitehall indicate that the monarchs themselves were eager to project the message that Ireland was an important part of the crown’s dominions and that the Irish were full subjects of the Tudor state. From 1541, medals and insignia struck for Henry VIII celebrated the creation of the kingdom of Ireland; later, the second great seal of Elizabeth I had the Irish harp prominently displayed on the reverse.14 Mary I had a Gaelic Irishman, Conor MacDermott, as one of her personal attendants and a Gaelic harper from Kildare, ‘Melanfyn Ourewerk’ (O’Rourke), may have played music at her court.15 Elizabeth was probably the most mindful of Ireland. Early in her reign she decided that the Bible should be translated into Gaelic, the better to spread Protestantism. She even expressed a desire to learn the rudiments of the Irish language: a special Gaelic primer was prepared for her use by a Hiberno-English nobleman from Co. Westmeath.16 Nor did she neglect Irish music. Through Elizabeth’s direct patronage Irish tunes became popular at her court, so that for a number of years ‘Blind Cruise’, a musician from north Co. Dublin, was in great demand in London and its vicinity.17 The genocide of a people and culture is not usually accompanied by promotion of their music.

II And yet, despite all this, it has become necessary to reconsider Tudor military behaviour in Ireland within an interpretative spectrum that encompasses partial extermination.18 In recent years Irish historians have begun investigating the regional and local impact of Tudor state expansion, charting the methods used to achieve it, and identifying those groups most affected, for better or worse, by the imposition of more direct English rule. This concentration on ground-level realities has exposed the limitations of relying too readily on official high-level reports and representations of developments in the country. What occurred was frequently messier, more compromised, than senior officials were prepared to admit. The high death rate associated 25

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with crown campaigns was as much to do with forces running amok, murdering and pillaging at will, as it was to do with government direction. Yet it was also to do with government direction. For one thing, the government was increasingly militarised as the period advanced; for another, close scrutiny of the activities of crown captains and other officers in the localities reveals that many of them behaved with impunity because they had been authorised to do so by government commission. Hundreds of officers were granted power of martial law to execute people without charge, on suspicion of, among other things, ‘wrongdoing’, and to receive a share of the wealth of everyone they killed. Such commissions represented a tolerance of arbitrary severity at the uppermost levels of the state often at odds with the nobler sentiments of policy discussions, and disregarded the rights of Irish people as subjects of the crown. Moreover, growing study of government advice papers, ‘plats’, and treatises, has tended to show that noble sentiment was far from universal. Disregard of Irish rights and Irish life was not a new phenomenon, confined to the final years of the sixteenth century (as was once thought), but was a dark thread running through government discourse about Ireland since Henry VIII’s time. Repeatedly these advice papers gave expression to an ideology of English power that was not merely supremacist but exclusivist. Even those authors – and there were many – who urged a cautious step-by-step absorption of Ireland into the wider Tudor realm, and who emphasised the importance of judges and law-books over soldiers and firearms, hoped sooner or later to bring about the country’s subjugation to English forms of social and political organisation and the imposition of English standards of ‘civility’. The Gaelic order that prevailed over much of Ireland beyond the ‘four English shires’ of the Pale around Dublin or the ‘Second Pale’ in the south-east was to be systematically neutered and reduced, either by negotiation and treaty-making or by war and the hangman’s rope – whichever seemed most applicable. Similarly, large sections of the population that were of medieval English descent but had adopted Gaelic language and customs in the intervening centuries – the Hiberno-English – were to be re-Anglicised. It is now apparent that this drive to Anglicisation provided an intellectual basis for treating Ireland and its inhabitants very differently from other ‘outlying regions’ of the Tudor state. In the right circumstances any measure could be contemplated. Ultimately, the fate of many Irish people was determined by how ‘circumstances’ were perceived in Dublin Castle, the seat of English power in Ireland, and in Whitehall. If the pursuit of Anglicisation was a key foundation of the crown’s Irish policy, security considerations were the other, following Henry VIII’s breach with Rome and the commencement of the English Reformation. The price for the royal supremacy over the English Church was English diplomatic isolation in Europe, and with that came a growing fear of invasion – of Ireland as much as of England. When King Henry first intervened in Ireland, in 1534, it was in response to reports that a Spanish and Imperial army of 10,000 soldiers was on its way to support the Geraldine rebels and defend the Catholic Church.19 If the foreign forces landed and Ireland fell, England itself would be next. Invasion scares punctuated Tudor Irish policy thereafter. In 1539–40 it was rumoured not only that James V of Scotland was readying a fleet, but that he was considering accepting an offer of the Irish crown that had been made to him by ‘all the great men in Ireland’.20 Henry VIII’s war with Scotland and France of 1544–5, unresolved at his death in 1547, bequeathed a bundle of troubles to his children, the Protestant Edward VI and the Catholic Mary I, not the least of which was containing 26

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the threat of French and Scottish influence in Ireland. These worries continued, and intensified, after Elizabeth I’s accession in 1558, and her restoration of Protestantism. Fears of French and Scottish intervention preoccupied her early years on the throne, with the arrival of hostile fleets on the Irish coast expected in 1559, 1560–62 and 1566. Subsequently, deteriorating relations with Habsburg Spain led to rumours of impending Spanish and papal invasion plans in 1569–70, 1572, 1574 and 1575–8. An invasion eventually materialised, in 1580, in Co. Kerry. Fears of other attempted landings were hardly eased by the slaughter of the Italian and Spanish forces trapped in Smerwick harbour (November 1580). Open war with Spain and Portugal was by then fast becoming inevitable, and from 1585, when it finally irrupted, until 1603, when the war wound down, barely a year passed without reports reaching Dublin and Whitehall of Spanish fleets and their likely Irish destinations. It was this constant dread of Ireland’s island exposure to foreign naval encroachment, and its strong religious, cultural and commercial ties to mainland Europe, that chewed away at English confidence about bringing Ireland under control. It allowed the advocates of military methods a stronger hold over Irish policy than those preferring a more gradual approach. It predisposed the government to over-reaction in times of rebellion and/or rumours of invasion. It made emergency measures like martial law widespread and commonplace. It made the mass killing of rebels, their followers, and suspected ‘maintainers’, seem logical. Occasionally it even recommended the inducement of famine in troublesome regions, as a short-term military expedient.

III Invariably the Tudor policy of Anglicisation was presented as though it were a gift to Ireland and the Irish, something from which the country and its inhabitants would derive enormous benefit. By making Ireland more like England Tudor ministers and servitors claimed that the country would become a land of peace and plenty, where everything would be stable and settled, law and justice prevail, and industry and enterprise be rewarded; all under the protective gaze of the royal government in Dublin. But stripped of all this spin and Tudor Rose-tinting, the pursuit of Anglicisation was not just a constructive endeavour. It was also deliberately destructive, for it meant de-Gaelicisation. The Gaelic way of life provoked real venom among leading English ministers and officers of the crown. Regardless of Queen Mary’s desire for a little Irish colour at her court, or Queen Elizabeth’s fondness for Irish tunes, those given responsibility for ruling Ireland on their behalf usually became less inclined to appreciate such manifestations of Irish cultural refinement. For them the Gaelic order was an alien and barely comprehensible entity that defied English management and supervision. The Gaelic aristocracy had once ruled the entire island, as kings and princes, and their sixteenth-century descendants lost no opportunity to remind the officers and agents of the English Tudor monarchy of this fact – something which greatly irked the crown’s officers, as doubtless was the intention. Circa 1540 the Gaelic lords and chieftains controlled approximately 60% of the land of the country: all of Ulster, the greater part of Connacht, half or more of Munster, and sizeable parts of Leinster. The lords’ political strength and vitality was greatly enhanced by their enduring territorial and cultural ties with Gaelic Scotland, with whose leading families they formed a self-contained world, or Gaedhealtacht, stretching fully 700 miles in length from the Skelligs off the coast of Kerry to the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. 27

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It was a world for which many English felt mostly repulsion. In their own territories, or tuatha, the Gaelic lords and their followers appeared to conform to no recognisable standard of proper ‘civilised’ behaviour. Often living remotely behind mountains and forests they were generally cattle lords, pastoral, semi-nomadic, who moved with their herds between summer and winter pasturelands accompanied by hundreds of their followers arranged into creaghts, or mobile communities. To English eyes this seemed an idle and feckless existence, following livestock instead of settling permanently in villages, farming the land, and growing things; it also looked latently or actually criminal, the mobility of the Gaels seeming to nurture a sub-culture of trespass and theft, cattle-raiding and banditry. And there were other faults. Living in such close proximity to cattle, pigs, goats and sheep the Gaelic Irish were considered slovenly and dirty. The lords and leading men wore long, heavy weather-resistant mantles or cloaks suitable to the outdoor life, but these made them appear rustic and backward. They and their horsemen rode without stirrups: that was deemed unrefined, not ‘gentleman like’. Collectively it all served to confirm the view that Gaeldom was primitive and beastly, its inhabitants savage. In countless reports and treatises of the period the late medieval English literary trope of the ‘wild Irish’ received a Renaissance humanist makeover. Indeed it was from the quills of some of the most experienced (and best educated) English officers despatched to Tudor Ireland that the trope would receive its clearest expression. To quote Sir William Fitzwilliam, the longest-serving Tudor governor of Ireland: in 1572, in a letter to Whitehall, he growled in frustration that ‘this people [the Irish]’ had been too long ‘misled in beastly liberty and sensual immunity so as they cannot abide to hear of correction, no, not for the horriblest sins that they can commit . . . In vain is law brought amongst them.’21 Likewise his eventual successor as viceroy, the son of the earl of Bedford and an advanced Calvinist, Sir William Russell: serving as a captain in 1581 he denounced as ‘devilish and abominable before God’ all ‘Irish habits and Irish laws’. Their continued prevalence tended only ‘to the utter destruction of the common weal and impoverishing of her Majesty’s subjects’.22 Writing about the same time the English governor of Connacht, Sir Nicholas Malby, adopted a similar moralising tone: reporting from Co. Galway he denounced as wicked the local rulers and their numerous followers, ‘forsaken of God and their prince’.23

IV Of course, cultural disdain for the Gaelic world was one thing; encompassing its reduction quite another. The main factor behind this transition was concern over English security. From Rosscarbery in the south-west all the way to Larne in the northeast the Gaelic lords controlled most of the Irish Atlantic coastline. French, Spanish, Portuguese and Scottish vessels routinely visited these shores, far from the reach of English power. Weather permitting, an invasion attempt would stand a good chance of success. Moreover, it was the sea that best sustained the capacity of the Gaelic lords to resist English governmental encroachment. Since the fourteenth century the steady supply of mercenary galloglasses from western Scotland and the Isles had transformed Irish fighting capabilities against English cavalry forces, and helped the local lineages overthrow large parts of the medieval English colony in Ireland – the ‘Gaelic resurgence’.24 At the beginning of the sixteenth century reports of growing numbers of Scottish mercenaries active in Ireland greatly agitated English observers, coinciding as it did with Scottish royal overtures in Ulster. No less concerning were reports that 28

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the Gaelic lords had begun acquiring firearms from continental and Scottish armstraders. The ‘resurgence’ was still surging. The sheer vim of the Gaelic order was demonstrated most vividly in historically English areas. To their horror, ‘New English’ servitors arriving in Dublin, the English colonial capital, or venturing out into the surrounding counties of the ‘English Pale’ encountered a community that was rather less English than they had expected. Gaelic influence was all around. Gentlemen and merchants with English surnames and centuries of English ancestry broke into Irish when meeting each other. They had Gaelic tenants, Gaelic household servants; they traded with Gaelic areas in Wicklow, the Midlands, the south Ulster borderlands. Many of them even had Gaelic wives or in-laws, and fostered their children with Gaelic host families to learn the language and customs of the Gaedhealtacht and to form (or preserve) lasting ties of affinity with Gaelic territories and the lineages ruling them.25 They had integrated, gone partly native, been Gaelicised. They were Hiberno-English. The newcomers’ condemnation of the Hiberno-English was immediate and shrill. It was also persistent. The word most frequently used to describe them was one loaded with meaning for anyone interested in the long history of pre-modern racism: ‘degenerate’.26 As Sir William Russell put it, in wide areas of the Pale and all across Munster and Connacht ‘all the lords and captains, knights, esquires and gentlemen’ of medieval English descent were ‘degenerate from their kind’. On two whole pages of his ‘Discourse of the present state of Ireland’ he listed the offending families that had so ‘degressed’ and ‘become Irish men in effect’.27 Russell’s text found its way into the hands of the Elizabethan Secretary of State Sir Francis Walsingham, who annotated it extensively, and wrote summaries in the margins. Walsingham wholeheartedly agreed that urgent measures needed to be taken to reverse Hiberno-English degeneracy and curb the continuing spread of Gaelic influence. The question was, which measures? Walsingham’s colleague Lord Burghley had already given the subject serious deliberation. In his main statement on Irish matters, the 1575 ‘Degrees for the Government of Ireland’, Burghley had proposed that a sort of apartheid was needed. It would be a medical measure, quarantine to cure a sickness. The Gaelic lords and lineages infected everything around them; they must, then, be contained, challenged, reduced; above all, they must be separated from the Hiberno-English to end the spread of their contagion. Then, with the Hiberno-English restored to full Englishness again, the Gaelic Irish might be cured with a suitable medicine, forcibly applied by soldiers on campaign as well as judges on circuit.28 In 1581 Russell made almost exactly the same recommendation in the discourse read by Walsingham. The obvious racialism that underpinned the Anglicising proposals of Burghley and Russell was nothing new. As far back as 1537 Henry VIII’s government had overseen the passage of an act in the Irish parliament ‘for the English order, habit and language’, which stipulated that ‘all men that [ac]knowledge themselves to be his highness’s true and faithful subjects’ must use the English language and English customs ‘continually’, ‘without ceasing’, and ‘must not suffer any within his family or rule to use the Irish habit’, or dress.29 Another act was also passed in the same parliament banning intermarriage and fosterage ‘with any Irish person or persons of Irish blood’, ‘within the fourth degree’.30 The fact that the acts had not been adequately enforced had exasperated crown officers and servitors long before Burghley and Russell picked up their pens. Among New English observers this failure was seen as yet further proof of the unreliability of the Hiberno-English who continued to serve in the central 29

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government in significant numbers, and who dominated local government in the counties and towns; only true Englishmen, born in England, could be entrusted with the task of imposing Anglicising measures and all that that entailed. Edmund Tremayne, the clerk of the Elizabethan Privy Council and a leading English ideologue on ‘Ireland matters’ whose views were held in high regard at Whitehall, saw forceful de-Gaelicisation as the only effective way to save the Hiberno-English from themselves, so low had they fallen. Queen Elizabeth, he urged, must be moved ‘to take ye enterprise in hand’ and ‘apply the medicine requisite for the purpose’ – to first reduce the ‘inhumanity and beastliness’ of the Gaelic ruling lineages, if necessary by extreme force, ‘to make all the Irishry in Ireland [live] in terror’. Then and only then might she compel the Hiberno-English to ‘show themselves English in deed’.31 Henry Ackworth, a captain in Munster and a close client of Burghley, broadly agreed. The reduction of Gaelic power had been only intermittently pursued in a few regions of the country, through treaties of surrender and re-grant, seneschal schemes, colonisation, and the establishment of garrisons; it was time, he said, for more concerted and persistent action. Ackworth, it should be noted, was a committed Protestant. What most prompted his advice was concern that the exposure of the southern and western Gaelic lordships to militant Counter-Reformation Catholicism imported from Europe would soon affect the island at large. But his prescription for de-Gaelicisation is striking for its racialist clarity. Militant Catholicism was only the most recent symptom of the real underlying problem – the uninterrupted flow of what he called the ‘spes veniae’, or infected bloodline, of the country’s Gaelic rulers. Their descent through long generations of ruthless scheming warlords, one vicious thug after another, was corrupting and harmful to the whole population and was a constant obstacle to good government and the development of a commonwealth. The blood-flow needed to be stopped, the lineages terminated.32 Such views are often identified with Edmund Spenser, who wrote at the close of the Tudor period, in the mid-1590s. Ackworth wrote a generation earlier, in the mid-1570s. Careful examination of other texts and authors is beginning to reveal much earlier examples of very similar opinions.33 Indeed, a single word provides an important clue to the persistence of a fundamentally hostile approach to the ‘Gaelic problem’ that dates all the way back to the reign of Henry VIII – ‘extirpation’. This was the sixteenthcentury English word for annihilation. Usually it is found in domestic English writings about agriculture and gardening, particularly in regard to weed-killing.34 It means to destroy completely, by pulling out from the root. It is frequently used in Tudor discourse about Ireland, as a metaphor for the military extermination of troublesome Gaelic and Gaelicised lineages and other ‘enemy’ groups. Not just rebel lords and their immediate followers were to be weeded and killed, but the entire bloodline of their stock, and, if need be, the populations living under their rule. Possibly the earliest use of ‘extirpation’ in this sense was in a letter to Henry VIII by Sir William Skeffington, written while leading a campaign against Geraldine rebels.35 The word recurs regularly thereafter in English state papers and official correspondence, down to Spenser’s day; a close study of its usage might be a worthwhile topic for a research student.

V Both Henry Ackworth and Edmund Spenser urged a cull, or ‘extirping’, of the rebellious Gaelic and Gaelicised lineages at times of heightened security fears (1574 and 30

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1596 respectively). It was much the same with Burghley and Russell’s proposals for quarantining the Hiberno-English from Gaelic infection (1575 and 1581). Partial extermination and apartheid required special circumstances to be recommended as suitable measures. For large parts of the Tudor period an in-between approach was more usual, mixing negotiation and accommodation with coercion and severity. In part this was due to economic considerations, with the government under pressure to trim and make savings while pushing ahead with the imposition of greater territorial control. It was also, though, a reflection of the Tudors’ conviction that the Irish were ‘reformable’ and ultimately would accept the extension of superior English forms of government and standards of behaviour. Despite difficulties of implementation, ongoing evasion, and countless rebellions, this idea lingered. It remained at the heart of crown policy at the beginning of the next century, under the Stuart monarchy. The willingness of many Irish lords and people to serve the crown and participate in its undertakings seemed, to some, to confirm the view that eventually most, if not all, might follow their example. The fact that those Hiberno-English and Gaelic Irish leaders who cooperated did so often out of narrow self-interest, expecting to gain power and land through crown reward, or out of more desperate considerations of self-preservation, for fear of impending destruction, was perfectly understood. It was accepted pragmatically as a necessary precondition for the successful realisation of policy. Besides which, Irish forces were a valuable addition to what constituted the royal army. They were cheap, they were readily available, and they knew the terrain best. No major campaign could realistically be undertaken without their participation. They could help make English dominion safe. And so we have the paradox that English military operations designed to Anglicise parts of sixteenth-century Ireland by force, and exterminate opposition, received vital assistance from the Irish themselves. The most prominent of the crown’s Irish allies were the Butlers. By a distance the main Hiberno-English dynasty in the country after the defeat of the Kildare Fitzgeralds in 1534–5, the Butler earls of Ormond embraced Tudor expansion enthusiastically as an opportunity to enhance their standing in England as well as in Ireland, as one of the great aristocratic houses of the Tudor dominions. In this they partly succeeded (though not nearly as much as they would have wished) and they did so by providing extensive military reinforcements to the crown, sometimes gratis, across the southern half of the country, and occasionally in Ulster and the frontiers of Connacht. The Butlers aside, among the Hiberno-English the Fitzgerald earls of Desmond provided extensive military assistance between 1543 and 1566; the restored earls of Kildare assumed a leading role from 1554–75 and again during 1594–7; and lesser lords such as Nugent of Delvin, Eustace of Baltinglass, Fleming of Slane and Plunkett of Dunsany participated in numerous ‘hostings’ and ‘journeys’. Regarding the Gaelic Irish, their role was less pronounced, but major Gaelic lords did play their part, not least Shane O’Neill prior to his rebellion in 1557, Barnaby Fitzpatrick between 1554 and his death in 1581, Donough, Lord Thomond during the years 1588–1603, and Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone before his fateful decision to rebel in 1595. Below this elite level it is also significant that a large proportion of the ordinary rank and file troops in the crown forces were of Hiberno-English and Gaelic extraction, hired by English officers as cheap substitutes for dead or missing English and Welsh men. But of course the campaigns in which these Irish lords and soldiers participated and risked their lives were English campaigns, in pursuit of English crown objectives, 31

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and under English direction. The imputation sometimes advanced that it was Irish influence that made the Tudor crown forces wage war so savagely, and kill so many, does not bear inspection. The worst excesses of the operations against the Geraldine rebels in the 1530s were carried out by English forces acting on the immediate orders of successive English viceroys Sir William Skeffington and Leonard Grey. This is why the main journal of Skeffington’s war in the borders of the Pale was called ‘The feats of the English army’. The attempted clearing of Laois and Offaly during 1546–8, though requiring an ethnically very mixed force, was overseen to chilling effect by Sir William Brabazon, the English Lord Justice. And so it continued: the initial Tudor incursions into Ulster in the late 1540s were the work of Andrew Brereton and Nicholas Bagenal, both of whom hailed from the north-west of England; the further penetration of the province between 1556 and 1563 was that of Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex, and his right-hand man and marshal Sir George Stanley (brother of the earl of Derby). The second plantation of Laois and Offaly was the bloody creation of Sussex’s brother and eventual successor as earl, Sir Henry Radcliffe, supported by a chosen team of New English captains, including Francis Cosby and Robert Harpole. Cosby and Harpole would later be the prime movers of the massacre of Mullaghmast in 1577. The slaughter of old men, women and children in Munster by the Devon knight Sir Humphrey Gilbert is notable not just for the brutality he deployed, but also because Gilbert had only English troops under his charge, not trusting native forces. The massacre of Rathlin Island in 1575 was done by Sir John Norris and Francis Drake; that at Smerwick in 1580 by Captains Walter Raleigh and Humphrey Mackworth. The often neglected Connacht massacre of 1581, at Carrick Mulgreeny, was carried out by George Acres and Nicholas Mordaunt, English officers of the provincial governor Sir Nicholas Malby. On first becoming Connacht governor a few years earlier Malby had proposed the ‘extirpation’ of ‘the entire race of the Burkes’. By his estimate 200 Burkes and their kin were killed during his 1580–1 operations – including a five-year-old boy – besides a great many others of less consequence.36 English government instructions demanded this level of severity. Consider the orders issued for the renewal of war against the O’Mores and O’Connors in the Midlands in October 1557: Sir Henry Radcliffe, the commander of the crown forces, was required ‘to plague, punish and prosecute with sword and fire and other warlike manners all Irishmen [my italics] and their countries’ in the vicinity of Laois and Offaly where he thought the O’Mores and O’Connors might be hiding out. He was also allowed to issue sub-commissions of martial law ‘under his hand’ to whoever was serviceable, to execute ‘all manner of persons’ whatsoever.37 One of the starkest statements of Tudor military tactics in Ireland was in August 1579. Responding to news of the arrival from Europe of the Munster Catholic rebel James FitzMaurice, a proclamation was issued specifying that in addition to FitzMaurice himself and his supporters, it would be lawful for the crown’s officers to put to death all wandering and masterless people in the province, including Gaelic harpers, bards and rhymers, as well as, curiously, able-bodied persons found acting as guides to ‘blind folk’.38 In the ensuing Munster campaign led by Sir William Pelham, the government army fought pitilessly. As Pelham described it in a letter to the queen, he had undertaken a journey into part of Co. Limerick ‘consuming with fire all habitation and executing of the people wheresoever we found them’. The rebels, he said, had departed before his arrival, but that did not matter. ‘Albeit it were to be wished that the common people should not 32

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with their blood bear the burden of the [rebels’] offence . . . the example with terror must light upon some.’39 Non-combatants were killed as an example to combatants. Not all crown commanders followed this practice. As far as we can tell, the operations waged by Pelham’s second-in-command the Hiberno-English lord the ‘Black earl’ of Ormond tended to discriminate between rebels and non-rebels, combatants and civilians, a little more effectively. This may have been because Ormond, as a native magnate, could avail of much better intelligence about the rebels’ whereabouts and how best to isolate them. But it was also because the earl needed to avoid unnecessary carnage the better to protect his reputation among the Irish, with whom he tried to mediate for the crown and advance his dynasty’s interests. Although according to an account written on his behalf he killed thousands, his style of soldiering drew heavy criticism for his use of protections to persuade rebels to surrender in return for sparing their lives. Among the New English it is recorded that Sir George Bourchier was reluctant to kill women and children: in April 1580 he was ordered to stop offering them his protection, and to put them to the sword when required.40 In the final analysis, however, it is clear that Bourchier was a rare exception. Once they commenced, most of the larger-scale crown campaigns in Ireland were conducted with scant regard for civilians. ‘Extirpation’ may have suggested a careful weeding of troubled ground, but in practice it was not very careful at all. Sir Nicholas Malby’s killing of 200 Burkes, referred to above, was accompanied by the slaughter of no less than 500 others who by his own admission were in no way related to his target group. Similarly, following his dismissal as viceroy in 1582, Lord Grey de Wilton penned a lengthy vindication of his brief government of Ireland, addressed to the queen. In this he presented a detailed account of what he most wanted to be remembered for – the killing of rebel Gaelic and Hiberno-English lords and their supporters in all four provinces of the country. He attempted to demonstrate his discrimination as commander-in-chief. His officers, he boasted, had slain various O’Byrnes and O’Tooles in Wicklow, O’Mores and O’Connors in the Midlands, Kavanaghs and Eustaces in Carlow, O’Rourkes in Leitrim, and Geraldines in Waterford, Cork, Limerick and Kerry. He listed all the killings, giving numbers and locations, in an abstract of service appended at the end. The most telling line is the last one: ‘So the number of slain in these services of note comes to 1,485, not accounting those of meaner sort, neither executions by law, nor killing of churls, the account of which is beside number.’41 This is one of the main reasons why the Tudor wars were so devastating to the Irish population at large. Civilian casualties were not only well out of proportion to the numbers of combatants killed, they were of small consequence, not worth the counting. Worse, they weren’t worth counting yet were often deliberately targeted in order to deny subjects and workers to the Gaelic and Hiberno-English rebel lords and leaders. The other reason for the devastating mortality was the general recourse to scorched earth and the inducement of famine. Both rebel and crown forces share the responsibility for this. As well as burning the lands of local enemies and crown loyalists Irish rebels often burned their own lands to deny succour to the crown forces chasing them. But here too the English army acquitted itself with particular vigour, in almost every campaign in which it was involved burning more widely and over much longer periods of time than its opponents. There were at least three sizeable famines caused by all this burning and destruction, in 1557–9 in the east and north-east, in 1580–84 in the south-west, and, probably most deadly of all, in 1601–4, at the very end of the Tudor wars. This last famine was strongest in Ulster and Connacht, but Munster too 33

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was badly affected. When it was all over the population of many parts of Ireland, but especially the Gaedhealtacht, had been greatly decreased. The final emasculation of Gaelic noble power soon followed, under the Stuarts, along with the resumption of Anglicisation.

Notes 1 TNA, SP 62/2/44; Annals of the Four Masters of the Kingdom of Ireland, (ed.) John O’Donovan (7 vols, Dublin 1851) [hereafter AFM], v, sub annum 1557. 2 Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland, (ed.) Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 102. 3 Fynes Moryson, An Itinerary (4 vols, Glasgow: MacLehose, 1907–8), iii, p. 283. 4 David Edwards, ‘The escalation of violence in sixteenth-century Ireland’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 63–9. 5 Hiram Morgan, ‘“Never any realm worse governed”: Queen Elizabeth and Ireland’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14, 2004, p. 308. 6 Population figures vary. All are conjectural. See L.M. Cullen, ‘Population trends in seventeenth-century Ireland’, Economic & Social Review 6, 1974–5, pp. 149–65; Raymond Gillespie, The Transformation of the Irish Economy, 1550–1700 (Dundalk, 1991), pp. 12–14; R.A. Houston, The Population History of Britain and Ireland, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: CUP, 1992), pp. 17–19; Seán Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (Oxford: OUP, 2007), pp. 404–5. 7 Vincent Carey, ‘“What pen can paint or tears atone?” Mountjoy’s scorched earth campaign’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.) The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell Press, 2004), pp. 205–16. 8 Cal. Carew MSS, 1601–3, no. 260. 9 Laurence McCorristine, The Revolt of Silken Thomas: A Challenge to Henry VIII (Dublin: Merlin Publishing, 1987), pp. 90–117; Gerald Power, A European Frontier elite: The nobility of the English Pale in Tudor Ireland, 1496–1566 (Hanover: Wehrhahn Verlag, 2012), pp. 72–4; Cal. Carew MSS, 1515–74, nos. 49, 52–3. 10 Cal. Carew MSS, 1515–74, nos. 207, 211–2, 215; David Edwards (ed.), Campaign Journals of the Elizabethan Irish Wars (Dublin: IMC, 2014), no. 1. 11 AFM, v, sub annum 1577. 12 David Edwards and Keith Sidwell (ed. & trans.), The Tipperary Hero: Dermot O’Meara’s Ormonius (1615) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), contains much new information on the Desmond war, besides numerous other crown campaigns in which the Butlers played a part. 13 Hiram Morgan, ‘Disaster at Kinsale’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell Press, 2004), pp. 125–9. 14 Kevin Sharpe, Selling the Tudor Monarchy; Authority and Image in Sixteenth-Century England (Yale: New Haven, CT, 2009), pp. 152–3, 403. 15 Index to the Testamentary records in the Commissary Court of London, 1489–1570 (London: HMSO, 1970), p. 79; Calendar of Patent Rolls, Philip & Mary, 1553–4, p. 412. 16 Brian Ó Cuív, ‘The Irish language in the early modern period’, in Theodore W. Moody, Francis X. Martin and Francis J. Byrne (eds), A New History of Ireland, III; Early Modern Ireland, 1534– 1691 (Oxford: OUP, 1976), p. 511; Vincent Carey, ‘“Neither good English nor good Irish”: bilingualism and identity formation in sixteenth-century Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 51–7. 17 David Edwards, ‘Blind Cruise, the Elizabethan harper’, Ossory, Laois & Leinster 5, 2012, pp. 19–32. 18 See the pioneering statement of Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur (Yale: New Haven, CT, 2007), ch. 5. 19 Micheál Ó Siochrú, ‘Foreign involvement in the revolt of Silken Thomas, 1534–5’, Royal Irish Academy Proceedings 96 C, 1996, pp. 49–62. 20 Alison Cathcart, ‘James V, king of Scotland – and Ireland?’, in Seán Duffy (ed.), The World of the Galloglass: Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200–1600 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 139–42. 21 Fitzwilliam to Burghley, 25 Sept. 1572 (TNA SP 63/37/60).

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22 Russell’s discourse, n.d. c.1581 (BL, Cotton MS Titus BXII, ff 347v–354v). 23 Malby’s discourse, 6 March 1581 (Ibid, Cotton MS Titus BXIII, ff 327r–332v). 24 See the various contributions to Sean Duffy (ed.), The World of the Galloglass: Kings, Warlords and Warriors in Ireland and Scotland, 1200-1600 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007). See also Kenneth Nicholls, ‘Gaelic recovery’, in James S. Donnelly Jr (ed.), Encyclopedia of Irish History and Culture, 2 vols (Farmington Hill, Gale, 2005), i, pp. 262–4. 25 Fiona Fitzsimons, ‘Fosterage and gossiprid in late medieval Ireland: some new evidence’, in Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland, c.1250–c.1650: Land, Lordship and Settlement (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 138–49. 26 Francisco Bethencourt, Racisms: From the Crusades to the Twentieth Century (Princeton: UP, 2013). 27 As n. 23 above. 28 Christopher Maginn, William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State (Oxford: OUP, 2012), pp. 90–96. 29 Statute Roll 28–29 Henry VIII, c.26, printed in full in Philomena Connolly (ed.), Statute Rolls of the Irish Parliament, Richard III – Henry VIII (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002), pp. 236–44. 30 Statute Roll 28–29 Henry VIII, c.22, in Ibid, pp. 217–20. 31 Tremayne’s discourse, 1573 (BL, Cotton MSS, Titus B XII, ff 357v–358v). 32 Ackworth to Burghley, 20 May 1574 (Cal. SP, Ire., 1571–1575, (ed.) Mary O’Dowd (Dublin: IMC, 2000), no. 982. 33 ‘David Heffernan, ‘Tudor “Reform” Treatises and government policy in sixteenth-century Ireland’, (unpublished PhD thesis, 2 vols (University College Cork, 2012). 34 OED. 35 State Papers, Henry VIII, 11 vols (London: HMSO, 1830–52), ii, no. 139. 36 Cal. State Papers, Ireland, 1574–85, pp. 99, 298. 37 HMC, Haliday MSS: The Irish Privy Council Book, 1556–1571 (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1897), p. 42. 38 Order of the Lord Chancellor and Council, 9 Aug. 1579 (TNA SP 63/68/23). 39 Pelham to Elizabeth I, 1 April 1580 (TNA SP 63/72/28). 40 Edwards (ed.), Campaign Journals, No. 5. 41 Ibid, No. 11.

Further reading Brady, Ciaran, The Chief Governors: The Rise and Fall of Reform Government in Tudor Ireland, 1536– 88 (Cambridge University Press, 1994). Brady, Ciaran, ‘The road to the View: on the decline of reform thought in Tudor Ireland’, in Patricia Coughlan (ed.), Spenser and Ireland: Interdisciplinary Essays (Cork University Press, 1989), pp. 25–45. Brady, Ciaran, ‘The captain’s games: army and society in Elizabethan Ireland’, in Thomas Bartlett and Keith Jeffery (eds), A Military History of Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 136–59. Campbell, Ian, Renaissance Humanism and Ethnicity before Race: The Irish and the English in the Seventeenth Century (Manchester University Press, 2013). Canny, Nicholas, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: a pattern established, 1565–1576 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976). Canny, Nicholas, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford University Press, 2001). Canny, Nicholas, ‘Taking sides in early modern Ireland: the case of Hugh O’Neill, earl of Tyrone’, in Vincent Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 94–115. Carey, Vincent P., Surviving the Tudors: The ‘Wizard’ Earl of Kildare and English Rule in Ireland, 1537–1586 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2002). Carey, Vincent P., ‘John Derricke’s Image of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney and the Massacre of Mullaghmast’, Irish Historical Studies 31, 1999, pp. 305–27. Carey, Vincent P., ‘The end of the Gaelic political order: the O’More lordship of Laois, 1536–1603’, in Pádraig Lane and William Nolan (eds), Laois: History and Society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1999), pp. 219–53. Carey, Vincent P., ‘“What pen can paint or tears atone?” Mountjoy’s scorched earth campaign’, in H. Morgan (ed.), The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell Press, 2004), pp. 205–16. Carey, Vincent P., ‘Atrocity and history: Grey, Spenser and the slaughter at Smerwick (1580)’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 79–94.

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Connolly, Contested Island: Ireland 1460–1630 (Oxford University Press, 2007). Donovan, Brian, ‘Tudor rule in Gaelic Leinster and the rise of Feagh McHugh O’Byrne’, in Conor O’Brien (ed.), Feagh McHugh O’Byrne: The Wicklow Firebrand (Rathdrum: Historical Society, 1998), pp. 118–49. Edwards, David, The Ormond Lordship in County Kilkenny, 1515–1642: The Rise and Fall of Butler feudal power (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003). Edwards, David, ‘The MacGiollapadraigs (Fitzpatricks) of Upper Ossory, 1532–1641’, in Pádraig Lane and William Nolan (eds), Laois, History and Society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1999), pp. 327–75. Edwards, David, ‘Collaboration without Anglicization: the Mac Giollapadraig lordship and Tudor Reform’, in Patrick J. Duffy, David Edwards and Elizabeth FitzPatrick (eds), Gaelic Ireland, c.1250–c.1650: Land, Lordship and Settlement (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), pp. 77–97. Edwards, David, ‘Beyond Reform: Martial Law and the Tudor Re-conquest of Ireland’, History Ireland, Vol. 5, Summer 1997, pp. 16–21. Edwards, David, ‘Ideology and experience: Spenser’s View and martial law in Elizabethan Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology in Ireland, 1541–1641 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), pp. 127–57. Edwards, David, ‘The escalation of violence in sixteenth-century Ireland’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), pp. 34–78. Edwards, David, ‘Ireland: security and conquest’, in S. Doran and N. Jones (eds), The Elizabethan World (London & New York: Routledge, 2011), pp. 182–200. Edwards, David (ed.), Campaign Journals of the Elizabethan Irish Wars (IMC, Dublin: Longman, 2014). Ellis, Steven G., Ireland in the Age of the Tudors, 1447–1603 (London: Barnes and Noble, 1998). Falls, Cyril, Elizabeth’s Irish Wars (London: Barnes and Noble, 1950). Fissel, Mark Charles, English Warfare, 1511–1642 (London: Routledge, 2001). Hammer, Paul E.J., Elizabeth’s Wars: War. Government and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke: Palgrave: Macmillan, 2004). Hayes-McCoy, G.A., ‘Conciliation, coercion and the Protestant Reformation, 1547–71’, and ‘The completion of the Tudor conquest and the advance of the Counter-Reformation, 1571–1603’, both in Theodore W. Moody, Francis X. Martin and Francis J. Byrne (eds), New History of Ireland, iii: Early Modern Ireland, 1534–1691 (Oxford University Press, 1976), pp. 69–93, 94–141. Heffernan, David, ‘Tudor “Reform” Treatises and government policy in sixteenth-century Ireland’ (unpublished PhD thesis, 2 vols, University College Cork 2012). Lennon, Colm, Sixteenth-Century Ireland: The Incomplete Conquest (2nd edn, Dublin: Gill, 2005). Lennon, Colm, ‘Taking sides: the emergence of Irish Catholic ideology’, in Vincent Carey and Ute Lotz-Heumann (eds), Taking Sides? Colonial and Confessional Mentalities in Early Modern Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), pp. 78–93. Maginn, Christopher, William Cecil, Ireland, and the Tudor State (Oxford 2012) Maginn, Christopher, ‘Civilizing’ Gaelic Leinster: The Extension of Tudor Rule in the O’Byrne and O’Toole lordships (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). McCormack, Anthony, The Earldom of Desmond, 1463–1583: The Decline and Crisis of a Feudal Lordship (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2005). McCorristine, Lawrence, The Revolt of Silken Thomas: A Challenge to Henry VIII (Dublin: Merlin, 1987). McGurk, John, The Elizabethan Conquest of Ireland: The Burdens of the 1590s (Manchester University Press, 1997). McGurk, John, ‘The pacification of Ulster, 1600–3’, in David Edwards, Pádraig Lenihan and Clodagh Tait (eds), Age of Atrocity, pp. 119–29. Montano, John Patrick, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge University Press, 2011). Morgan, Hiram, Tyrone’s Rebellion: The Outbreak of the Nine Years War in Tudor Ireland (Dublin: Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1993). Morgan, Hiram, ‘“Never any realm worse governed”: Queen Elizabeth and Ireland’, TRHS 14, 2004, pp. 295–308. Morgan, Hiram, ‘Giraldus Cambrensis and the Tudor conquest of Ireland’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Political Ideology, pp. 22–44. Morgan, Hiram (ed.), The Battle of Kinsale (Bray: Wordwell Press, 2004). Nicholls, Kenneth, Gaelic and Gaelicized Ireland in the Middle Ages (2nd edn, Dublin: Lilliput, 2003). Palmer, Patricia, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge University Press, 2001) Palmer, Patricia, ‘At the sign of the head: the currency of beheading in early modern Ireland’, in Stuart Carroll (ed.), Cultures of Violence: Interpersonal Violence in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave: Macmillan, 2007), pp. 129–55.

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Palmer, William, The Problem of Ireland in Tudor Foreign Policy, 1485–1603 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 1994). Quinn, D.B., The Elizabethans and the Irish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, NY, 1966). Rapple, Rory, Martial Power and Elizabethan Political Culture: Military Men in England and Ireland, 1558–1594 (Cambridge University Press, 2009). White, Dean G., ‘The reign of Edward VI in Ireland: some political, social and economic aspects’, Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 14, 1965, pp. 197–211. Wilson, Philip, The Beginnings of Modern Ireland (Baltimore: Remington, 1914).

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4 TO WHOM DO TH E C H I LD R EN BE L ONG ? Genocidal displacement in Europe and Australia Simone Gigliotti

On 9 December 1948, the General Assembly of the Nations adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNCPPCG). One of the means of genocide, Article 2(e), was ‘forcibly transferring children of the group to another group’ enacted ‘with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such’.1 The reasons for promoting the forced transfer of children to the ranks of physical genocide in the final draft were contentious and vigorously debated by delegates during the Convention’s drafting stages. What is somewhat surprising in this debate is not so much the actual and justified migration of the forced transfer of children clause, but rather the repeated and often vague references in these debates to children’s experiences of persecution and denationalization as a ‘special case’ which seemed to both contradict and validate its inclusion. While minority protection treaties, delegates suggested, could cover items described as cultural genocide, children, and their wartime experiences in different countries of Nazi Europe in particular, and their displacement in the postwar period, featured heavily in post-Second World War debates about reconstruction, nation-making, and the reunification of families. Debates that ensued during the drafting stages about the practices of transfer, the age of children who can reasonably be covered by the clause, the impact of these transfers on the departed biological group, and the child’s posttransfer social identity and development, continue today.2 This chapter examines practices of physical and biological transfer of children of ‘undesirable’, ‘alien’ and mixed-race heritage and the impact of these practices on the possibility of the restoration of culture and return to the family unit in post-genocide societies. It outlines racially motivated policies which separated children from their family unit during the interwar, wartime and postwar period in Europe (through forced and anticipatory migration, forced labour, displacement, deportation, abduction and orphanhood). It compares and contrasts children’s post-1945 return to biological families and the nation with examples from Australia during the interwar period. In that country, state-administered policies of ‘breeding out the colour’ towards the ‘unwanted third race’ of children of European and Aboriginal parentage bore the racial marks of the Nazi policy towards Jews, Poles, Roma and Sinti and other groups. These policies do not suggest ideological equivalence to the practices of the ‘Final Solution’ of intended extermination through deportation, concentration, 38

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massacre and other forms of killing. Rather, the policies in colonies and in post-1901 Australia were part of a globalizing sentiment and civilizing process premised on racial fitness and threat of degeneration, and also particular to it, the preservation of whiteness in a settler-colonial society. Finally, the chapter examines Raphael Lemkin’s writings about children’s physical and biological displacement as an indelible feature of genocide.

Europe’s displaced children: Between family and nation Children have often been described as war’s first victims. The Second World War in Europe saw the collapse of the divide between civilians and combatants. This collapse was evident in a diverse and disturbing range of experiences and recruitments: bombings in Britain prompted evacuations to countryside locations, hidden children in caves, cellars and attics, and also on the Aryan sides of ghettos in Warsaw and Lodz,3 smuggling as a ghetto occupation for children, and the recruitment of children into partisan or resistance movements in forests fighting Nazis or Nazi occupation, to name a few examples. These wartime experiences and displacements were preceded by refugee migrations of Jewish children in the mid- and late 1930s, fuelled by the racial and eugenic policies of the Nazi regime, which often resulted in permanent breakdowns of the family unit. The Kindertransports to Britain and other destination countries (such as Australia and New Zealand), in the wake of the Kristallnacht of 9–10 November 1938, and the asylum-seeking voyage of the St. Louis in May 1939 were intended to provide temporary refuge locations. German children and youth were not exempt from Nazi ideology. They were promoted as its foremost recipients through recruitment into militarized pathways in the Hitler Youth and the League for German girls. Additionally, Nazi policies in the East cultivated the racial potential of ethnic German and other children, while the so-called Euthanasia programme targeted almost 7,000 young, disabled German children for death.4 War on the European continent provided the closest physical and geographic reminder of large-scale destruction and displacement of populations for delegates during the drafting stages (in the Secretariat Draft and Ad Hoc Committee draft meetings). Yet the privileging of the visibility of physical genocide as a wartime practice disguised the ongoing effects of cultural genocide that began in the 1930s and continued throughout the 1940s and into the period of postwar relief and Allied occupation. Cultural genocide was a trans-migratory process. Refuge or shelter opportunities outside of the family unit (through relocation to orphanages, hidden identities, or migration) was supposed to be temporary, while the restoration of the shattered family unit was predicated on survival of the parents and the return of victimized children to them. The sheer geographical scale of displacement (across nations, borders and oceans) made that lofty hope all the more unachievable. Approximately 50 million people died in the Second World War, through combat, genocide, total war, ethnic cleansing and displacement. Demographer Eugene Kulischer calculated that 55 million people were forcibly displaced between 1939 and 1947, some 30 million as a result of the Nazi invasion and the remainder as a consequence of the German defeat.5 The destruction of childhood was implied in these figures. Millions of children were orphaned, injured, or suffered from growth and medical problems resulting from malnutrition. The International Red Cross, for example, estimated that 13 million children in Europe had lost their parents, and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (the UNRRA) had 50,000 39

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unaccompanied children in its care a few months after the end of the war.6 This number soon grew to 65,000, and by the end of 1946 the UNRRA reported that more than 200,000 queries had been received by Polish welfare agencies searching for lost children, many of them victims of expulsion and Nazi policies of ‘Germanization’.7 UNESCO (the United Nations’ Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), founded in 1945, estimated that 8 million children in Germany, 6.5 million children in the Soviet Union, and 1.3 million children in France remained homeless in 1946.8 These figures were in addition to the deaths of 1.5 million children at the hands of Germans and their collaborators during the period of Nazi rule. The majority of the victims were Jewish children who were targeted as part of the Nazi regime’s ‘Final Solution’ in ghettos and concentration and extermination camps, along with Roma, German disabled children, and children in the Soviet Union. The social death of childhood in the Second World War was all too pervasive. Relief workers working in Europe on the front line commented on the ‘sad physical and mental state of Europe’s children, in particular, which spawned dystopian fears of European families and societies in disarray’.9 Their status, as abandoned, orphaned, and homeless, robbed of emotional and material security, was the main theme of this coverage. Children also featured in the reportage of war journalists and photographers. Thérèse Bonney’s self-published book Europe’s Children (1943) caused a sensation.10 One reviewer of it asked: ‘When Europe’s uprooted children grow up, what will they do to a world which has done such things to them?’11 Her book provoked outrage in its depiction of displaced societies, streetscapes and wild, primitive frontiers, with the image of the roaming, traumatized, often injured child becoming a universal icon of suffering in total war conditions. This preoccupation with war children continued well into the postwar period. Children in Central Europe were prime recipients of UNRRA aid, while long-standing Jewish relief agencies such as the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (AJDC), organizations such as L’Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants (OSE) and Obschestvo Remeslenovo i zemledelcheskovo Trouda (ORT), and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), administered a number of restorative, educational and reunification programmes for Jewish displaced children and teenagers. They were subjected to a type of international custody battle between the international humanitarian agencies of UNRRA, Jewish relief agencies, Zionist organizations and welfare societies aimed at claiming their national status. What emerged in the treatment of Jewish displaced children was an ideological battleground for resurrecting the notion of ‘childhood’ in the wake of war and its trauma, and also a claim to the social and territorial future of these unrepatriable children, some of whom were orphans, unaccompanied, and potential emigrants to Palestine. As can be seen, the definition of the best interests of children as touted in administrative organizations involved in the welfare, relief and re-socialization of Jewish and non-Jewish displaced children was contested, as were the sources and modes of documentation and proposed solutions. Europe’s first postwar international conference, held at Zurich, Switzerland, in 1945, was devoted to ‘Children Victims of the War’.12 France had also convened an earlier conference on the moral rehabilitation of children affected by war, and a conference on juvenile delinquency in Geneva in 1947 focused on war children of Europe. Bonney’s concept of children displaced by war was the basis of Fred Zinnemann’s film The Search, released in 1948.13 Also contributing to this visual archive was David ‘Chim’ Seymour, a celebrated Polish-Jewish 40

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photographer who achieved fame from his Spanish Civil War coverage.14 Seymour was commissioned by UNESCO and UNICEF to travel to Italy, Poland, Hungary, Austria and Greece to capture the ongoing effects of war and the efforts of these agencies to address children’s relief needs. He spent six months touring these countries, and a selection of the 5,000 photos he took appeared in the 1949 book Children of Europe.15 UNESCO Courier also published a photo essay of his tour as ‘Somewhere in Europe’, in which Seymour provided first-hand impressions.16 Irish writer, humanitarian activist and historian Dorothy Macardle also published a book of the same name, Children of Europe, in 1951, in which she commented that the effects of war were ‘immeasurable’, citing psychological damage, loss of hope, and faith in life. She declared that the war produced ‘children without a childhood’.17 She applied the term ‘genocide’ to the Nazi colonization of Poland which had produced the separation of children from their families, of men and women by means of mass deportations, and of people from their country: ‘the Nazis wanted Polish territory, but not Poles’.18 The wave of this attention and sentiment indicated a crisis point of moral conscience in wartime and postwar Europe, and that postwar peace could not be secured with the persistent disorder of roaming children and broken families.19 This sentiment dominated the reports of in-demand professionals working in Displaced Persons’ camps in Europe such as educators, doctors, UNRRA relief workers, psychologists and social workers. Europe’s postwar children stood at the centre of political conflicts between military authorities, foster parents, social workers, Jewish agencies, East European Communist officials, and DPs themselves, all of whom competed to determine their fates. These battles were linked to emerging ideals of human rights, the family and its social repair, democracy, liberal values, child welfare, and the reconstruction of European societies at large. In the words of Vinita A. Lewis, an officer with the International Refugee Organization (IRO) in Germany: ‘The lost identity of individual children is the Social Problem of the day on the continent of Europe. Even if his future destiny lies in a country other than that of his origin, he [the displaced child] is entitled to the basic Human Right of full knowledge of his background and origin.’20 The moral outrage generated by the disorder and homelessness of war-weary children accelerated the implementation of relief and welfare policies designed to rehabilitate and return them, wherever possible, to their biological families. Lemkin, too, was very aware of these battles and debates. His activism for children capitalized on the moral outrage on which they were built. The widespread attention to children’s problems in Europe was anchored to international relief policy and public policy in the United States. This attention drew on existing international conventions for the protection of the rights of children and it also exposed their practical and psychological limitations as to what those needs were, to which family units they applied, and where. When the UN General Assembly endorsed the Convention on the Rights of the Child in November 1989,21 it built on decades of child welfare recognition such as in 1919, when the League of Nations established the Committee for the Protection of Children, and adopted in 1924 the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child. The 1924 Geneva Declaration stated in its first clause that: ‘The child must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually.’22 This declaration also addressed a child’s right to survival, nutrition, shelter, health care, humanitarian relief, protection from exploitation, and the right to grow up in an environment that fosters their development, regardless of race, nationality or creed. The UNCPPCG of 9 December 1948 enshrined the 41

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protection of children as a targeted group based on their nation, race, religion or ethnicity. The UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) of 10 December 1948 further underscored these themes, with a clear emphasis on individual development and protection. Article 25 of the UNDHR stated that: ‘Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection,’23 while Article 16, clause 3, noted that: ‘The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State,’24 privileging, at that time, the heterosexual, nuclear family. The UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child of November 1959 added provisions regarding a child’s right to an identity, family, education, and freedom from discrimination.25 Pathways to the recognition of states’ destructive political and racially fuelled policies against children varied markedly between postwar Europe and postwar Australia.

The Stolen Generations in Australia: Separation and the impossibility of return From the early twentieth century to the early 1970s across Australian states an estimated 20,000 to 25,000 children of mixed Aboriginal and European parentage were removed from their families and communities to religious institutions, working farms, mission homes, and white foster families. The intention of these removals varied. They included a documented policy of biological absorption and ‘breeding out the colour’ in the mid-1930s, to a social welfare, assimilationist model of the 1950s. In 1901, the year the States were federated into the Australian Commonwealth, there were fewer than 8,000 children of mixed race in Australia but by the early 1930s, the number was around 30,000. Although abductions of Aboriginal children for agricultural and domestic labour had occurred in sporadic form since the late 1800s, the removal policies of the twentieth century, and especially those of the 1930s, were widespread, coordinated and eugenic in nature. They occurred at a time when the Nazi regime in Germany was legislating the segregation of Jews, first in administrative, legal and social terms, and then through pseudo-science. To review, the Nuremberg Laws of September and November 1935 outlined definitions of Aryan and non-Aryan in terms of blood purity and degree as prerequisites for citizenship. Jews and Sinti and Roma who did not meet these purity criteria were earmarked for, initially, social and civic exclusion, though there was ambiguity in relation to so-called mischlinge (mixedrace Jews). These biological definitions also guided discussions about sterilization and ‘evacuation’ (a euphemism for death) at the Wannsee Conference of 20 January 1942, held outside Berlin. The selective minutes (or Protocol) of that meeting reveal the ideological commitment to racial purity and a flexible approach to defining what is degenerative and asocial behaviour. Sterilization would achieve eventual extinction of the biological group (‘Persons of mixed blood of the first degree who are exempted from evacuation will be sterilized in order to prevent any offspring and to eliminate the problem of persons of mixed blood once and for all’).26 The other, existing method was that of ‘evacuation’. Its first appearance in the protocol reads: ‘Another possible solution of the problem has now taken the place of emigration, i.e. the evacuation of the Jews to the East, provided that the Fuehrer gives the appropriate approval in advance.’27 The ‘Treatment of Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree’ was the 42

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same as that of Jews in relation to the ‘Final Solution’, while the ‘Treatment of Persons of Mixed Blood of the Second Degree’ was defined as the fate of Germans (that is, to live), with exceptions to that due to factors including ‘racially undesirable appearance as Jews’, and ‘a bad police and political record that marks him outwardly as a Jew’.28 The minutes also refer to children of mixed-blood unions and their fate as being ‘evacuated’ or sent to an old-age ghetto. Interestingly, in Item 6, ‘Marriages between Persons of Mixed Blood of the First Degree and Persons of Mixed Blood of the Second Degree’, the children of these unions ‘will as a rule have stronger Jewish blood than the Jewish person of mixed blood of the second degree’.29 Though the Nazi regime ideologized and implemented a comprehensive range of policies and practices to eliminate what it saw as unfit races and so-called aliens, the preoccupation with biological purity was not isolated to it. Concerns about race, immigration, health and social welfare occupied officials in British settler societies and other countries during the modernizing era of economic competition, settlercolonial models of governance, and Social Darwinism and Galtonian eugenics from the mid-nineteenth century. The practice of child abductions in Australia preceded federation in 1901; it was built on a colonizing ideology of racial exclusion that promoted the perception of Aboriginal primitivism and the ‘dying race’. The outcome was a socialized norm among settlers, colonists and officials about Aboriginal doom – their ostensible inability to adapt to a progressive European civilizing process in education, farming and commerce, and habitation. Efforts to protect Aborigines in numerous states had limited success and by 1911, the Northern Territory and every state except Tasmania had protectionist legislation giving the Chief Protector or Protection Board extensive power to control indigenous people. In some states and in the Northern Territory the Chief Protector was made the legal guardian of all Aboriginal children, displacing the rights of parents. Apart from settler violence, competition for land between pastoralists and Aborigines, the rising demographic of an ostensibly confronting mixed-race group was causing concern, a result of voluntary and forced sexual relations between Aboriginal women and European men (and also Asian, Malay, and Pacific Islanders). The demographic growth of the ‘half caste’ was the main threat to the White Australia ideal – the most important political and racial value of the new Commonwealth.30 The population increase of this undesirable racial group was reported in foreign newspapers, particularly British ones, by local correspondents and visiting doctors, priests and missionaries. In Social Darwinist terms, the so-called ‘half castes’ were not regarded as close to extinction. It was quite the opposite. In 1901, there were estimated to be fewer than 8,000 of them in Australia but by the early 1930s the number was around 30,000. Scientists and politicians were influenced by German and British thinkers about racial evolution, such as T.X. Huxley and Hermann Klatsch, who formed the view that Aborigines (not the extinct Tasmanian group that Charles Darwin wrote about in Voyage of the Beagle) were unrelated to black races and were primitive and dark Caucasians, remote racial ancestors of contemporary Europeans. The implication was that there existed a basic racial affinity between Aborigines and European settlers and that if there was ‘interbreeding’ there would be no throwback to the Aboriginal side. These views were embraced by Aboriginal protectors who believed that the proposal of biological absorption offered the most practical solution. This philosophy was articulated explicitly in April 1937 at the first CommonwealthState Native Welfare Conference, attended by representatives of all the states (except 43

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Tasmania) and the Northern Territory. Although states had been influenced by each other’s practices to that time, and even sought the views of other Chief Protectors as to what should be done about their ‘Aboriginal problem’, this was the first time that Aboriginal affairs had been discussed at the national level. The conference’s attendees discussed a methodical approach to quantifying the ‘half-caste’ and their fate in terms not dissimilar to the 1935 Nuremberg Laws in Germany. They also discussed Australia’s racial complexity, its geographical distribution and acceptance of racial spaces of ‘full-blooded’ Aboriginality, and measures required to police undesirable sexual relations. References to negligent Aboriginal mothering, the family and its responsibilities, and the attack on its cultural and biological integrity all feature as elements that Lemkin had identified in his writings about the constitution and destruction of the family as the core unit of society. A.O. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia (1915–40), was a prominent exponent of absorption, and one of the conference’s most active participants.31 At the conference, Neville said that the so-called full-bloods constituted a ‘problem . . . which will eventually solve itself [since] no matter what we do, they will die out’.32 He had long argued for absorption of the rising population of mixedrace children as being in their best interests, having already authorized the removal of mixed-race children in remote parts of Western Australia. In Neville’s view, white blood in the mixed-race child was indicative of assimilation potential, as reflected in a resolution at the 1937 conference: ‘That this Conference believes that the destiny of the natives of aboriginal origin, but not of the full blood, lies in their ultimate absorption by the people of the Commonwealth and it therefore recommends that all efforts be directed to that end.’33 It was intended that children with lighter skin colour would lose their blackness through removals and be accepted into non-indigenous society and through long-term, inter-generational acculturation. The notion of legitimate welfare where states were legally charged to remove children from negligent mothers to their custody on the basis of child abuse and violence thus merged with the racial welfare of the new nation. The control of births of these mixed-race children also entailed the surveillance of marriages and sexual relations between Aboriginal women, European men, Pacific Islanders and ‘Asiatics’. The argument posed by Neville also revealed the racial geography of ‘interbreeding’: There is some Asiatic blood in the north, and a certain amount of negroid strain also is to be seen due to the fact that some of the early settlers brought with them to Western Australia negro servants who left their mark on the native population. The negro strain remains. The Asiatic cross, however, is not a bad one. We find that half-caste Asiatics do very well indeed; in fact, very often they beat the white cross. In order that the existing state of affairs in Western Australia shall continue, and in order to prevent the return of those half-castes who are nearly white to the black, the State Parliament has enacted legislation including the giving of control over the marriages of half-castes.34 The victims of these removals were called the Stolen Generations, a term that the historian Peter Read coined in 1982 to describe the trans-generational losses that were endured and continue to affect almost all aspects of Aboriginal well-being and identity 44

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in Australia. Though the practice had been known about, and documented in newspapers, mission reports, films, oral testimony, and historical literature, it had not been acknowledged at a national level until 2008 as the first order of business of the newly elected Australian Labor Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. On 13 February his national apology on behalf of the Federal Government was televised live cross the nation. After apologizing for the ‘pain, suffering and hurt’, and ‘to the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities’, the Prime Minister reflected: ‘There comes a time in the history of nations when their peoples must become fully reconciled to their past if they are to move forward with confidence to embrace their future . . . and to deal with this unfinished business of the nation, to remove a great stain from the nation’s soul.’35 He apologized for what they had endured and for decades of official silence about it: violent separations from families, relocations to missions, camps and orphanages, for their use as low paid or unpaid labour, forced into marriages with white European men during which they suffered physical, sexual and psychological abuse, and violence. They were often given new names to erase reminders of their Aboriginality. Many children never saw their parents or families again, or even remembered them. The Prime Minister’s apology built on state-level apologies of the prior decade and the staunch denial of wrongdoing by the conservative Prime Minister John Howard.36 Rudd reproached Howard and his government’s long-held and patronizing attitude that the removal of children was ‘for their own good’. His apology acknowledged the destructive impact of forcible removals that were carried out by most states across Australia, most actively in the Northern Territory, Queensland and Western Australia where Aboriginal populations were greatest in number. Though well intentioned, Rudd’s speech left many issues unresolved including that of requisite and appropriate compensation, consultative pathways to healing, and the residue of these removals in generations of displaced Aboriginality. The national apology came eleven years after the release in 1997 of Bringing Them Home: The Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (hereafter BTH Report).37 The BTH Report was the result of a Labor Government initiative to compel the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission to investigate the history, the policy and practice of indigenous child removals in colonial and twentieth-century Australia.38 On 26 May 1997 the BTH Report was tabled in Australia’s Federal Parliament. It provided graphic details of the procedure of the targeting of children, their separation from parents and siblings, their use as cheap or unpaid labour, forced marriages with white European men, and the physical, psychological and sexual abuse and violence that resulted from their removal.39 One such submission in the BTH Report came from Millicent, who was four years old when she was taken in 1949. She was born in Wonthella, on the outskirts of Geraldton, some 400 kilometres north of Perth in Western Australia. She recalled: At the age of four, I was taken away from my family and placed in Sister Kate’s Home – Western Australia where I was kept as a ward of the state until I was eighteen years old. I was forbidden to see any of my family or know of their whereabouts. Five of us children were all taken and placed in different institutions in WA. The Protector of Aborigines and the Child Welfare Department . . . said we would have a better life and future brought up as 45

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whitefellas away from our parents in a good religious environment. All they contributed to our upbringing and future was an unrepairable scar of loneliness, mistrust, hatred and bitterness . . . The empty dark and lonely existence was so full of many hurtful and unforgivable events that I cannot escape from no matter how hard I try. Being deprived of the most cherished and valuable thing in life as an Aboriginal Child – love and family bonds.40 The BTH Report alleged that the forcible removals of children constituted genocide, citing Article 2(e) of the UN Convention on Genocide: ‘When a child was forcibly removed that child’s entire community lost, often permanently, its chance to perpetuate itself in that child. The Inquiry has concluded that this was a primary objective of forcible removals and is the reason they amount to genocide.’41 The allegation was supported with submissions, research into the fate of indigenous groups in other settler societies such as the United States, Canada and New Zealand, consultation with Raphael Lemkin’s 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe and the United Nations’ draft conventions on genocide.42 One of the report’s 54 recommendations urged the creation of an Aboriginal Oral History Archive that would be ‘modelled on the Shoah Foundation set up to record the oral histories of Jewish victims of the Nazi holocaust’ and would, in the words of victim Doris Pilkington, author of Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, the book on which the Australian film Rabbit Proof Fence was based, ‘fund and facilitate the collection of oral histories of Aboriginal survivors of our holocaust’.43 The use of Holocaust analogies did not end there, as Pilkington described her time in a children’s institution as ‘more like a concentration camp than a residential school for Aboriginal children’.44

Lemkin as advocate The allegation about genocide as the destruction of culture in the BTH Report was grounded in the first Secretariat draft of the UN Convention on Genocide from June 1947 which drew on Lemkin’s thinking on group destruction. In the first Secretariat draft, cultural genocide was described as ‘more than just a policy of forced assimilation by moderate coercion, involving for example, prohibition of the opening of schools for teaching the language of the group concerned . . . it was a policy which by drastic methods, aimed at the rapid disappearance of the cultural, moral and religious life of a group of human beings’.45 It was achieved through five means: (a) forcible transfer of children to another human group; or (b) forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of a group; or (c) prohibition of the use of the national language even in private intercourse; or (d) systematic destruction of books printed in the national language or of religious works or prohibition of new publications; or (e) systematic destruction of historical or religious monuments or their diversion to alien uses, destruction or dispersion of documents and objects of historical, artistic, or religious value and of objects used in religious worship.46 As related to the transfer of children, the definition said: ‘The separation of children from their parents results in forcing upon the former at an impressionable and receptive age a culture and mentality different from their parents. This process tends to bring about the disappearance of the group as a cultural unit in a relatively short time.’47 These sentences were used in the BTH Report to support the charge of genocide.48 This definition of cultural genocide did not survive the final draft of the UN Convention on Genocide, but the 46

TO WHOM DO THE CHILDREN BELONG?

method of forcible transfer did and now constitutes a physical element of genocide as Article 2(e). The advocacy of children’s rights in the convention through the provision of Article 2(e) was not without challenge from various experts and delegates in the drafting stages, although it was consistent with Lemkin’s thinking on the group as an ethno-social entity. As historian Dirk Moses has noted, Lemkin ‘did not consider cultural destruction in isolation from attacks on the physical and biological elements of a group. Culture was inextricably interwoven with a broader assault encompassing the totality of group existence.’49 Although Lemkin was a vigilant historical chronicler of group destruction, his position on children has been surprisingly understudied. Injustices perpetrated against children preoccupied him. Lemkin wrote that ‘the permanent psychological injury and the arrest of normal development of the child victim is perhaps the most shocking and tragic result of genocide’.50 He chronicled the impact of historical child separations and displacements as the erasure of their biological units and social identities. The terms killing, trafficking, slavery and forced labour were frequently mentioned in his writings, and the topic of children’s persecution was to be a chapter in his projected book on a world history of genocide. Particular attention was given to the ‘kidnapping of children’, ‘socialization of children’, and ‘deportation of school children’.51 In Lemkin’s archival materials,52 for example, one finds repeated references to children and their targeting as an ongoing practice, witnessed during the convention’s drafting with the Communist Party’s relocation of Greek refugee children in Macedonia to Eastern Europe in the late 1940s. Frequent mentions are made of the ‘outrageous abduction of children’ by Greek Communists,53 and allegations that the Soviets were committing genocide by abducting children from Eastern Germany.54 Lemkin asserted that the abductions were similar.55 The removal of Greek refugee children provided a timely example to secure the passage of Lemkin’s chronicle of child transfers in history, the inclusion of which in the final draft appeared to reflect the efforts of the Greek delegate Mr Vallindas, who emphasized the ongoing practice of child removals.56 After the Convention had passed in the General Assembly, Lemkin asserted that since Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia all ratified the convention they were now guilty of genocide for their role in the abduction of Greek children.57 As evident in his archival materials, Lemkin’s inventory of violations against children covered various methods and historical examples that underscored physical and cultural decline of the family group to which they belonged, and the group that they would no longer perpetuate (their biological and social group) as a result of their removal. Separation, whether by physical killing, or from the family group, is cited in actions occurring from antiquity to medieval, colonial and modern settings (from the Belgian Congo to Poland, and to Russia, including other locations), such as ‘children into slavery, child slavery, stealing of children, separation of families, prevention of births, transfer of children, killing of children, taking of children, actions against children, seizure of children, and trafficking of children’.58 Yet it was the specifics of wartime Eastern Europe and postwar Greece that provided temporal urgency and widespread media coverage in postwar Europe and the United States to mobilize consciousness of the historical phenomenon. Speaking of vulnerable survivors, Lemkin prioritized war’s effects on children:

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Finally, the survivors of genocide should receive attention. There are many examples of survivors who have developed conditioned responses to certain situations which used to symptomize danger to them. In the case of children, the effects are more fundamental. For instance, a Polish orphan who was hidden by a family during the Nazi occupation in the Ukraine had to spend most of his time under the table. Two years after the liberation he still crept under the table in manifest panic whenever a stranger entered the house. The permanent psychological injury and the arrest of normal development of the child victim is perhaps the most shocking and tragic result of genocide.59 What did Lemkin’s chronicle of the historical sufferings of children and their rights of belonging actually contribute to Article 2(e)? To answer this question, one can look to his legal texts and writings about ‘voluntary separation’, such as divorce, which provides some insight into his thinking about the family unit as a cultural and potentially politicized entity. In his 1944 article ‘Orphans of Living Parents: A Comparative Legal and Sociological View’, Lemkin drew attention to the absence of legal protections for children of divorced parents.60 The Second World War and the appropriation of family units to support political ideologies were not lost on him. He wrote: ‘Apart from society’s warm interest in the integrity of the family, we must not overlook the dangers to democracy in disregarding problems arising out of the instability of the home, since anti-democratic elements may use the resulting dissatisfactions for their own political purposes. We can see this in the professed protection of the home and the family by Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and more recently, Petain.’61 Lemkin viewed the family as the primary unit that coheres children’s status in society and he distinguished several conceptions of family relationships affecting children: the clan conception in the Far East and Northern Africa, the Roman Catholic conception, the Racial and State conception of family life (as evident in Nazi Germany), the Contractual-Hedonistic conception of family life (which he believed prevailed in France, the United States and Scandinavian countries), and the Russian Free Love conception which found expression after the 1917 Revolution. Lemkin interpreted the family as the primary cultural unit of socialization for the child and offered suggestions for counsel and mediation in divorce proceedings. A persistent theme was the protection of the family unit’s cultural bonds in the legal context of the dissolution of the marital contract. Lemkin’s discussion of the family where the sovereignty of the child comes into question as a result of dissolution of the unit was not dissimilar to the arguments of advocates for children’s welfare in the aftermath of the Second World War. Destroyed families and childhoods were persistent victims of the war in the postwar period. The notion of a return to normality, of the family as the peaceful, stabilizing force of postwar order in a liberalizing Europe, was vigilantly pursued by relief authorities and Allied occupation governments. As Tara Zahra notes: The project of reclaiming national sovereignty in liberated Europe was also linked directly to sovereignty over children. Like women, children were seen as a form of national ‘property’ that required protection from foreign invasion and appropriation. Repatriating and renationalizing ‘stolen’ children in Germany and Austria was linked to postwar justice and denazification, the defense of ‘human rights’ and the family, and the acquisition of the productive and reproductive labor necessary for reconstruction.62 48

TO WHOM DO THE CHILDREN BELONG?

Lemkin’s philosophy was not out of place in the post-Second World War context of humanitarian activists who touted individualist and internationalist values, and viewed two collectives, the nation and the family, as essential sources of individual identity and agency. For all of Lemkin’s attention to children and in particular his postwar advocacy for children as victims of genocide, we have little evidence that the fate of mixed-race Aboriginal children in 1930s Australia was known to him, unlike the targeting of Aboriginal Tasmanians in the early nineteenth century which was featured in his writings. Abductions of children in Nazi-occupied territories in Eastern Europe,63 and ensuring Australia remains white, in cultural and biological terms, despite the different national and political contexts, translated eugenic aims into everyday painful realities for separated families and children. Unlike the fate of abducted children in Eastern Europe and Greece, the memory of the abduction of Aboriginal children was all but invisible in Australian national consciousness until 1997. The charge of genocide in the 1997 BTH Report was very controversial; one significant outcome was that it galvanized historians into highly publicized ‘History Wars’ which debated the intentions and methods of forced child removals, their transnational histories and links to the Holocaust in terms of Australia’s perpetrator history, and their place in the colonial violence of Aboriginal dispossession. Historian Inga Clendinnen, for example, wrote: When I see the word ‘genocide’ I still see Gypsies [sic] and Jews being herded into trains, into pits, into ravines, and behind them the shadowy figures of Armenian women and children being marched into the desert by armed men. I see deliberate mass murder: innocent people identified by their killers as distinctive entities being done to death by organised authority. I believe that to take the murder out of genocide is to render it vacuous.64 The conservative federal government of John Howard repeatedly denied that there was such a thing as the Stolen Generations, and rejected any notion of historical and financial responsibility for practices sanctioned by previous administrations.65 The Howard Government’s long-term denial of a grievous wrong was in contrast to scholarly and media activism. Scholars, in particular, began to consult Lemkin’s writings and his multi-layered definitions and examples of genocide, and its forebears of barbarity and vandalism. There were revisions of triumphalist histories of Australia’s colonization with the foregrounding of massacres, disease, violence, and resource competition.66 The debate also urged a rethinking of comparisons between genocide in Australia and that in Europe committed against Jews and other victim groups. Writing in 2004, Australian sociologist Robert van Krieken suggested that it was more ‘meaningful in a broader sense to compare the assimilation of the Aboriginal people in Australia, not with the Holocaust, but with the processes, structures and political rationalities of assimilation of “outsiders” and “strangers” in the modern state generally, both in the centuries prior to the Holocaust and continuing after it’.67 Some historians contend that the national apology was a missed opportunity in not following up on the BTH Report and its 54 recommendations for redress in relation to reparation, and the ongoing dismal statistics on Aboriginal health, crime and welfare. Anna Haebich, a historian of the Stolen Generations in Western Australia, commented that the national apology of 2008 was ‘stripped of the international human rights contexts that laid such heavy responsibilities on the Australian nation. These 49

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were conveniently forgotten, allowing the nation the luxury of expressing sorrow and remorse to the Stolen Generations without being troubled by the unpaid debts still owed to them.’68 Tony Barta, a historian of Germany and colonial genocide, argued that ‘the genocide Australia needs to recognise is not the one that may have been envisioned in the removal policy, but the one the removal policy was intended to complete’.69 Barta suggests that the practice of child removals was a racial conclusion to the extermination policies of British colonizers since the late eighteenth century. Debates about the Stolen Generations in Australia since the publication of the BTH Report in 1997 suggest that although the Holocaust provided an empowering language of suffering for the victims, such language had little place in accounting for the intentions of colonial agents, Chief Protectors and religious organizations in enacting the policy of forcible child removals.70 The use of Holocaust motifs (round-ups, transports, and camps) to describe the experiences of victims was a distraction that repressed a serious conversation about the charge of genocide in the BTH Report. Historian Russell McGregor and sociologist Robert van Krieken offer alternative and possibly instructive views for interpreting nuances of intent in the policy of absorption in 1930s Australia as temporally distinct from the governance model of citizenship and assimilation in the post-1945 period. McGregor notes a clear transformation of intent in relation to Aboriginal policy from absorption to assimilation at the time of the Second World War, suggesting that the absorption process of the interwar years was carried out with the intention to breed out the colour. This intent did not persist in the postwar era, when conferences in 1948 and 1951 saw assimilation of Aborigines as a pathway to citizenship (which did not eventuate until 1967) and liberal postwar governance.71 Van Krieken considers the impact of forcible removals for Australian moral community, and what this practice revealed about the civilizing project, which he sees as an assimilatory model in a centuries-old attempt to fortify the rising nation state through family units and liberal citizenship.72 This chapter has critiqued the displacing core of genocide – the movement of child victims between places, between cultures and families, and the erasure and re-imagining of their biological identities. Although the links between racial policies and displacement in Europe and the Stolen Generations in Australia might not be immediately obvious, critical to both were questions of belonging and sovereignty. To whom did the children’s racial future belong? How could they be restored to the family, and to the nation, in the aftermath of removal? If displaced children in postwar Europe, it seems, enjoyed a human right to a nationality and a longed-for return to the nation as their family group, the complete contrast of the denial of rights to identity, heritage and family of the separated Aboriginal children was all too pronounced. The historical experiences of children as victims of state policies in Europe and Australia merits further attention that builds on Lemkin’s and other humanists’ advocacy for children. This work might also uncover the racial tones and exclusions in historical writing that can be revealed from comparative study.

Notes 1 Article 2(e) of the UN Genocide Convention. Accessed from UN Treaties: https://treaties. un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%2078/volume-78-I-1021-English.pdf. 2 William Schabas writes: ‘But, although not stated in the Convention, the genocidal act of transferring children only makes sense with relatively young children, and eighteen years must be too high a threshold. Presumably, when children are transferred from one group to

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3

4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

another, their cultural identity may be lost. They will be raised within another group, speaking its language, participating in its culture, and practising its religion. But older children are unlikely to lose their cultural identity by such transfer.’ See William A. Schabas, Genocide in International Law: the Crime of Crimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 176. On the possibilities of children’s survival on the Aryan sides in Warsaw and Lodz, respectively, see Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak, The Warsaw Ghetto: a Guide to the Perished City (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 730–48, and Nechama Tec, ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Heberer Children during the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: Alta Mira Press), xxvi. Patricia Heberer, ‘Children in the Web of Racial Hygiene Policy’, Children during the Holocaust, p. 193. Peter Gatrell, ‘Introduction: World Wars and Population Displacement in Europe in the Twentieth Century’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2007, p. 419. See his comments about East-Central Europe, the geographical core of 80 million displaced people in the twentieth century. He cites Ewa Morawska’s estimates that around 80 million Eastern Europeans alone were forcibly displaced during the twentieth century, if one takes account of ‘expulsions, deportations, exiles and forcible repatriations, compulsory population transfers and exchanges, panic-stricken flights and induced departures’. Her estimate includes 5 million war refugees (1914–18), 10 million displaced following the war (as a result of redrawn borders and ‘administrative transfers’), 9 million war refugees (1939–45), 11 million deportees (Nazi forced labourers), 25 million displaced following the war (including 20 million transferees, 9 million of them German, 4.5 million repatriated DPs and 1.5 million ‘westbound’ DPs), 12 million Stalin-era deportees and resettled people, 4 million refugees from the Soviet bloc, and around 4 million post-communist refugees (including ethnic Russians moving from the ‘near abroad’). Mark Wyman, DPs: Europe’s displaced persons, 1945–1951 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 87. Wyman, DPs, pp. 92–93. Tara Zahra, ‘Lost Children: Displacement, Family, and Nation in Postwar Europe,’ Journal of Modern History, Vol. 81, No. 1, March 2009, p. 46. Ibid. The self-published book contained 62 photographs. Bonney also served as critical advisor to Fred Zinnemann’s The Search (1948). ‘Suffering Children’, Review of Europe’s Children in Time Magazine, Books: Monday, Dec. 6, 1943. Wyman, DPs, p. 88. From a large literature on The Search, see J.E. Smyth, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014). David ‘Chim’ Seymour (Dawid Szymin). He was the founding member with Robert Capa and Henri-Cartier Bresson of the Magnum Photos consortium. David ‘Chim’ Seymour, Children of Europe (Paris: UNESCO, 1949). Accessed from: http:// unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001332/133216eb.pdf. See David ‘Chim’ Seymour, ‘Somewhere in Europe: A Photographer Highlights the Drama of Post-War Youngsters’, UNESCO Courier, Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1949, pp. 1, 5–9. Dorothy Macardle as cited in Wyman, DPs, p. 89. Dorothy Macardle, Children of Europe: A study of the children of liberated countries; their war-time experiences, their reactions, and their needs, with a note on Germany (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1951), p. 65. Zahra, ‘Lost Children’, p. 45. Lewis, as quoted in Zahra, ‘Lost Children’, p. 45. Convention on the Rights of the Child. Accessed from http://www.ohchr.org/en/ professionalinterest/pages/crc.aspx. Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (26 September 1924). Accessed from http:// www.un-documents.net/gdrc1924.htm. See the ‘Declaration of Geneva’, men and women of all nations, recognizing that mankind owes to the Child the best that it has to give, declare and accept it as their duty that, beyond and above all considerations of race, nationality or creed: The child must be given the means requisite for its normal development, both materially and spiritually; the child that is hungry must be fed; the child that is sick must be

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23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38

39

nursed; the child that is backward must be helped; the delinquent child must be reclaimed; and the orphan and the waif must be sheltered and succored; the child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress; the child must be put in a position to earn a livelihood, and must be protected against every form of exploitation; the child must be brought up in the consciousness that its talents must be devoted to the service of fellow men. UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) Article 25, clause 2. Accessed from: http:// www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/. UNDHR, Article 16, clause 3. See: http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/. UN Declaration of the Right of the Child (1959): http://www.unicef.org/lac/spbarbados/ Legal/global/General/declaration_child1959.pdf. Wannsee Protocol, January 20 1942. Accessed from: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/ wannsee.asp. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. For example, in a correspondent’s contribution to The Times of 21 February 1925, it was suggested that the ‘intermixing of colour has bequeathed a legacy which may possibly prove a great moral and physical menace to the Commonwealth’. Readers might remember Kenneth Branagh’s portrayal of him in the film Rabbit Proof Fence. Russell McGregor, ‘Governance, not Genocide: Aboriginal Assimilation in the Postwar Era’, in A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books), p. 293. Commonwealth of Australia, Aboriginal Welfare: Initial Conference of Commonwealth and State Aboriginal Authorities, Canberra, 1937, p. 21. Ibid, p. 11. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, 13 February 2008’. The full apology can be viewed and accessed in multiple formats from: http://australia.gov. au/about-australia/our-country/our-people/apology-to-australias-indigenous-peoples. State premiers and representatives in Australia apologised to the stolen generations as follows: 27 May 1997: Western Australia (Richard Court, Premier; Geoff Gallop, Leader of the Opposition); 28 May 1997: South Australia (Dean Brown, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs); 3 June 1997: Queensland (K.R. Lingard, Minister for Families, Youth and Community Care); 17 June 1997: Australian Capital Territory (Kate Carnell, Chief Minister); 18 June 1997: New South Wales (Bob Carr, Premier); 13 August 1997: Tasmania (Tony Rundle, Premier); 17 September 1997: Victoria (Jeff Kennett, Premier); 24 October 2001: Northern Territory (Claire Martin, Premier). Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (Commonwealth of Australia, 1997). In full, these four terms of reference were to trace the past laws, practices and policies which resulted in the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families by compulsion, duress or undue influence, and the effects of those laws, practices and policies; to examine the adequacy of and the need for any changes in current laws, practices and policies relating to services and procedures currently available to those Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were affected by the separation under compulsion, duress or undue influence of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, including but not limited to current laws, practices and policies relating to access to individual and family records and to other forms of assistance towards locating and reunifying families; to examine the principles relevant to determining the justification for compensation for persons or communities affected by such separations; to examine current laws, practices and policies with respect to the placement and care of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and advise on any changes required taking into account the principle of self-determination by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The terms of reference linked the history of Aboriginal dispossession to contemporary welfare concerns, and also to potential compensation claims or means of redress. See BTH Report, pp. 2–3. The BTH Report included 54 recommendations for the attention of governments, churches and community groups, one of which included a National Sorry Day, recognised subsequently on an annual basis on 26 May. See the National Sorry Day Committee website: http://www.nsdc.org.au/.

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40 BTH Report, p. 102. Confidential submission 640, South Australia, ‘WA woman removed in 1949’. In January 1996, Millicent received an enquiry from the South Australian welfare authorities. A woman born in 1962 was searching for her birth mother. This was Toni, Millicent’s daughter. The two have since been reunited. 41 BTH Report, p. 190. 42 There was, for example, reference to removals to educational institutions of first nations peoples in the United States and of Inuit peoples to the High Arctic Circle in the early 1950s. 43 See Doris Pilkington, Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1996), p. 72, as cited in the BTH Report, p. 197. 44 Ibid. 45 See United Nations Economic and Social Council, Draft Convention on the Crime of Genocide, 28 March 1947, UN Doc E/447. 46 Draft Convention on the Crime of Genocide, 28 March 1947. 47 Ibid. 48 BTH Report, p. 236. 49 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture and the Concept of Genocide’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 34. 50 New York Public Library (NYPL Raphael Lemkin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division) Lemkin, Box 2, Frame 190. 51 See NYPL Collection, Box 3, Frame 1042. 52 All sources quoted (box number/frame) are from the Raphael Lemkin Papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY (cited as NYPL collection). For an overview of Lemkin’s collections in the United States see Tanya Elder, ‘What you see before your eyes: documenting Raphael Lemkin’s life by exploring his archival Papers, 1900–1959’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2005, pp. 469–99. 53 See Lemkin Papers, NYPL Collection, Box 1, Frame 316. Frame 354–355 refers again to abduction of children by Greeks. 54 See Lemkin Papers, NYPL Collection, Box 1, Frame 354–355. 55 See Lemkin Papers, NYPL Collection, Box 1, Frame 358. Lemkin’s letter to Dean Acheson of 20 June 1951 refers to Soviet abduction of German children as being similar to Greek communists’ removal of children. 56 The move was seen at the time to reward the successful lobbying of the Greek delegate to the Drafting Committee, Mr. Vallindas, who sought recognition of the Greek Communist Party’s unjust removal of approximately 28,000 Greek and Macedonian children from villages in northern Greece during the Civil War from 1946 to 1949. Vallindas, or rather the Communist guerillas, provided a timely reminder of the Convention’s purpose and urgency. See the discussion about the reasons for inclusion and omission of forced transfer at the 82nd meeting, 23 October 1948, as contained in Hirad Abtahi and Philippa Webb (eds), The Genocide Convention: The Travaux Préparatoires (Leiden; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008). On the removal of these children, see Loring M. Danforth and Riki Van Boeschoten, Children of the Greek Civil War: Refugees and the Politics of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 57 See Lemkin Papers, NYPL Collection, Box 3, Frame 373. 58 See Lemkin Papers, NYPL Collection, Box 2, Frames as follows: Frame 83: Belgian Congo; mentions mutilation and massacre of women and children; Frame 84: Bulgaria under the Turks; mentions ‘taking of kids’ to replenish Janissaries; Frame 87: Chios: ‘children into slavery’; Frame 90: Greeks V. Turks: ‘child collecting’; Frame 94: Hottentots; ‘child slavery’; Frame 96: Hungary under Turks; ‘stealing of children’; Frame 98: Plains Indians (US): ‘stealing of children, separation of families, prevention of births’; Frame 100: Janissaries; ‘transfer of children’; Frame 102: Jews, Poland, Modern times: ‘killing of children’; Frame 103: Jews, Russia, ‘taking of children’; Frame 105: Jews, Romania, modern times, ‘actions against children’; Frame 111: Serbs: ‘taking of children’ for Janissaries; Frame 112: Christians in Smyrna, ‘seizure of children’; Frame 113: South Africa: ‘stealing of children’; Frame 117: book outline, mentions ‘genocide in times of peace – kidnapping of children’; Frame 126: modern times, genocide; mentions again the list of coverage. See also Frame 964: stealing of

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59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67 68 69 70

71 72

children of slave labour in Tasmania; Frame 967: cruelty of soldiers and settlers; Frame 1010: natality in Tasmania and fate of ‘half-caste’ children; Frame 963: Children in Tasmania and half-caste children; Frame 964–966: stealing of children in Tasmania; Frame 894: trafficking in children in Natal (Southern Africa) as equivalent to slave trade; Frames 935–961: Lemkin on Tasmania; children specifically mentioned in the following documents: Frame 949: death of children; Frame 950: removal of last remaining Tasmanians to Oyster Cove including 10 children. Lemkin Papers, NYPL Collection, Box 2, Frame 152. Raphael Lemkin, ‘Orphans of Living Parents: A Comparative Legal and Sociological View’, Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 10, No. 5, Summer 1944, pp. 834–54. Lemkin, ‘Orphans of Living Parents’, p. 835. Tara Zahra, ‘A Human Treasure: Europe’s Displaced Children Between Nationalism and Internationalism’, Past and Present (2011), Supplement 6, p. 334. See Isabel Heinemann, ‘“Until the Last Drop of Good Blood”: the Kidnapping of “Racially Valuable” Children and Nazi Racial Policy in Occupied Eastern Europe’, in Moses, Genocide and Settler Society, pp. 244–66. Inga Clendinnen, ‘First contact’, The Australian’s Review of Books, May 2001, pp. 6–7. Anna Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous Histories: Cases from the History of Australia’s Stolen Generations’, Journal of Social History, Summer 2011, pp. 1033–4. For a general narrative see Mark Davis, The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2008), and the specific, see A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and the Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Empire, Colony, Genocide: Conquest, Occupation, and Subaltern Resistance in World History (New York: Berghahn Books, 2008). Robert van Krieken, ‘Rethinking Cultural Genocide: Aboriginal Child Removal and SettlerColonial State’, Oceania, Vol. 75, No. 2, December 2004, p. 142. Haebich, ‘Forgetting Indigenous Histories’, p. 1034. Tony Barta, ‘Sorry, and not sorry, in Australia: how the apology to the stolen generations buried a history of genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2008, p. 209. Neil Levi, ‘“No Sensible Comparison”? The Place of the Holocaust in Australia’s History Wars’, History & Memory, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2007, pp. 124–56. Levi noted that comparisons between the Holocaust and injustices perpetrated against indigenous groups in settler societies were rather unhelpful attempts at transnational remembrance as local, colonial histories were measured against a European example of unprecedented destruction. Russell McGregor, ‘Governance, not Genocide: Aboriginal Assimilation in the Postwar era’, in A. Dirk Moses (ed.), Genocide and Settler Society, pp. 293–4. Robert van Krieken, ‘The “Stolen Generations” and Cultural Genocide: The Forced Removal of Australian Indigenous Children from their Families and its Implications for the Sociology of Childhood’, Childhood, Vol. 6, 1999, p. 302.

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5 TH E GRE AT PU RG E I N UK R A I NE The German Operation of the NKVD (1937–8) Volodymyr Semystyaha and Igor Tatarinov

25 July 2012 was the 75th anniversary of the repressive actions against Soviet citizens of German ethnic origin. On that day in 1937, mass reprisals were initiated in accordance with the decree No. 00439, issued by the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD). The discovery of previously secret archival documents after the collapse of the USSR has yet to reduce the gaps in our understanding of the mechanism of reprisals committed by the Soviet secret service. The fate of thousands of political victims of the Soviet regime remains unknown, and their relatives still wait for their rehabilitation. The politics of terror against Ukrainian Germans undertaken by the Soviet secret services during the Purges remains a pressing scholarly issue. During the Soviet era, the German population in Ukraine diminished fifteen-fold. The official data of the 1937 census showed over 408,000 ethnic Germans, or 1.5% of the population, while nowadays their number does not exceed 33,000 (0.1%) in Ukraine. After the 1991 wave of democratization in Ukrainian society, the opportunity arose to explore the era of political reprisals. In particular, a number of scholars such as Boris Chirko, Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi, Yuri Shapoval, Viktor Chentsov, Serhii Bilokin’, Volodymyr Semystyaha and Mark Junge1 studied the ethnic dimension of the Great Terror. Their access to the documents of the Soviet secret services allowed them to conduct research on this tragic page in Ukrainian twentieth-century history. Very important information is concentrated in a new multivolume edition of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory.2 European and American historians have also addressed the ethnic nature of political repressions in Ukraine. The studies of Robert Conquest, David L. Hoffman, Hiroaki Kuromiya, Norman M. Naimark, Robert Tarston, Raphael Lemkin, Timothy D. Snyder, Lennart Samuelson3 and others significantly enriched the historiography of the issue. Special mention should be made of the fundamental work by Terry Martin.4 Their works are mainly based on archival materials and the memoirs of eyewitnesses. Noteworthy too is the research conducted by Russian scholars Nikita Okhotin and Arsenii Roginskii on the actual archival documents, which produced a comprehensive study on the NKVD’s special anti-German operation.5 However, they approached the issue within the overall Soviet context without consideration of specific features of the Ukrainian SSR. What is more, there is still no generalizing study on the punitive actions taken against the Ukrainian Germans. Therefore, we will attempt not only to summarize the achievements of researchers in this area and include little-known archival documents, but also to highlight the course and consequences of the anti-German special operations of the Soviet secret service in Ukraine. 55

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Planning anti-German special operations Ukraine occupied a geographically strategic position, and in view of the possible war with the neighboring countries the ‘cleansing’ of the republic was considered a very important task. However, the main objective of the anti-German operation was to clean the public administration and the spheres directly associated with country’s defensive capabilities (military defense, engineering, coal mining, oil and chemical industry, black and colored metallurgy, transport, power stations and some other areas). The planning and implementation of the anti-German NKVD operations were preceded by serious preparatory work and specific events. The 1932–33 Ukrainian crisis greatly intensified Soviet concerns over cross-border ethnic ties. Finally, the rise of Hitler and the German–Polish nonaggression pact of January 1934 focused Soviet xenophobia on the western border regions, inhabited by Poles and Germans.6 Traditional Soviet xenophobia and the geographic dispersal of the Germans in the Ukraine predetermined the repression of this group. This process began with the anti-German and antiPolish campaigns during the 1933 Ukrainian terror. It took on all-union dimensions with the 5 November 1934 Politburo decree ‘On the Battle with Counter-Revolutionary Fascist Elements in the German Colonies’, which led to mass arrests and show trials not only in Ukraine but also in central territories such as the Slavgorod German raion in Siberia.7 One year before the Great Terror, in 1936, about 15,000 Polish and German families (more than 65,000 people) were deported from Ukraine, adjacent to the Polish border. The operation had been inspired by a decree of the Politburo of the CPSU. At the session on 20 July 1937 (P51/324), Joseph Stalin personally wrote a resolution and attached to it a handwritten note on a small piece of paper: ‘To arrest all Germans at our military, paramilitary and chemical plants, power plants and construction places in all regions’, stressing the words ‘all’ and ‘to arrest’. Stalin instructed the Chief of the NKVD of the USSR Nikolai Yezhov8 to give immediate orders to the NKVD to arrest all Germans working at defence plants (artillery, rifle, machine gun, cartridge, powder, etc.) and send some of them out of the state. The copy of the order had to be sent to the Central Committee. It was ordered to report on the procedures of arrests and the numbers of those arrested on a daily basis.9 The resolution was signed by Politburo members V. Chubar’, N. Yezhov, V. Molotov, K. Voroshilov, L. Kaganovich and A. Mikoian. On 25 July 1937, operational order No. 00439 was issued and on the same day telegrams were sent to all departments of the NKVD. Within four days, large-scale arrests began. By the autumn of 1937, they grew into a massive punitive operation. The preamble to the order justified the planned operation: The latest secret and investigation materials showed that the German General Staff and the Gestapo in large scale organized espionage and sabotage activities at the most important, primarily military, industrial enterprises, using the German nationals. The spy network formed by the German citizens even now is carrying out malicious acts and sabotage and is paying much attention to diversions for war time.10 To prevent these actions, the commissar ordered the arrest of all German citizens who lived in the USSR and worked or used to work in military industries and on the railways. The arrests were to be completed in five days, starting on 29 July. After a ‘very careful’ investigation the cases were to be sent to the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court (Voiennaia 56

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Kollegiia Verkhovnogo Suda)11 or Special Council (Spetsial’noie Soveshchaniie) of the NKVD. The repressive institutions took action not only against German citizens. The text of the document stated: ‘if German agents, spies, saboteurs and terrorists among Soviet citizens and nationals of other countries are identified during the investigation again, they must be immediately arrested, regardless of their place of work’.12 The Soviet totalitarian regime treated Germans as potential spies and traitors, whose malicious activities had to be eradicated by all means.13 As Hiroaki Kuromiya states, the Soviet government deemed ethnic Germans a particular threat because of their suspected ties to and sympathies with Nazi Germany. Germans in Ukraine were all the more suspect as throughout the terrible time of the collectivization campaign and the 1932–33 Great Famine in Ukraine they had corresponded with their relations in Germany and the USA in the hope of receiving material aid and possibly emigrating.14 A wide range of methods, from job dismissals on ethnic ground to arrests and imprisonment, were prescribed. The presence of Germans among the management of enterprises and institutions was seen as ‘contamination’ that had to be eliminated. Fear about potential ‘sabotage’ and ‘espionage’ by Germans dominated the Ukrainian party and the nomenclature elite in early 1937. In particular, a member of the Politburo of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of Ukraine, First Secretary of the Dnipropetrovs’k Regional Committee Mendel’ Khataievych said: The German intelligence service has an excellent foothold in Dnipropetrovs’k region. Over 10,000 Germans live in Zaporizhzhia area. We know that national feelings are very strongly developed among the German population, many of them have a commitment to their ‘Fatherland’, no matter who would govern it – Hitler or anyone else. And they can easily find sufficient numbers to do their work among 10,000 people.15 Sarkis Sarkisov, who was a candidate member of Politburo of the Communist Party of Ukraine and the First Secretary of the Donetsk Regional Committee, also came forward with accusations against the German population. Having expressed the concern that in their fight with the ‘Trotskyists’ and other ‘pests’, the party authorities and the NKVD were not sufficiently vigilant, Sarkisov said that ‘in terms of disclosure of the German fascists extensive work had been done’. He continued: The Germans who cooperate with the Nazis spread their net at large power plants of Donbas. Fascist groups were exposed by the NKVD. I think that here we should be more resolute about the deportation of many Germans from the Donbas. We do not need them. Our people, good managers, will do well without them . . . It has been a long time since they settled down in Donbas. We must send the Germans away. Of course, there might be exceptions, but generally we should get rid of them.16 Eventually, Khataievych and Sarkisov were arrested on 7–9 July 1937 as the organizers of the ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite fascist gang’, and both shot dead in the autumn. Stalin’s regime often tried to cover the traces of crime by eliminating their former 57

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supporters who were unwanted witnesses. There is no doubt that in early 1937 Stalin had completely formed a general plan of punitive operations for the future. Along with the general cleansing of the party and state elite, which had already started, two other extensive operations designed to destroy a potential ‘fifth column’ played a significant role before the war. The first one was designed to ‘clean up’ the country and get rid of ‘former people’. That meant executing all ‘traditional’ enemies of the Soviet power (in the terminology of the NKVD, people with ‘a dubious social and political past’) – the kulaks, former landowners, the tsarist officials, white officers, clergymen, socialist revolutionaries, Mensheviks as well as hard-core criminals. Through mass arrests and shootings, the NKVD was to eliminate ‘the rebel base’ in the Soviet Union in case of war. The second operation was designed along national ‘lines’, and included the elimination of ‘spies and sabotage bases’ of the countries constituting the ‘capitalist encirclement’ of the USSR. The victims of reprisals would be foreign settlements, directly or indirectly linked to foreign countries. The most important of these were the Polish, Harbin-Japanese and German ‘lines’. Despite the fact that special anti-German operations started earlier than other massive national operations of the NKVD, they were implemented in that respective order. The German operation gained momentum only in the autumn of 1937. By that time, orders No. 00447 (the so-called kulak operation), No. 00485 (Polish operation) and No. 00486 (the reprisals against the wives and children of ‘enemies of the people’) were already being carried out in the republic. As for the German ‘line’, the NKVD confined itself to arrests only of German citizens during the summer of 1937, because the German operation was not as well prepared as the Polish or the Harbin ones. Moreover, German representation in the highest authorities of the USSR (in comparison with the Poles or Latvians) was negligible. This was the reason why questions were not raised about the fabrication of a ‘main case’ to justify the actions, as with the PMO (‘Polish Military Organization’ [see below]). The German operation began with the arrest of German citizens. On 6 August 1937, Yezhov reported to Joseph Stalin: The total number of German citizens arrested in the USSR was 340 individuals. In Moscow and Moscow region 130 persons, in Leningrad and Leningrad Region 45, in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic 52, in the Azov-Black Sea region 13 and in other republics and regions 24 people. . . . As a result, the investigation has now uncovered 19 spy-sabotage residencies at several major industrial enterprises. . . . From July 29 to August 28 472 citizens of Germany were arrested in the USSR: in Moscow and Moscow region 130, Leningrad and Leningrad region 79, the Ukrainian SSR 106, the Azov-Black Sea region 54, Sverdlovsk region 26, and other areas of the republic 77.17 As can be seen, arrests after 6 August took place only in Leningrad, Ukraine and the Azov-Black Sea region. The documents show that in early autumn of 1937 the primary task of order No. 00439, which was to clean up military factories and workshops, was almost complete.

The implementation of NKVD Order No. 00439 in Ukraine According to the all-USSR population census, 28,397,658 people lived in the Ukrainian SSR in 1937. Ukrainians constituted 78.2% or 22 million of the total population. 58

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Ukrainian Germans made up 1.5% of the population of the republic, or 401,880 people (out of 1,151,601 Germans living in the USSR).18 The majority of the Ukrainian Germans lived in Donetsk (which until July 1938 also included the territory of the Luhansk region), Dnipropetrovs’k, Odesa, Zhytomyr, Mykolaiv, Kyiv, Kharkiv and the Crimean Republic. Arrests among the Ukrainian Germans started at the end of September 1937. A certain standard for all the mass national operations in 1937–8 was the Polish model, of which Commissar of the NKVD Yezhov was particularly ‘proud’. In fact, he was personally involved in its planning and implementation. The Order No. 00485 about Polish operations included all Yezhov’s main instructions that formed the basis of further analogous orders for other national ‘lines’. Typically, the preamble to these orders usually consisted of claims about the revitalization of intelligence activities of the particular country on Soviet territory, which could possibly grow into sabotage and insurrectionary actions. The order always contained an exact list of the persons to be repressed and the areas that were to be ‘cleansed’ in the first instance, and determined the timing of operations and forms of reporting. A special procedure of conviction known as the ‘album’ was introduced to the practice of the NKVD for the first time.19 According to the ‘album’ procedure, after NKVD personnel had investigated local departments they compiled reports on each arrested person with a proposal for sentence (death penalty or imprisonment for 5–10 years), which were attached to a special list (the ‘album’). Then the submitted papers were signed by the head of the regional department of the NKVD and prosecutor, who supported or amended the proposed sentence. The album was then sent to Moscow for the final decision by the NKVD Commissar Nikolai Yezhov and the Prosecutor of the USSR, Andrei Vyshinskii. The sentences were executed and the ‘albums’ returned to local departments of the NKVD. The course of the German ‘line’ of reprisals was in principle identical to the ‘Polish model’. Similar categories of people were lined up for arrest, and the timing of operations, the type of sentences and the way they were executed, the reporting procedures, and so on were all the same. Moreover, the development of both operations at some point was defined by the same instructions. The mass anti-German operation began with the arrests of the same categories of the population that were arrested during the Polish operation. Arrested were former German prisoners of war, political refugees, German deserters, the ‘counter-revolutionary active’ (leaders) from the German national districts and others. Most of the arrested people were former German citizens who by the time of their arrest worked or used to work in a military industry or in transport. Among them were German engineers and workers who arrived in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s and then took Soviet citizenship. All of them were already required to be registered under the terms of order No. 00439, but their mass arrests began only within the framework of the ‘album’ German operations in the autumn of 1937. The reprisals also extended to former citizens of Germany who were not related to work in the military-strategic areas of the Soviet economy. Another category of political victims was made up of those connected with so-called ‘consular relations’. Everyone who maintained contacts with German diplomats in the USSR fell into this category. According to an instruction dated 1 February 1938, ‘consular relations’ were mentioned among other principal subjects of national operations. From then on, the ‘album’ procedure of conviction was formally applied to this category of political victims, which affected the overall scale of arrests. Former war prisoners from among the soldiers and officers of the tsarist army, who were in German 59

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captivity during the Second World War, were also subject to the order. Their arrests began in Ukraine following the arrests of former German prisoners of war. People who had previously worked for German companies were also considered a threat to Stalin’s regime. The pre-revolutionary employees of foreign joint stock companies, banks, industrial and commercial enterprises, or foreign correspondent offices, along with the employees of foreign concessions during the Soviet era were put on a special record as ‘suspects’ of the NKVD. The former employees of German firms were registered as especially suspicious. With the start of the repressive operations, this category became the first priority for the NKVD as the one that had an obvious (recorded in the questionnaire) relation to Germany. The prisoners’ wives were also repressed according to the ‘album’ procedure. The force of NKVD Order No. 00486 (15 August 1937) on reprisals against family members of ‘traitors of the motherland’ was extended to the families of those sentenced according to the ‘album’ operations. Under this order, ‘enemies’ wives, condemned by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union or by tribunals, were subject to arrest and imprisonment for up to eight years. The children of such people were given to relatives or sent to orphanages. But due to the limited accommodation possibilities for women in overcrowded prisons and the absence of orphanages, the NKVD eliminated all amendments relating to this order on 22 November 1937. By that time, about 4,500 wives had been arrested within the framework of Polish, Harbin and German operations in Ukraine. German prisoners who were already in prison for spying for Germany were suppressed again. They could not be released. Instead, just two months before their sentence was due to end the prison submitted a special memorandum on them to the NKVD. The special committee of the NKVD then sentenced them to a new term. Most prisoners with any connections with Germany were shot – usually by a verdict of regional NKVD troikas20 or in accordance with order No. 00447.21 Therefore, the specific directives and orders of the NKVD covered almost all categories and social groups of Ukrainian Germans. It is easy to see that all of the categories have one thing in common, namely a real or imagined connection with Germany. The suspects were all inhabitants of Ukraine who were born, studied, worked or lived in Germany; those who had gone on official business trips there, had contacts with German relatives, friends or colleagues, communicated with German citizens working in the USSR, cooperated with German firms, were former prisoners of war and so on. Even so, membership of this high-risk category did not necessarily mean inevitable repression. First of all, the NKVD took into account the place where the person worked or lived. The probability of applying repressive measures to residents increased if a person lived in the German national district, in the border area or regime territory, in the military districts and towns where the military garrisons were deployed. At the same time, in contrast to the strictly regulated and numerous circulars, orders and directives of the Polish operation, the regulatory framework of the antiGerman operation was much less specified, especially in its early stages. Except for order No. 00439, which was only tenuously related to subsequent mass operations against the Germans, no other documents relating to this operation have been found. Therefore, despite the similarities between the German and the Polish ‘lines’ of reprisals, questions remain regarding the specific features of the anti-German operations in Ukraine, particularly in its early stages. 60

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However, it is known that in the autumn of 1937 a directive arrived at the regional departments of the NKVD with instructions to intensify measures to identify the hostile elements among the German population. The NKVD focused primarily on large industrial regions of Ukraine and the places where many Germans lived (Luhansk, Donets’k, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovs’k, Zhytomyr, Odesa). Only in Ukraine, Moscow and Leningrad was ‘the presence of large terrorist espionage and subversive organizations’ uncovered. In general, until early November 1937, the anti-German operation was not mentioned in the secret documents of the NKVD (or, at least, no mention of it has yet been discovered). It appears for the first time in Yezhov’s telegram sent on 3 November 1937 to the central and local NKVD departments: The operations carried out against the anti-Soviet elements, Germans, Poles, Harbinians and the wives of Motherland traitors have been very slow in some areas . . . I order [you]: 1 2

To accelerate operations against the anti-Soviet elements, Germans, Poles, Harbinians, the wives Motherland traitors. To set the deadline for all these operations on 10 December, 1937. All arrests, investigations and re-assessments of all investigated cases must be completed by this date.22

In accordance with the final data for 1937, two-thirds of the Soviet Germans who were arrested by the ‘album’ procedure came from the Ukrainian SSR. There is every reason to believe that the anti-German operation started on a massive scale in Ukraine. Besides, about one-third of the Soviet Germans lived within the territory of the republic. Overall, according to the reports of the NKVD’s regional departments in the Ukrainian SSR by the end of 1937 some 16,228 ethnic Germans had been arrested.23 It appears that the majority of those arrested by order No. 00439 were arrested during November and December 1937. The tactic of strategic cleansing of German settlement areas of so-called anti-Soviet elements was a permanent component of Soviet state security operations. In 1936/7 such tactics were applied, for example, in the Dnipropetrovs’k region. G. Dehesh, a smith on a collective farm in the village of Bliumenport in the Molochansk district, was accused of being a leader of a German terrorist youth group. A. Gauss from the NovoNikolaevs’k district was accused both of spreading anti-Soviet propaganda among farmers and of attempting to create a rebel union. Documents show that during the anti-German operations in Dnipropetrovs’k 3,689 Germans were arrested. Of those 72% (2,648 people) were arrested in 1938.24 The scientific and technical intelligentsia did not escape reprisals. In particular, on 19 October 1937, the joint commission of the NKVD and the Office of Public Procurator of the USSR condemned a toolroom foreman, V. Runge, to death.25 On 4 November 1937 the special committee of the NKVD deported Y. Schweitzer, an engineer in charge of technical control, outside the territory of Ukraine. A similar decision was taken on 17 November regarding Y. Fel’dhen, the foreman of a new steam train shop. At the time of their arrest these specialists were not citizens of the USSR, even though they were working at a strategic Soviet enterprise – the October Revolution Voroshilovgrad Locomotive plant.26 On 25 September 1938 the electrician of this plant, F. Prinz, was sentenced to death by Troika of the NKVD in the 61

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Voroshilovgrad Region.27 Apparently, the Soviet punitive institutions often applied capital punishment to Germans who were citizens of the USSR, whereas foreign citizens were typically only deported. The NKVD’s officers found spies and counter-revolutionaries among Germans in all sectors of the economy. In particular, among railway workers in Dnipropetrovs’k those repressed in 1937 on charges of ‘a German counter-revolution’ included: in car repair factories – 76 Germans, at intrafactory transport – 17, in other railway facilities – 64. According to the NKVD version, the headquarters of German counter-revolutionary organization functioned out of the ‘Kryvorizhstal’ and ‘Kommunar’ plants. It was connected with the German Consulate in Kharkiv, which allegedly controlled assault troops in the German-populated colonies (Khortytsia, Shyroke, Vodiane) and formed a militant group that was preparing a terrorist act against the Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev.28 In the Donetsk region the NKVD ‘detected’ a German military-fascist organization and ‘found out’ that it was headed by German spies: M. Sommer, a former member of the CPSU; political emigrants A. Holz and B. Bekhte-Blatchik, who were members of the Communist Party of Germany; K. Martens, formerly one of the leaders of the Mennonite movement; and J. Schlunk, an instructor for national minorities of the regional department of education. In the opinion of the investigators, the organization was preparing for anti-state actions in the future war. All Germans were arrested and sentenced.29 The departments of NKVD worked systematically down the SouthDonetsk railway. A memorandum of the NKVD entitled ‘On the results of the efforts to eliminate and destroy counter-revolutionary forces and anti-Soviet elements in the South-Donetsk railway’ illustrates that the facts of the so-called German espionage were used to fabricate four cases. The first case involved a group of counter-revolutionaries, which operated from the Ilovays’k and Iasynuvata railway terminals. It was headed by workers C. Naiman and R. Brod from the Ilovays’k station. It was connected to the ‘National Union of the Germans of Ukraine’ and had allegedly been preparing terrorist acts against the leaders of the CPSU and the Soviet government, collected intelligence information, and organized industrial accidents. The Military Tribunal accused 105 people involved in this case.30 The next case, ‘Haak and others’, also comprised fictitious facts. From the official investigation: ‘this organization of 20 individuals headed by German spy Haak and the local teacher Koch acted from the Voroshilovgrad railway terminals. It planned to arrange for the train to crash on the day of the twentieth anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution.’ All suspects were arrested and sentenced. According to Ukrainian scholars, the total number of arrested Germans was 4,265 in Donbas, 3,608 of whom (84.6%) were shot during the years of the Great Terror.31 In 1937, the NKVD arrested on various counts of so-called espionage activities 155 ethnic Germans in the Vinnytsia oblast’, 259 in Chernihiv, 828 in Mykolaiv, 77 in Poltava, and 1,558 in the Zhytomyr oblast’.32 The operations designed to eliminate military-fascist conspiracies were also applied to Soviet military personnel of German nationality. Thus, O. Gump-Tomskyi, the head of the political department of the 13th Air Brigade stationed in the Dnipropetrovs’k region, was arrested and shot for being a secret Nazi agent in the Red Army. In the ‘A. Weininger’ case, A. Bornshtedt, the Chief of Staff of the 123rd Infantry Regiment was arrested and shot.33 But the documents show that capital punishment was not applied to all arrested military personnel of the Air Force. In particular, the instructor-pilot of the Voroshilovgrad military school of pilots A. Schmidt, who at the time of his arrest 62

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was a member of the Communist Party, was only sentenced to 7 years of imprisonment by the Military tribunal of the Kharkov Military District on 18 October 1938.34 Among the arrested there were many young Germans. The prosecutors of the NKVD titled the cases ‘Enemies’, ‘Friends’, ‘Heirs’ and others. The charges were based on alleged communication between young people and rich peasants or kulaks, counter-revolutionaries and other individuals who were potentially dangerous to the existing regime. In the case titled ‘Jugend’ six young adults were arrested who had allegedly been recruiting rebellious personnel. Maierchenko [Maier] in the ‘Kampf’ case, as a son ‘of an arrested resident of the German secret service’, among 12 others, was accused of maintaining correspondence with the German ‘Society to aid the Germans living in the USSR’.35 The documents show that quite often people were arrested for no reason. For example, a 20-year-old native of Voroshilovgrad, A. Fisler, worked as hydraulic presser at the Voroshylovhrad plant. Arbitrarily arrested in 1937, he was condemned to death by the NKVD Commission and the Prosecutor of the USSR on 4 March 1938, and executed on 1 April.36 Knowing German, as well as teaching it, also constituted a threat to other Soviet national groups. For example, A. Paranchak, a Ukrainian teacher of German at a school near coal mine No. 4 in Perevals’k, was sentenced to death on 26 September 1937 and shot on the same day. N. Bartmanskii, an ethnic Ukrainian who taught Ukrainian and German at the Rubizhne Chemical Institute, was sentenced to death on 16 November 1937 and shot on 5 January 1938.37 A Jewish teacher of German from Krasnyi Luch Technical College, G. Shamzon, was also sentenced to death by a troika of Voroshylovhrad NKVD on 17 September 1938.38 There was a rather paradoxical system of reprisals applied to the family members of those arrested for treason. Typically, they were arrested and released from custody a few months later for lack of sufficient evidence. For example, V. Pfeifer, a farmer on the ‘Rote Fahne’ collective farm, was arrested as a family member of someone who had been detained for treason on 1 November 1937. By 27 February 1938, he was released from custody. Another person from the same farm, K. Pfeifer, was arrested on similar charges, and by 15 March 1938 the criminal case against her was closed and she was released from custody. K. A. Pfunt was arrested on the same day on a nearby Telman farm and released four months later. Similarly, a housewife K. J. Pfunt was under investigation for 3 months. Her case was closed for insufficient evidence to support the charges against her and she was released from custody.39 According to the memoirs of those who witnessed the execution of the Schmidt family of Ukrainian Germans in Luhansk (Voroshilovhrad), the victims were forced to dig a pit for their communal grave. The victims, who until the end did not believe that they would be shot, were denied food and water, brutally beaten with rifle butts, and berated as enemies of Soviet power. Witnesses claim that they shot the fathers and sons first, who did not even try to escape, knowing that the rest of the family would be punished. From there the women relatives were required to publicly and in writing denounce their arrested husbands, fathers, brothers and sons. High school students who did not want to denounce their arrested relatives were kicked out of the Komsomol, expelled from school, and deprived of labour and civil rights.40 Thus, out of all those arrested in Ukraine, Germans made up a very large group, being the third largest numerically after Ukrainians and Poles. They were accused of criminal activities, administrative and economic crimes, counter-revolutionary activities, treason, participating in the kulak groups and rural unions, campaigning activities 63

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and so forth. Germans were the second largest ethnic group in the republic among those accused of White counter-revolutionary activities. However, when considering the number of those arrested for non-political reasons Germans made up a much smaller contingent than did Ukrainians, Russians and Jews. Among those arrested for mismanagement Germans made up less than half a percent: 0.6% for speculation, 0.8% for embezzlement, 0.9% for bribery and corruption, 1% for abuse of power, and 2.2% for negligence.41

Reprisals against German citizens It is important to also mention the German citizens against whom the operational NKVD Order No. 00439 was initially directed. According to the directive documents, Germans who were not Soviet citizens were also registered and arrested. According to the reports of the regional NKVD departments in Ukraine, 16,228 Germans were arrested in 1937, comprising 10.2% of all arrests made that year.42 Yet these figures only concern Germans who were Soviet citizens. It is clear that there would have been few Germans in Ukraine who would have had foreign citizenship, so Order No. 00439 referred primarily to ordinary Ukrainian Germans. When put into context, these figures look especially terrifying. While the German population before the Great Terror reached 1.5% of the total population of Ukraine, their share among those arrested exceeded 10%. One of the instruments used to eliminate Germans who were citizens of foreign countries (Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland) was administrative exclusion from the country. During the second half of 1937, the NKVD of the USSR sent a letter demanding that local operatives take strategic measures to remove foreign citizens from the Soviet Union, particularly those individuals suspected of espionage and counter-revolutionary activities. The document required that all persons from the special record of NKVD be included in the list of German subjects who were to be sent out of the country, and in some cases to be arrested and deported. Political emigrants, for whom preparatory work had already been completed and appropriate measures taken, were dealt with separately and were an exception. Refusal to extend a residence permit served as one way to force Germans with foreign citizenship out of Ukraine in the spring and summer of 1937, although it did not happen very often. Most of these actions took place in the border areas or in regions with special status. Massive operations, which began in August 1937, immediately aggravated the issue of ‘foreigners’. This prompted the NKVD to release Instruction No. 68 ‘On foreigners’ on 22 August 1937. The instruction specified how foreigners would be treated. On the one hand, it was believed that the vast majority of foreign citizens residing in the USSR were organizers of espionage and sabotage. On the other hand the intelligence-investigative work of NKVD was to remain the primary means of combating these criminal activities. In addition, the Instruction stressed the importance of administrative measures in reducing the activities of spy and sabotage groups. This Instruction, aside from the option of refusing to renew a residence permit after its expiration, presupposed the provision of short-term entry visas to foreigners. First and foremost, it halted the practice of extending residence permits to citizens of Germany, Poland, Japan, Italy and Austria residing in the Soviet Union.43 Another important area of repression against German citizens was the weakening of their presence in the country; which, conducted by NKVD, aimed at the actual isolation of foreign diplomatic missions in the USSR. Instructions were given in the spring 64

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of 1937 about a ‘deep examining’ of embassy and consulate employees, and detection and ‘examining’ of all their friends. It should be noted that the category of ‘consular relations’ in Order No. 00485 was not mentioned directly. The arrests of these people were presupposed by earlier instructions. During the first months of the mass operations the heads of the local NKVD departments acted on their own accord without any additional instructions. The German embassies, missions and consulates, as well as the apartments and dormitories of their employees, and the theatres, clubs, restaurants and private residences visited by them were put under ‘continuous surveillance’. At the same time, NKVD agents were ordered to prevent any communication between the German embassy and consulates and Soviet citizens by means of carefully organized secret observation. They were then required to identify and apply extensive reprisals to all Soviet citizens connected with the personnel of foreign diplomatic missions and those who visited their offices and homes. Those foreign citizens who had suspicious links with the diplomatic representations of their countries also had to be arrested. Permission for the arrest of foreign citizens was issued by NKVD of the USSR. Such actions made it nearly impossible for many foreign institutions to continue their work in the USSR. For example, by mid-November 1937 only two (in Kyiv and Novosibirsk) out of seven German consulates in the USSR were functioning, and by May 1938 they too had closed.44 It should be noted that executions of German citizens – with the exception of political immigrants – during the Great Purges were not carried out on a large scale, as the majority of arrested German citizens were sent to Germany after their investigations. This practice of expatriation which had been limited in early 1937 was resumed in the fall. According to the data of the German embassy in Moscow, 593 individuals were sent to Germany from November 1937 to December 1938. In general throughout 1937–8 about 620 people were sent to Germany. This number comprises one-third of all those condemned to exile abroad by the Special Meeting of NKVD USSR over the course of those two years. Comparing the number of those exiled with the number of arrested German citizens clearly shows that the vast majority of those arrested were sent abroad. This is another particular aspect of the anti-German operation. It can be explained by both a careful application of the death sentence and by foreign political considerations. However, N. Yezhov’s well-known promise to release all arrested German citizens and send them abroad, which was given to the German Ambassador Schulenburg in fall 1937, was not fully kept. At least 200 individuals from among those arrested were not permitted to leave the USSR. They found themselves in prisons and camps; some of them fell victim to cruel investigations or were sentenced to death, etc.45

The geography of operations Examining certain geographical features of repression of the German population in Ukraine, one can clearly see an uneven mapping of arrests throughout the various regions of Ukraine. In 1937 alone the Donetsk region witnessed 5,732 arrests or 35.3% of the total number of repressed Germans. Comparatively, in other regions of Ukraine there were: 3,689 arrested Germans (22.6%) in Dnipropetrovs’k, 1,558 (9.6%) in Odessa-Zhytomyr, 828 (5.1%) in Mykolaiv, 629 (3.9%) in Kiev, and 409 (2.5%) in Kharkiv. The total number of arrests made in these areas all together comprised 93.7% of all the Germans repressed that year.46 This disproportionality was caused by the disparity in levels of economic development in various regions throughout the country. Those most likely to be repressed came from qualified personnel in urban areas with highly developed industry 65

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and agriculture. One should note that there was also a high percentage of Germans in such areas. Therefore it fits that the more industrialized region of Donetsk had the highest number of the arrests, constituting more than one-third of all those repressed; in second place was the region of Dnipropetrovs’k, which had more than one-fifth; and third was the region of Odessa. The situation did not change in 1938, either. Analyzing archival sources, recent historiography and quantitative data, one can draw certain conclusions about the nature of the anti-German reprisals in the USSR. Understandably, Soviet Germans, with their specific mentality, economic and cultural self-sufficiency aroused feelings of deep fear and mistrust among the communist authorities of the Soviet state, which in turn became the main reason for the socio-economic and political pressure exercised by the Soviet regime on its subjects of German descent. Such repressive policies from year to year grew increasingly more inhuman. During Stalin’s economic modernization, the intellectual and economic German elite and German-speaking communities in Ukraine’s most urbanized regions suffered the most. The numerous examples of political reprisals stated above support this. At the same time the extremely low level of civil and criminal violations committed by ethnic Germans suggests that a different explanation must account for their political persecution. Formally, the national operations of the NKVD were to be completed by late 1937. However, according to decision No. P57/49 of the Politburo of the CPSU dated 31 January 1938, these operations were to be continued. The NKVD received instructions to proceed with operations aimed to defeat the espionage and sabotage groups of Poles, Latvians, Germans, Estonians, Finns, Greeks, Iranians, Harbinians, Chinese and Romanians, both foreign and Soviet citizens, until 15 April 1938. The extrajudicial character of case hearings, regardless of the citizenship of the individual arrested, also remained in effect until 15 April 1938.47 Thus, by a special decision of the Politburo of the CPSU the anti-German operation was extended to mid-April 1938 in all regions of the Soviet Union. The permission that Yezhov had granted for simplified prosecution of inquiries and ‘album conviction’ was renewed on a monthly basis until 1 August 1938. There was a significant rise in arrests in March and April, but the figure fell again almost immediately due to overcrowding in the prisons. As the antiGerman operation gained momentum at the beginning of 1938, most of the arrested Soviet citizens were sentenced by local departments of the NKVD in accordance with the ‘album procedure’. This being said, the local NKVD authorities neither troubled themselves with attempts to create the appearance of a ‘thorough investigation’ nor tried to process a number of the service documents required for submission of investigation reports. In total almost 68,000 Germans in the USSR were arrested. Among them the number of those sentenced reached 55,005, the majority of whom (41,898) were put to death, while 13,107 were imprisoned, exiled or deported. According to incomplete data, the number of Germans arrested in Ukraine amounted to 22,400, or 33% of the total number of those arrested across the Soviet Union. Of the 21,229 people convicted, 18,005 or 85% were sentenced to death and executed. The remaining 3,224 people were punished in other ways.48

Reprisals against the Ukrainian Germans in accordance with Order No. 00447 Up until late 1937 the national operations were among the most large-scale operations organized by the NKVD. Concurrently, the Soviet authorities carried out a massive 66

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operation directed against various social groups in the USSR, which was personally initiated by Stalin. On 2 July 1937, he informed the regional party leaders of the beginning of a campaign for the destruction and imprisonment of 270,000 citizens. The Soviet leader demanded that they submit to the Central Committee the number of people to be executed by the troikas’ decisions; the committee would then carry out the reprisals over a five-day period. On 4 July 1937, the chairman of Ukraine’s NKVD, Israel’ Leplevs’kyi49 ordered the regional departments to make lists of people to be executed until 6 July, and report back to him on 7 July. On 30 July N. Yezhov signed Operation Order No. 00447 ‘On reprisals of former kulaks, criminals, and other antiSoviet elements’. According to this document, about 820,000 people were imprisoned between August 1937 and November 1938. At least half a million were executed, and the rest were sent to the Gulag. This operation became the largest during the Great Terror. One could learn about it in detail only after the collapse of the USSR, when in 2010 the German Historical Institute in Moscow and Russian Political Encyclopedia published the two volumes ‘The corpses of the enemy for the benefit of people. The kulak operation in the Ukrainian SSR 1937–1941’. The book’s title uses a quotation from a speech by Nikita Khrushchev at the Party plenum in Moscow on 14 August 1937.50 Thus, in the words of Robert Conquest, ‘the discovery in the Soviet archives of the NKVD’s secret operational order No. 00447 has drastically changed our perception of Stalin’s Great Terror’.51 Ukrainian historian Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi proved that the order was preceded by thorough preparatory work. First of all, the regional departments of the NKVD summarized the data on those social categories which were to be arrested. This information was sent to the 8th department of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR, where it was summarized and sent to the 8th department of the NKVD of the USSR. In Moscow they prepared the final schedule of reprisals for the republics, territories and regions. Then the concrete numbers were incorporated into order No. 00447, and after that they were shaped as central executive orders. The local departments of the NKVD were supposed to turn those figures into reality.52 The document required local agents to assign all repressed kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements to one of two categories: a) Those elements most hostile to the Soviet regime that were to be subject to immediate arrest and, after consideration of their cases by the troikas, capital punishment. b) All other less active elements, which were also subject to arrest and imprisonment for a period of eight to ten years. According to registration details, the Chairman of the NKVD USSR and the heads of the regional and provincial offices approved the number of persons to be repressed in the country. In total, 31,800 people were to be arrested, 8,000 of whom were included in the first category, and 23,800 in the second.53 It is worth noting that during this operation the planned numbers were repeatedly raised and the terms of the operation extended. The operation was initially supposed to be completed in four months, but in fact it lasted from 5 August 1937 until November 1938. Each arrested individual had a case file, which included the arrest warrant, search protocol, a list of materials confiscated during the search, personal documents, a profile of the arrested, the protocol from the interrogation and a brief letter of accusation. The investigation was conducted in an accelerated and simplified manner. 67

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Investigation materials had to disclose all of the arrested individual’s contacts during the investigation. At the end of the investigation the case was sent to one of the regional troikas. Usually, the number of troikas functioning in the regional centres of Ukraine varied from 8 to 12. A troika included the head of the regional NKVD office, the regional prosecutor and the secretary of the regional committee of the Communist Party. The troika examined the investigation materials, which were collected separately for each arrested person or group, as well as every family that was subject to resettlement. Depending on the case materials and the degree of social danger posed by the individual, the troikas could transfer him or her from the second category into the first or vice versa. Typically, the troikas held the minutes of the proceedings and fixed the sentences taken for each accused person. The meetings took place behind closed doors and without the presence of the accused, leaving them no chance to put up a defence. The minutes of proceedings were then sent to the Chief of the Operation Group to be fulfilled. Extracts from the protocols were then attached to the case files for each prisoner. Operation order No. 00447 clearly regulated the procedure of how the sentence was to be carried out. Reconsiderations of the troika’s decisions were not allowed and the sentences were quickly executed. The executions were based on certified excerpts from the proceeding minutes of the troika with a brief explanation of the verdict for each convicted individual, along with a special order signed by the chairman of the troika. These documents were handed over to a person who would implement the final verdict. Sentences of the first category were exercised in accordance with the instructions of People’s Commissars of the NKVD and chief departments of the NKVD. The time and place of execution were to be kept secret. The documents confirming the execution, placed in a separate envelope, were attached to each case file. Convicted individuals from the second category were sent to the camps according to the orders given by the GULAG NKVD of the USSR. Reports covering the progress and results of these operations were sent every five days by telegraph and more detailed information was sent by mail.54 Aside from punitive troikas consisting of representatives of the NKVD, the Bolshevik Party and the public prosecutor’s office, there were also so-called militia’s troikas acting throughout Ukraine: special, passport, administrative and so on. They consisted of representatives of the NKVD, the prosecutor’s offices and the militia. Troikas of both types exchanged court cases. They punished only prisoners, though as a rule they acted arbitrarily and often abused their powers. Within the framework of NKVD operation order No. 00447, which was given on 5 August 1938, 5,567 Ukrainian Germans were sentenced for involvement in counter-revolutionary nationalist organizations. According to information provided by A. Nazarenko, the chief of the 1st special department of UDB of the NKVD of the USSR, 4,938 people were sentenced in line with the decisions of the Military collegiums of the NKVD by special procedure, 398 by the special troikas, 205 by the regular courts and 26 by the Special committee of the USSR.55 The idea that this operation in Ukraine was exercised with special brutality because of the ‘zealousness’ of the local leadership of the NKVD can be partially supported. In the recently published document ‘On the shortcomings in preparation and implementation of mass operations in Ukraine’, dated February 1938, Yezhov strongly criticized the leadership of the Ukrainian NKVD. Secret agents were rebuked for trying to pursue the quantitative characteristics of fulfilment while showing a generally poor 68

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level of investigation, insufficient work with suspects in order to obtain full confessions of their crimes and so on. The document recommended intensifying their work with nationalities, including Germans. Further reprisals envisioned the arrests of special immigrants from the border areas, deserters, former soldiers of the German and Austro-Hungarian armies, particularly former officers, prisoners of war who stayed in special German camps, activists of the Pan-German organizations (‘The Union of Mennonites’, ‘The Union of the colonists of the Germanic race’, ‘The Union of the Black Sea Germans’) as well as individuals associated with German diplomatic institutions establishments and employees of German firms.56 While from September 1937 to January 1938 4,059 Ukrainian Germans were repressed in accordance with order No. 00447, within the framework of the anti-German operation the number of those arrested reached 15,026. Only a fraction of the cases of arrested Ukrainian Germans were not related to the anti-German operation. Almost half of all of those arrested were rural inhabitants. Workers in heavy industry and state officials of various ranks each constituted about 15%. Transportation and defence industry workers taken together did not exceed 10%.57 Thus, in Ukraine the vast majority of all arrested Germans were farmers and heavy industry workers. L. Munvez, the UDB chief of the 8th division of the Ukrainian NKVD, produced a report dated by 12 January 1937 which covered anti-Soviet and counter-revolutionary groups of Germans liquidated by state security organs. In this note, one can find evidence about the individuals convicted for these crimes. Thus, in the Selz national area in the Odessa region a German fascist rebel organization was eliminated, one allegedly created in 1933 by the German resident Popper. In the opinion of the investigators, the Schtreifel brothers, who were kulaks, under Popper’s instructions, recruited 19 kulaks and former participants in anti-Soviet rebellions from the villages of Strasbourg and Baden to the rebel organization. Moreover, in the district centre of Selz the NKVD exposed a fascist rebel organization, which was supposedly created by German consular agents in Odessa. Its members carried out pro-Nazi propaganda and created rebel groups to fight the Soviet regime in a future war. All members of this group were arrested and sentenced.58 A report from the Odessa regional department of the NKVD regarding the political situation in German national districts of the region specified that due to historical circumstances, the majority of the German population had strongly opposed the socialist transformation in German villages for many years. This opposition was caused by the complex socio-economic structure of the German colonies in the past, which had predominantly kulak land tenure, a high percentage of kulak elements, total participation of the adult population in anti-Soviet uprisings in 1919, an especially strong influence of the clergy and so on. According to authorities of the Odessa NKVD department, the German population had been considered by the fascist secret service both as a source and base for its subversive activities in Soviet Ukraine. This fact was allegedly confirmed by all materials relating to the exposed underground fascist groups. Since 1933 in Spartak, Selz and Karl Liebknecht national districts 124 fascist, subversive and rebel organizations had been exposed and eliminated. In the entire Odessa region in June–August 1937 alone 49 fascist, subversive and insurgent organizations were eliminated, with over 800 people arrested. Of these, 580 were from the three national districts mentioned above. The analysis of the situation allegedly testified that all fascist underground organizations were founded by the German Consulate and the special agents of German intelligence, and that 69

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both the German Consulate and intelligence service in their recruiting activities were using a large espionage network. The local authorities were also deemed dangerous in the eyes of the Soviet regime. Thus, in the Selz district the secretary of the district committee of the Communist party Haftel, the secretary of the district Komsomol committee Baron and the chairman of the district executive committee Boldt were considered to be spies. The editor of the local newspaper Palosch-Schalei turned out to be a Trotskyist terrorist, likewise so did Fichtner, the head of the land department. In many regional organizations a number of German spies were uncovered as members of a Trotskyist organization. They also planned to deport from the German districts up to 5,000 families: 1,800 in the Spartak district, 1,800 in the Selz district, and 1,400 in the Karl-Liebknecht district.59 The same situation could be observed in other national regions of Ukraine.

The concluding stage of the punitive actions of 1937–8 Like other operations, the anti-German operation was suspended by joint decision No. P65/116 of the Politburo of the CPSU and the Council of People’s Commissars of the USSR on 17 November 1938. Arrests had to be conducted solely on the basis of a court or prosecutor’s decision. This document stated that ‘cleansing the country from rebel sabotage and espionage personnel played a positive role in ensuring the successful construction of socialism’. But one should not think that the problem of cleansing the Soviet Union of spies, wreckers, saboteurs and terrorists was resolved. ‘The task now lies in continuing a relentless fight against all enemies of the USSR, and [this fight] should be conducted with more effective and reliable methods.’60 The new Commissar of the NKVD USSR, Lavrentii Beria, issued a Special Order on 22 December 1938 which declared that all verdicts of the extraordinary authorities that were not carried out, or taken after 17 November 1938, were invalid. Under Beria’s leadership, 7,372 people were dismissed from the NKVD, 987 of whom were sentenced as part of the ‘struggle for the restoration of socialist legality’. The results of the Great Terror were summed up by Stalin and Molotov. They welcomed the action taken against internal party opposition, which consisted of the Trotskyites and bukharinists, kulaks, criminals, anti-Soviet elements and so on. However, they sharply criticized the ‘mistakes’ made by the NKVD and the public prosecutors. These mistakes, they admitted, resulted in the ‘violation of the revolutionary legitimacy’. In their opinion, such problems were inspired by enemies, who managed to infiltrate the NKVD and the prosecution office, thus decreasing Party control over both institutions. During the first half of 1938 alone, the Communist-Bolshevik regime hid the evidence of its crimes by executing about 700 employees of the NKVD, who were involved in the Purges. This was because, first, Stalin did not want living witnesses to the crimes; second, local Soviet authorities also tried to blame others for their crimes; third, new odious figures were striving for power. In particular, these figures were Lavrentii Beria and Andrei Vyshynskii, who reached the highest ranks in the NKVD and the Prosecutor’s office of the USSR respectively. Both of them were looking for any means to destroy their opponents. For example, the Head of the Ukrainian NKVD Vsevolod Balytskyi was shot on 27 November 1937. His successors both met violent ends: Israel’ Leplevs’kyi was shot on 28 July 1938, and Oleksander Uspens’kyi, who faked his own suicide in Kiev on 14 November 1938, was tracked down and shot on 27 January 1940. 70

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The same fate awaited many of the highest officers of the NKVD, who were blamed for the supposed excesses, which were in fact the substance of Stalin’s policy. Soviet socialism had become a tyranny where the tyrant’s power was demonstrated by his mastery of the politics of his own court.61 As we can see, the joint decision of the state and political structures of the Soviet Union on 17 November 1938 not only stopped the Great Terror, but also placed all responsibility for the Purges on the NKVD. In this way, the leadership of the country tried to avoid taking responsibility for the ‘genocide actions’ (to use Norman Naimark’s terminology)62 carried out against its own citizens, and to shift the blame solely onto NKVD authorities.

Conclusion In late 1938, the Great Terror came to a halt. Before it was over, 122,244 people had been sentenced to death and more than 73,200 to imprisonment by the NKVD alone. The process was supervised by Nikolai Yezhov (the Head of the NKVD USSR) and Oleksander Uspens’kyi (the Head of NKVD Ukrainian SSR), with the consent of the first secretary of the Central Committee Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev. Joseph Stalin personally oversaw this leadership, as demonstrated by the resolutions he sent in telegrams, demanding additional ‘quotas’ for death penalties. The time of the Great Terror struck a heavy blow to the German communities that existed in Ukraine. Deliberate policy aimed at the extermination of the best representatives of the German ethnic group led to the almost complete disappearance of this extremely talented, educated and industrious national group from Soviet Ukraine. Drawing on internationalist rhetoric, the ruling Bolshevik regime sought to cover up its punitive actions, which resulted in the destruction of the intellectual elite, and wiped out the national identity, culture and historical memory of the German people living in the USSR. The scale of anti-German operations conducted by the NKVD was defined, first, by the fact that there were many defence factories in Ukraine, and, second, by the presence of German national districts within the regional administrative-territorial structure of the republic. The size of the German population also mattered, but only in combination with the other aforementioned factors. The most wide-scale repressions were carried out in the areas where both of these two factors were present. Despite the strict regulations of Yezhov’s directives concerning the groups targeted by the reprisals, rules, procedures, etc., much of the final outcome of cases depended on how local NKVD authorities interpreted those directives and which direct orders they issued on the spot. Their personal preferences also largely determined which of the ‘national lines’ (all other factors being equal) received more attention, which target groups were expanded and so on. The nature and extent of reprisals in Ukraine was also influenced by the personal ambition of NKVD leaders (e.g. their desire to make a career for themselves or, by contrast, their desire not to stand out from the others); their caution (many tried not to exceed the ‘limits’ established by the centre); and their ‘initiative’, or, for that matter, their own personal cruelty. The latter reflected not only in the cruelty of the investigations which differed in various regions, but also on the verdicts. The average percentage of those shot within ‘the German line’ in the USSR was 76.17%.63 In Ukraine this figure was about 84%. Further research on the history of the Great 71

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Terror, its regional characteristics and mechanisms is still needed. Such studies, based on re-interpretation and conceptualization of previously unavailable documents and factual information, are important not only for retrospective analysis, but also for understanding Stalinism. Ukraine’s experience shows that by initiating arrests of its ‘enemies’, Soviet totalitarian rule pursued a policy of eliminating its real and potential opponents. It was this problem with which NKVD employees had to grapple; falsifying cases and trying to achieve ‘success’ at any cost. At the same time, eliminating enemies was part of a strategy aimed at the destruction of those ethnic and social groups which had been recorded as unreliable and dangerous. Thus, as a whole, this action cannot be considered a manifestation of unregulated or blind terror. By summarizing available scholarly data, we can operate with the following figures. Between 5 August 1937 and 1 July 1938, 197,945 people were convicted in the Ukrainian SSR, 133,376 of whom were Ukrainians, or 67.3%; 45,286 Poles (22.8%); and 25,752 Germans (13%). The final number of Ukrainian Germans repressed during the ‘Great Terror’ reached 26,000–28,000 people. Of these 22,000 were arrested within the framework of the anti-German operation, and the rest were repressed in other operations, primarily the anti-kulak (by order No. 00447). But of all the victims of the German operation, most of the victims were not Germans, as Timothy Snyder has pointed out.64 We agree with Snyder, who argues that the actions taken against the Germans ‘were milder than those against Soviet Poles, because Stalin seems not to have abandoned hope that Soviet–German relations could be improved’.65 But the number of victims in this operation was very high, with more than half of Germans arrested sentenced to death. There is no final figure or verified quantitative data relating to the development and consequences of the anti-German operations of the NKVD in Ukraine. Nowadays, due to the lack of statistical information and access to the archives of the secret intelligence service, it is quite impossible, unfortunately, to resolve the issue conclusively. Yet researchers continue to pursue this line of inquiry, along with other scholarly inquiries into other crimes of Stalin’s totalitarian repressive regime. At present, we can conclude that the anti-German operation of the NKVD; internal deportation; the tragic events of 1941–5 along with the assimilation policy of the USSR and the mass emigration of Germans in the 1980s and 1990s all contributed to the fact that in the most recent census the once-vibrant German population in Ukraine rested at 0.1% of the total population.

Appendix A. ‘Operation order of the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs No. 00439’ 25 July 1937. Moscow No. 00439 Recent intelligence and investigative materials prove that on a massive scale the German General Staff and the Gestapo organized espionage and sabotage work at the most important industry plants, and above all, at defensive industry plants. Towards this end they draw personnel from German citizens, who are settled there. In carrying out sabotage, these secret agents drawn from among the German citizens primarily focus on organizing sabotage during the war, and with this purpose in mind prepare a subversive network. In order to completely suppress these activities of the German secret service, I hereby order: 72

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1

That within three days from the date of receipt of this order the following lists of German citizens be compiled and sent to me: a) All those working at military plants and at plants within the defence departments, according to the attached list of plants; b) A separate list of German citizens who at different times worked at these plants and workshops, were later dismissed, but remained in the Soviet Union, regardless of where they currently work; c) A separate list of German citizens, working on railways. The lists should contain: the German citizen’s surname, first name and patronymic, his rank and the name of the enterprise where he works.

2

Starting from 29 July of this year, begin arresting all German citizens, documented by you and working at military plants and at plants within the defence departments; railways; those dismissed from these plants, if they reside in your republic, territory or region. All arrests should be completed within five days.

3

German political emigrants working at military plants and plants with the defence departments should be arrested only if they have retained German citizenship. To send me no later than by 5 August 1937 a detailed memorandum for each German political emigrant who took Soviet citizenship, indicating the compromising materials available so that a decision may be made regarding his or her arrest.

4

The investigations of the cases of those arrested should be conducted with special care. One should pursue the goal of uncovering heretofore unexposed German secret service agents, and of absolutely annihilating the sabotage network established by them in industry. Upon completion of the investigation, these cases should be sent to the NKVD for further examination by the Military Collegium or by the Special Committee of the NKVD.

5

In the course of the investigation the newly identified German agents, spies, saboteurs and terrorists, both from among Soviet citizens and citizens of other countries, should be immediately arrested, regardless of their place of work.

6

Along with the fulfilment of this operation, one should start a thorough accounting of all German citizens working in all other industrial enterprises, agriculture and government institutions, and former German citizens, who took Soviet citizenship and previously worked in arms factories and the defence departments of other enterprises. By 1 September (the regions of the Far East and Eastern Siberia – by 15 September) one should submit to me a complete memorandum for each of the specified persons, indicating the data and detailed compromising material so that a decision can be reached regarding his or her arrest.

7

Telegraph me on a daily basis by 12 PM to inform me about the course and the results of the operation, and to submit all materials obtained by the investigation.

8

This order to be put into force via telegraph. PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR FOR INTERNAL AFFAIRS OF THE USSR GENERAL COMMISSAR OF STATE SECURITY (N. Yezhov)66 [Handwritten signature is missing]. 73

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Notes 1 Borys Chirko, ‘Natsmen? Znachit’ voroh’, Z arkchiviv VUChK—GPU—NKVD—KGB, 1995, No. 1/2, pp. 95–112; Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi, Repressyvna dial’nist orhaniv derzhavnoï bezpeky SRSR v Ukraïni (kinets’ 1920-kh-1950-ti rr.). istoryko-statystychne doslidzhennia, (Donets’k National University, 2003); ‘Statystyka politychnykh repressii v Ukrains’kii SRR u 1937’, Z arkchiviv VUChK—GPU—NKVD—KGB, 2000, No. 2/4, pp. 103-112; ‘Repressiï za limitamy’, Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2006, No. 3, pp. 210–223; ‘Natsional’ni aspekty politychnykh repressii v Ukraïni u 1937 r.’, Ukrains’kyi istorychnyi zhurnal, 2001. No. 2, pp. 74–89; Yuri Shapoval, Ukraïna v dobu Velykoho teroru (1936–1938 rr.), (Kiev: Lybid’, 2009); Victor Chentsov, Tragicheskiie sud’by. Politicheskiie repressii protiv nemetskogo naseleniia Ukrainy v 1920–1930 gg (Moscow: Gotika, 1998); ‘Problema politicheskikh repressii protiv nemetskogo naseleniia Ukrainy v svete documentov NKVD’, Voprosy Nemetskoi istorii, The Papers of Ukrainian–German Conference (Dnipropetrovsk, 26–29 September, 1995), pp. 164–74; Serhii Bilokin’, Massovyi teror iak zasib derzhavnoho upravlinnia v URSR (1917–1941 rr.): dzhereloznavche doslidzhennia (Kiev: Institute of History of Ukraine, National Academy Sciences of Ukraine, 1999); Volodymyr Semystyaha, ‘The Role and Place of Secret Collaborators in the Informational Activity of the GPU – NKVD in the 1920s and 1930s (on the basics of materials of the Donbas region), La police politique en Union sovietique, 1918–1953’, Cahiers Du Monde Russe, Vol. 42, Nos. 2–4, 2001, pp. 231–44; Serhii Kokin, Mark Junge, Rolph Binner, Oleh Dovbnia, Berndt Bonvech, Iryna Smirnova, Gennadii Bordiugov. Edited by Mark Junge. Velikyi Teror v Ukraïni. ‘Kurkul’s’ka operatsiia 1937–1938 rr. u 2-ch chastynach, 2 vols (Kiev: Kyiv-Mohylians’ka Academia, 2010); Oleg Dovbnia, Liudmila Makarova, Sergey Kokin, Mark Junge, Rolf Binner, Irina Smirnova, Gennadii Bordiugov. Edited by Liudmila Makarova, Tcherez trupy vraga vo blago naroda. ‘Kulatskaia operatsiia v Ukrainskoi SSR 1937– 1941 gg., 2 vols (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2010). 2 Petro Tron’ko (ed.), Oleksander Reient, Yuri Danyliuck, Reabilitovani istoriieiu. 27 vols. Luhans’ka oblast’, 3 vols, Luhans’k, 2004–2008. 3 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); David L. Hoffman, Stalinism: the essential readings (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003); Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead: Stalin’s Great Terror in the 1930s (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s genocides (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010); Robert Thurston, Life and terror in Stalin’s Russia, 1934–1941 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); Raphael Lemkin, Soviet genocide in the Ukraine, 1953 (reprinted by Kashtan Press, Kingston, 2009); Vladimir Haustov, Lennart Samuel’son, Stalin, NKVD i repressii v 1936–1938 gg. (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009). 4 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923– 1939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 70, No. 4, December 1998, pp. 813–61. 5 Nikita Okhotin and Arsenii Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD v 1937–1938 gg’, Papers of International Scientific Conference, Nakazannyi narod. Repressii protiv rossiiskikh nemtsev v Sovetskom Soiuze v kontekste sovetskoi natsionalnoi politiki, Moscow, 18–20, November 1998, (Moscow: Zvenia, 1999). 6 Terry Martin, ‘The Origins of Soviet Ethnic Cleansing’, p. 847. 7 Ibid, p. 853. 8 Nikolai Ivanovich Yezhov or Ezhov (1 May 1895–4 February 1940) was the senior figure in the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) under Joseph Stalin during the period of the Great Purge. Chief of People’s Commissar for State Security (NKVD) on 27 January 1937–25 November 1938. 9 Okhotin and Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD’, p. 41. 10 Ibid, p. 43. 11 The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union (Rus.: Военная коллегия Верховного суда СССР) was created in 1924 by the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union as a court for the higher military and political personnel of the Red Army and Fleet. In addition it was an immediate supervisor of military tribunals and the supreme authority of military appeals. During 1926–48 the Chairman of the Collegium was Vasili Ulrikh. During the Great Purge of 1937–8 the Military Collegium tried relatively prominent figures, usually based on the lists approved personally by Joseph Stalin, the majority of Article 58 cases

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12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

having been processed extrajudicially by NKVD Troikas. In particular, the Military Collegium conducted the major Soviet show trials. Note available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Military_Collegium_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_Soviet_Union. Operative Order of the NKVD No. 00439, 25 July 1937. Available at: http://www. memorial.krsk.ru/DOKUMENT/USSR/370725.htm. – According to copies provided by the Archives of Federal Security Service of Russian Federation in St. Petersburg and Leningrad region. See Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Hiroaki Kuromiya, The Voices of the Dead, p. 141. Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi arkhiv hromads’kykh ob’iednan’ (TsDAHO) Ukraïni, fond 1, opys 1, sprava 526, arkush 339–40. TsDAHO, fond 1, opys 1, sprava 517, arkush 132–3. Okhotin and Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD’, pp. 47–8. ‘Vsesoiuznaia perepis’ naseleniia 1937 goda. Obshchie itogi’ (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007). The NKVD’s payroll method of processing the criminal cases and sentencing. Long lists of persons subject to capital punishment, and to the right letter ‘p’ or 5–10 years of imprisonment. NKVD troika or Troika, in Soviet Union history, were commissions consisting of three people who convicted people without trial. These commissions were employed as an instrument of extrajudicial punishment introduced to circumvent the legal system to enable quick execution or imprisonment. It began as an institution of the Cheka, then later became prominent again in the NKVD, when it was used during the Great Purge. Troikas are credited with the death sentences or exile of over 600,000 people. Note available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/NKVD_troika. Okhotin and Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD’, p. 51. Ibid, p. 56. Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi, ‘Natsional’ni aspekty politychnykh repressii’, p. 81. Derzhavnyi haluzevyi arkhiv sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny, fond 42, sprava 31, arkush 11 and 61–69. Petro Tron’ko (ed.), Reabilitovani istoriieiu, Vol. 3, p. 235. Ibid, p. 633. Ibid, Vol. 3, p. 167. Chentsov, Tragicheskiie sud’by, p. 105. Ibid, pp. 106–7. Grigorii Vasil’chuk, ‘Nemtsy Ukrainy v realiiakh Stalinskoi rekonstruktsii’, Etnicheskiie nemtsy v Rossii: istoricheskii phenomen naroda v puti, Papers of XII International Scientific Conference Moscow, 18–20 September 2008 (Moscow: ICSU Press, 2009). Zina Lyholobova ‘Naibil’sha chistka v Donbasi’, Z arkchiviv VUChK—GPU—NKVD—KGB, 1995, No. 1/2, pp. 177–89. Vasil’chuk, ‘Nemtsy Ukrainy’, p. 436. Chentsov, Tragicheskiie sud’by, p. 123. Tron’ko, Reabilitovani istoriieiu, Vol. 3, p. 674. Derzhavnyi haluzevyi arkhiv sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny, fond 42, sprava 2, arkush 115. Tron’ko, Reabilitovani istoriieiu, Vol. 3, p. 521. Tron’ko, Reabilitovani istoriieiu, Vol. 1, p. 316. Tron’ko, Reabilitovani istoriieiu, Vol. 3, p. 622. Ibid, pp. 180–81. Memoirs of eyewitnesses recorded and kept in the Luhansk church of St. torment. Guri, Samon and Aviv. Derzhavnyi haluzevyi arkhiv sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny, fond 42, sprava 2, arkush 3–4. Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi, ‘Natsional’ni aspekty politychnykh repressii’, p. 81. Okhotin and Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD’, pp. 52–4. Ibid, pp. 56–7. Ibid, p. 56. Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi, ‘Natsional’ni aspekty politychnykh repressii’, p. 81. Arkhiv Presidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, fond 3, opis’ 58, sprava 6, arkush 52. Okhotin and Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD’, p. 60.

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49 Israel’ Moiseievich Leplevs’kyi (1894–July 28 1938) was the head of the GPU in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, then People’s Commissar of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR from 14 June 1937 to 25 January 1938. He was arrested as participant of fascist conspiracy in the NKVD on 26 April 1938, and on 28 July he was shot according a sentence passed by the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR. 50 For more, see Sergei Kokin, Mark Junge, Tcherez trupy vraga vo blago naroda. 51 Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin’s purge of the thirties (New York: MacMillan, 1973). 52 Volodymyr Nikol’s’kyi, ‘Repressii za limitamy’, p. 217. 53 NKVD Order No. 00447, 30 July 1937 ‘About repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements’. Available at: http://www.memo.ru/history/document/0447. htm. 54 NKVD Order No. 00447, 30 July 1937 ‘About repression of former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements’. Available at: http://www.memo.ru/history/document/0447. htm. 55 Derzhavnyi haluzevyi arkhiv sluzhby bezpeky Ukraïny, fond 16, opys 31, sprava 105, arkush 284. 56 Serhii Kokin, Mark Junge, Velykyi Teror v Ukraïni, Vol. 1, pp. 30–31. 57 Serhii Kokin, Mark Junge, Velykyi Teror v Ukraïni, Vol. 2, p. 266. 58 Ibid, p. 258. 59 Borys Chirko, ‘Natsmen? Znachit’ voroh’, p. 105. 60 The decision of the Politburo of the CPSU No. P65/116, 17 November 1938. Available at: http://memo.ru/history/document. 61 Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 108. 62 Norman M. Naimark, Stalin’s genocides, p. 118. 63 Okhotin and Roginskii, ‘Iz istorii nemetskoi operatsii NKVD’, p. 61. 64 Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 113. 65 Ibid. 66 Operative Order of the NKVD No. 00439, 25 July 1937. Available at: http://www.memorial. krsk.ru/DOKUMENT/USSR/370725.htm. According to copies provided by the Archives of Federal Security Service of Russian Federation.

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6 EXPU L SIONS F R O M EA S T ER N E U ROPE AFT ER 1 9 4 5 Benjamin Lieberman

The end of the Second World War and the immediate postwar era brought a massive wave of expulsions and deportations across wide sections of Central, Eastern and South-eastern Europe that led to the forced migration of some 15 million people.1 These expulsions, commonly referred to as postwar expulsions, actually consisted of expulsions that began in the late phases of the war and continued into the postwar era. The postwar expulsions permanently remade the ethnic map of Europe, marking the end of many long established communities, and causing extensive suffering as well as death. But beyond scattered statements by members of victimized groups or those advocating on their behalf, these cases are seldom discussed as examples of genocide in historical literature. Indeed, much of the historical discussion of the expulsion and transfer of ethnic Germans, the largest of all the cases of forced migration in this period, draws a sharp distinction between such expulsion and genocide. It is striking just how often historians make this point. The historian Eagle Glassheim, for example warns against overstating comparisons of Nazi crimes and crimes carried out against Germans: ‘To suggest that the expulsions were a genocide akin to the Holocaust, however, is to underrate vastly the evil and totality of the Nazi “Final solution”.’2 Historian T. David Curp makes a similar distinction for the case of expulsions from Poland: ‘By avoiding the extreme of genocide and settling for driving off, rather than exterminating its enemies, Polish society . . . sowed seeds of future conflict.’3 Eric Langenbacher, in a volume on subaltern genocide, or genocides by the oppressed, explains that he does ‘not argue that the expulsion of Germans was a full-blown subaltern genocide’.4 In contrast, accounts of ethnic cleansing have cited the expulsion of Germans as a major example.5 Identifying the boundaries between expulsion and genocide, historians most often refer to the distinction between expulsion and deportation, on the one hand, and the destruction of European Jews, on the other hand. Thus R. M. Douglas, at the start of a detailed account of the expulsion and transfer of Germans, notes, ‘It is appropriate at the outset to state explicitly that no legitimate comparison can be drawn between the postwar expulsions and the appalling record of German offenses against Jews and other innocent victims between 1939 and 1945.’6 Douglas draws attention in particular to the issue of making comparisons: ‘whatever occurred after the war cannot possibly be equated to the atrocities perpetrated by the Germans during it’. Thomas Urban similarly makes a comparison to distinguish between postwar campaigns against Germans in lands that came under Polish authority and the German policies of the war: despite some similarities, he stresses, ‘there was no Polish extermination policy!’7 77

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Comparisons between the Holocaust and the expulsions of Germans are especially explosive because the victimization of Germans can be, and has been, employed to depict Germans as fellow victims, even though Germany launched the mass extermination of European Jews. The controversy centers not on the question of whether many Germans suffered as victims but again on the issue of comparisons between victims. Germans undoubtedly suffered from the war, and, as historian Robert Moeller explains, ‘the most important representatives of German victimhood were the women, men, and children who left or were driven out of Eastern Europe by the Red Army at the war’s end’, along with Germans held captive for years after the war.8 However, the question of how to place this victimization within the larger context of the war and German campaigns of extermination, including the Holocaust, caused heated dispute among historians in what became known as the Historikerstreit during the 1980s. Historians have reason to place the forced migrations of the war’s end and immediate postwar era outside the boundaries of genocide. The expulsions and transfer of ethnic Germans, and other contemporary cases of forced migration of Poles, Ukrainians, Italians, Hungarians and others did not demonstrate the intent to destroy targeted groups or their actual destruction. However, the historical consensus that distinguishes between genocide and these expulsions does not completely sever any meaningful relationship or connection to genocide. Indeed, the history of the postwar expulsions, so repeatedly held apart from genocide, draws attention to key issues in the study of genocide, including the challenge of drawing boundaries between genocide and those acts generally deemed to fall short in some way of genocide. If we are to continue to define postwar expulsions as somehow distinct from genocide, we need to do more than simply compare the postwar expulsions with one case of genocide (the Holocaust), no matter how central that case is to the study of genocide and the history of the Second World War.

Postwar expulsions to Germany For decades after the Second World War the postwar expulsions were chiefly recalled in countries with affected populations, in particular Germany. Standard narratives of the Second World War outside Germany gave little or no space to the forced migration and transfer of some 12–14 million Germans, but within the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), the expellees, as they became known, were a wellknown and active group in society and in politics. A Federal Ministry for the Expelled (Bundesministerium für Vertriebene) sponsored the collection of testimony by survivors, which led to the publication between 1954 and 1961 of several volumes of selected accounts. Outside of Germany, Alfred Maurice de Zayas wrote a series of books on the expulsions beginning in the 1970s.9 In the aftermath of German unification, renewed interest in the expulsions gave rise to books as well as documentaries, and a broader expansion of scholarship into expulsions followed the new wave of interest in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1990s and 2000s. The now abundant research into the expulsions provides a clear outline of the timing and execution of the postwar expulsions and population transfer. The flight, expulsion and transfer of Germans took place in three main phases in a process that began before the end of the war. In the first phase, Germans fled their homes, chiefly from areas in the path of the Soviet army, as the war’s end approached. The second phase followed German defeat. In so-called ‘wild’ expulsions, varied forces, including 78

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emerging authorities in states such as Poland and Czechoslovakia drove out many Germans. In the third and final phase, the Potsdam Agreement of 1945 provided for an ‘orderly and humane’ transfer of Germans. There were multiple causes for the expulsion and transfer of Germans. The idea of redrawing ethnic boundaries to create more homogenous nation states had gained increasing support during the interwar years. Most notably, the population exchange of Greeks and Turks under the Treaty of Lausanne of 1923 established a precedent for forcibly moving large populations on the ground of their identity. Once the idea was established, varied political and intellectual figures of the interwar years had floated schemes for removing unwanted populations from varied states, including Poland, Romania and Serbia, among others. The idea of shifting German populations out of Czechoslovakia, in particular, predated the Second World War. As Germany pressed for the handover of the Sudetenland in 1938, Czech political figures contemplated the place of Germans in a future Czechoslovakia. Edvard Beneš discussed a plan for making changes to the German–Czech border that would place 800,000–900,000 Germans in Germany if Germany also accepted another one million Germans from Czechoslovakia.10 After the division and occupation of Czechoslovakia’s remaining regions, Beneš from exile continued to discuss options for shifting borders and Germans. The Czech underground cited the prior Greek–Turkish population exchange as evidence to support a new population transfer.11 As for Poland, the idea of moving the Polish border westward was already under discussion in the interwar years.12 During the war, exile leaders of both Czechoslovakia and Poland increasingly came to favor the forced migration of Germans as a key policy for the future. Beneš, in London, advocated increasingly ambitious plans for removing Germans. At the same time resistance movements favored creating a Czechoslovakia without German citizens. Indeed, Beneš was by no means in the lead in advancing the most radical proposals.13 By 1943, Beneš was publicly discussing the idea of removing all ethnic Germans from a future Czechoslovakia. He met with Allied leaders to advocate for this position. In the case of Poland, exiles and the underground pushed for a new western border. Sikorski, Prime Minister of the Polish government in exile, lobbied during the war for a redrawing of borders to shift regions such as Königsberg, eastern Pomerania, and parts of Silesia and East Prussia to a future Poland.14 Stalin, meanwhile, made clear the Soviet intention to shift the old border with Poland to the west. This stance reinforced the logic of shifting the Polish–German border to the west as a kind of compensation for Poland. The use of forced migration to remake the future map won support at the highest levels of the Allied war effort. At a series of conferences at Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam, the Allied leaders set in motion a redrawing of maps.15 It was not just Stalin who advocated for moving the boundaries on the map. Historian Matthew James Frank has documented the growth of British public support for expelling Germans. Churchill would assent to Stalin’s plans at Teheran.16 Without official records or surveys that document public opinion, assessing the role of grassroots pressure in expulsion has caused more historical controversy. A growing body of historical research stresses the complex identities found in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the ambivalence displayed towards nationalism by many residents. At the same time, war and occupation sharpened ethnic and national hostility. As historian Tomás˘ Stanek explained, ‘the wave of national radicalism with sharp 79

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anti-German accents encompassed practically all sections of the Czech population’.17 External factors shaped the decision to expel Germans, but in Czechoslovakia, historian Eagle Glassheim observes, ‘local conditions and popular mentalities were essential ingredients of the Czechoslovak expulsion fury’. Despite such views, Czechs and Germans were in some cases still willing to live alongside each other. The war and occupation did not simply replace one kind of ethnic relationship (a pattern of coexistence) with another (a demand for homogenization and forced removal): rather, it intensified conflicting ideas about the future. The historical record points to multiple advocates of expulsion: exiles, Allied leaders, communists, non-communists and, in some cases, the public, but what stands out most is the breadth of assent to expulsion. A kind of ethnic cleansing consensus, reinforced by the experience of war, reached a high point by war’s end. Under these circumstances, the most intriguing question was not who advocated or agreed to expulsion, but rather who did not?

From flight to ‘wild’ expulsions Germans began to flee areas of the east before war’s end. In particular, the Soviet advance prompted an exodus from East Prussia as well as from areas to the west. German propaganda that depicted Soviet forces as racial and political enemies helped to propel the flight, and early contacts with Soviet forces and reports of killings and mistreatment made Germans ever more ready to take on the risks that flight carried. As early as the fall of 1944, some Germans began to evacuate South-eastern Europe, though many stayed. By late 1944, Germans started to flee from the Baltic and areas of Eastern Prussia, and a Soviet offensive in January 1945 induced still more Germans to leave their homes. Refugees crammed onto trains, clogged roads, and pressed into ports, looking for a place on a vessel. The voyage out of the east carried risks: Soviet forces sank ships, including the Wilhelm Gustloff with some 9,000 people on board. With German defeat, the so-called ‘wild’ expulsions began, in which Czech and Polish forces began to drive out Germans before any international agreement had been reached on German transfers. Czech and Polish military formations, partisans, and militias gathered up Germans from numerous communities and attempted to drive them across borders. The common use of the term ‘wild’ to describe this phase of expulsions may give rise to the misleading assumption that these expulsions were entirely unplanned: Czech and Polish military formations shared in the powerful ethnic cleansing consensus. Thus the Polish military and Polish communists championed expulsion. Jerzy Zie¸tek, acting provincial governor of Upper Silesia, for example, declared on 10 February 1945 that ‘We will deal with the German population inhabiting these lands, which have been Polish since before the beginning of time, just as the Germans taught us.’18 However, the ‘wild’ expulsions still had a chaotic quality. Soviet authorities did not always support the arrival of new refugees. Partisans in Yugoslavia, for their part, took part in ‘wild’ expulsions of Germans even after the Potsdam Agreement of August 1945. Selected incidents of violence gained particular notoriety during the era of ‘wild’ expulsions. At the end of May 1945, between 20,000 and 25,000 Germans were forced from their homes in Brno (Brünn), the capital of Moravia, and at least 10,000 were then marched in a column that stretched for many miles. Some 455 died at the small town of Pöhrlitz, 194 in nearby villages, and many more, according to Germans, 80

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died en route.19 This march stood out in 1945 because of the number of victims, but incidents of terror on a smaller scale not only inflicted suffering, but also had an exemplary quality in propelling Germans to leave when they had the chance to do so. Another especially notorious violent strike at Germans occurred in late July 1945 at the town of Ústi nad Labem, where Czechs killed some 200 Germans (some accounts gave far higher figures for the death toll) after explosions at a munitions dump that were blamed on alleged German sabotage. It is difficult to arrive at any firm total for the number of Germans forced out of their homes during the phase of ‘wild’ expulsions, partly because some of those expelled managed to return. At a minimum several hundred thousand Germans were forced out of Poland. Reports indicated that some 450,000 Germans had been expelled from Bohemia and another 110,000 from Moravia through August 1945.20 In all, the total number of Germans expelled outside of any international framework may have reached as high as 2 million combined from Czechoslovakia and Poland in 1945. Those Germans who remained in Czechoslovakia and Poland faced harsh conditions in the interim before their final expulsion under the terms of the Potsdam Agreement. While some were able to remain in their homes, many were evicted. Germans were placed on particular streets in some Polish cities, and a plan was even conceived of to make part of Breslau into a ghetto, though Gomutka, the Polish communist leader, stopped the project.21 Germans were sent into the countryside to work, and still others were placed in camps. There was great variation among the holding sites characterized as camps. In Bohemia, Germans were placed into emptied public buildings, schools, factories, and even sports fields among other sites. Contemporaries themselves referred to some of these as camps. The number of ethnic Germans held in camps in Czechoslovakia exceeded 200,000 by November 1945.22 There were no equivalents to the death camps designed for the rapid destruction of entire groups, but the term ‘concentration camp’ was employed, and the worst of the postwar camps were dangerous and deadly places. Beatings were commonplace, and prisoners in some cases received a meager diet of 1,000 calories a day, or even as low as 600 or 500 calories per day, a level wholly incapable of supporting life. An estimate at the lower range places the number of deaths in camps in Czechoslovakia at 6,615. Thousands died as well in camps in Poland. At the camp of Mystowice in Poland, 2,227 died in 1945, and the total number was likely higher. Conditions in camps in Yugoslavia were especially harsh: inmates received the most meager rations and many died, especially during the winter of 1945–6.23

‘Orderly and humane’ transfer The expulsions took a new form after the Potsdam Conference held between the main wartime Allies from July until 2 August 1945. Article 13 of the Potsdam Agreement stated ‘that the transfer to Germany of German populations, or elements thereof, remaining in Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, will have to be undertaken’. In principle, these transfers would take a new form. The United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union agreed that ‘any transfers that take place should be effected in an orderly and humane manner’. In November 1945 the Allied Control Council agreed to the transfer of 6,650,000 Germans to the Allied occupation zones in Germany. Some 3.5 million were to be transferred from western Poland to the Soviet and British zones. 81

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Another 3,150,000 Germans were to be transferred from Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria to the American, Soviet and French zones. A very rough schedule called for dividing up the transfers by percentages of the total per month, allowing for ‘changes on account of the weather or transport, and after more information is received about the quantity of population transferred’. Carried out with rudimentary planning and without adequate security or supply of food or water or (in winter) heat, the organized transfers proved to be anything but orderly and humane. Germans endured overcrowding and mistreatment during long, slow transports out of Poland in which they received little food or water. The harrowing journey in Operation Swallow, the Polish transports to the British zone of occupation, caused substantial numbers of deaths and many who survived were so depleted that they had to be hospitalized on arrival.24 Rape was common: British medical officers found that many women and girls had suffered sexual assault. Many had been beaten. Mainly, because they were shorter, the transfers out of Czechoslovakia led to less loss of life, though these too failed to exemplify an orderly or humane transfer. Journalists and aid workers commented on appalling conditions. Anne O’Hare McCormick of the New York Times, for example, reported ‘the exodus takes place under nightmarish conditions, without any international supervision or any pretense of humane treatment’. She made the comparison to the recent past: ‘We share responsibility for horrors only comparable to Nazi cruelties.’25 The organized transfer came to end in stages. Britain halted Operation Swallow at the end of 1946. Hungary, which removed some 110,000 ethnic Germans under the terms of Potsdam, had to stop deportations west in 1946, not only because of American concerns, but also because of internal political division in Hungary.26 Even after transports to the US and British zones of occupation came to an end, the USSR started a further phase of expulsion in 1947, moving out the surviving remnant of Germans in what had been East Prussia. By 1948, the Germans of the city of Königsberg, renamed Kaliningrad, were gone. From the start of mass flight to the end of the organized transfers, some 12–14 million Germans had shifted west. Determining just how many had died has long caused controversy. Reviewing the expulsions from Czechoslovakia, a joint German, Czech and Slovak historical commission arrived at a figure of some 40,000 deaths, certainly a large number, but also far below previous German estimates of upwards of 200,000 or even 400,000 deaths. The death toll in Poland was likely much higher – leading to a total number of German dead from flight, expulsion and transfer somewhere in the area of half a million.27 This would still lead to a total much lower than many prior German estimates of total deaths of some two million.

Poles and Ukrainians The period from the late phases of the Second World War to the early postwar era also brought massive violence and forced migration in other contested regions, including mixed Polish–Ukrainian borderlands. As German power eroded, a war carried out by rival Polish and Ukrainian militias broke out. In 1943, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) of the Organization of Ukrainian Unity or OUN-Bandera, named for its leader Stepan Bandera, who was imprisoned for much of the war by Nazi Germany, attacked Polish homes and villages. A German report of June 1943 stated: ‘Many Polish families were wiped out and whole Polish villages burned down during the reporting period. 82

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It should be stressed that the greater part of the Ukrainian population take part in this.’28 Hundreds of thousands of Polish civilians fled. On the other side, Polish militia forces carried out similar attacks against Ukrainians. Migration continued as borders shifted after the war’s end. Under a repatriation agreement, some 1.5 million Poles left the Soviet Union for Poland between 1945 and 1946. Their departure was in principle voluntary, but intimidation and acts of violence propelled the departure of Ukrainians out of Poland until the Soviet Union stopped accepting further Ukrainians in 1946. Poland opted instead to break up and redistribute the Ukrainian population. In Operation Wisla, Polish troops forced some 150,000 Ukrainians away from Poland’s new eastern border to be resettled in small group to the west.29

Remaking Central and Eastern Europe at war’s end The flight and expulsion of Germans and the shift west of Soviet and Polish borders gave rise to the largest part of postwar forced migration, but elsewhere as well, war’s end generated population transfers and expulsions. Czechoslovakia’s exiled leaders called for deporting the Hungarian population of Slovakia, but in this case Hungary’s new communist leadership actually intervened with the Soviet Union to reach an agreement on a population exchange that moved Magyars out of Slovakia and Slovakians out of Hungary.30 Czechoslovakia also forcibly moved Hungarians within Czechoslovakia, making 44,129 move to areas of the Sudetenland where Germans had lived, before later allowing them to return.31 Along the Italian–Yugoslav border, the peninsula of Istria was awarded to Yugoslavia after the Second World War. Combat during the war pitted the communist partisans against fascists, but conflict over the peninsula increasingly acquired an ethnic dimension.32 Italy retained the city of Trieste, but most of the Istrian peninsula was transferred in stages to Yugoslavia, and with every phase of transfer the mass of Italians left. Estimates of the total numbers range from some 30,000 to 200,000–300,000. Though Italians were not expelled, fears that dated back in part to wartime violence contributed to their departure.

Expulsion and genocide The history of the postwar expulsions both reinforces and challenges the conventional view of these expulsions as distinct from genocide. For historians and other scholars of genocide, the postwar expulsions seldom fit into the category of genocide, and there is reason for this decision if the purpose of genocide studies is to weigh individual cases and determine if they meet the criteria of genocide. Wherever the ultimate responsibility for expulsions is placed, it is difficult to document a genocidal intent to destroy the targeted group in whole or in part. Nor do the methods employed show a determination to reach such a destructive end. To take the case of the ethnic Germans, by far the largest of the expelled populations, the camps of the postwar era did not serve as sites for mass destruction of the group, despite much hardship and many deaths. Despite the references to concentration camps, actual death camps were not revived. Identifying boundaries between genocide and expulsions does not, however, provide reason to see the postwar expulsions as completely isolated from genocide. The relationship between expulsion and genocide was complex. The postwar expulsions, 83

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even when distinct from genocide, shared broader goals with genocide. Expulsion served as yet another means for purifying imagined homelands through coercion and at times massive violence. Postwar expulsions also arose within a long cycle of violence shaped in large part by Nazi Germany’s war of extermination in the East. Postwar expulsions cannot be attributed only to revenge: discussion of population transfers to match states with nations in Central and Eastern Europe predated genocide, the German attack on the Soviet Union, and even the start of the Second World War. However, both the war itself and planning for the future took a more radical turn with the escalation of violence. German aggression shattered the existing map, radicalized planning for moving populations, and created opportunities for undertaking all manner of plans for forced migration, including those carried out against Germans. Where a simple declaration that the expulsions were not genocides creates a sense of certainty about the goals and level of violence of both expulsions and genocide, charting the precise relationship between postwar expulsions and genocide draws attention to one of the more unsettling aspects of the study of genocide: the place of unstated comparisons. Would the postwar expulsions still be classified in the same way if they had not overlapped with and then immediately followed the Holocaust? The discussion of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia provides an instructive example because analysis and accounts of genocide have sometimes included the case of the former Yugoslavia.33 But if the primary method of purification in the former Yugoslavia consisted of expelling unwanted populations because of their identity, how is it then possible to so clearly distinguish between the postwar expulsions and genocide? Proof of acts of genocide provides one of the main reasons for identifying the ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, and in particular in Bosnia, with genocide. Camps where Bosnian Serb forces imprisoned, beat, tortured, and in many instances killed Bosnian Muslims prompted comparisons between the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and the Holocaust, but identifying ethnic cleansing in Bosnia in international law with genocide ultimately rested on analysis of massacres that erased the targeted groups from particular areas. Most notably, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia reached convictions for acts of genocide. Beginning with the trial of Radislav Krstić, a Bosnian Serb general, the ICTY convicted several former officers and security officials either of genocide or of aiding and abetting genocide as in the case of Krstić himself. At Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces separated men and boys and then took them away and killed some 8,000. The ICTY found that these killings along with the expulsion of women ‘inevitably resulted in the physical disappearance of the Bosnian Muslim population of Srebrenica’ and that the perpetrators intended to destroy Srebrenica’s Muslim community.34 Rather than comparing the expulsions at the end of the Second World War with the destruction of the European Jews during that war, studies of genocide could also compare killings and massacres carried out at the war’s end with acts of genocide at Srebrenica. Did the killings at Srebrenica, for example, illustrate a different intent or reach a different scale than the deaths caused by the march out of Brünn or the massacres at Usti nad Labem? As far as can be determined, the massacre at Srebrenica involved killing substantially more victims, but if historians obtained revised higher figures for death at either Brünn or Ústi nad Labem would they then have cause to identify these as acts of genocide? R. M. Douglas has argued that these were unusual events even within 84

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the expulsion of ethnic Germans, but Srebrenica also occupies a distinctive place in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims, at least in the cases tried by the ICTY. The finding that Bosnian Serbs had carried out acts of genocide at Srebrenica did not lead to similar judgments in large numbers of cases from other towns. Indeed, survivors of ethnic cleansing of towns such as Višegrad, decried what they saw as overly restrictive use of the term genocide by the ICTY. Acts of genocide, whether infrequent of commonplace, also have a broader purpose that extends far beyond the immediate sites of killings. They provide a message to the targeted population that their communities cannot survive. Such acts of genocide are not the only point of possible correspondence between genocide and the postwar expulsions. The history of genocide demonstrates that in many cases, genocide consisted of multiple acts of genocide. Much of the death toll in the Armenian Genocide, for example, resulted from expulsion under conditions that predictably led to the destruction of Armenians. In broadly similar fashion, Romania undertook the destruction of Jews expelled from Bessarabia across the Dniester River into Transnistria in 1941–2. The Genocide Convention covers such methods of destruction with the following act of genocide: ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ As has been repeatedly documented, the forced migration of ethnic Germans, the largest of all the postwar expulsions, fell short of the stipulation of the Potsdam Agreement for an ‘orderly and humane’ transfer, a point made in the very title of the history by R. M. Douglas.35 In particular the accounts of the harsh conditions on transports out of Poland in the winter of 1945–6 and the high death toll exacted by a slow trip in bitter cold with little food or water indicates that it was very predictable that significant numbers of Germans would die. This observation does not in itself prove genocide. The overall pattern of transfers did not show an organized programme of destruction, but at least for a time the methods for transfer showed the clear potential of closely converging with methods of genocide employed elsewhere. Along with the finding that acts of genocide took place in other cases of expulsion, a further approach to ethnic cleansing complicates efforts to clearly distinguish between the postwar expulsions and genocide. Soon after the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ began to gain widespread usage in the 1990s, it attracted extensive criticism as a euphemism. Martin Shaw subsequently argued that ‘ethnic cleansing’ was indistinguishable from genocide. Shaw finds it ‘highly ironic that the Holocaust and “ethnic cleansing” have come to be regarded as categorical opposites, one “extreme” genocide, the other not fully genocidal’.36 Where the history of postwar expulsions, at least as studied by historians and social scientists, finds a distinction with genocide by drawing contrasts between the postwar expulsions and genocide as carried out during the Second World War, broader comparisons between the postwar expulsions and other episodes of expulsion erode that firm distinction from at least two directions. The peaks of violence identified in ethnic cleansing of Bosnia and the execution of genocide in other cases by subjecting targeted populations to conditions that led to their mass destruction show that acts of genocide took place within other expulsions, and the discussion of cleansing as a form of destruction suggests a close overall match in terms of goals and outcomes between expulsion and genocide. A counter-factual question is instructive: if similar expulsions took place in a different time and place would we afterwards so firmly separate them from genocide, as is the case in most professional historical discussion of the postwar expulsions? One historical work that does speak of genocide of ethnic Germans, but 85

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specifically of Yugoslavia’s ethnic Germans, places that postwar destruction, not just in the context of the war itself, but within a much longer narrative of violence.37 Recognizing the problems in finding fixed boundaries between expulsion and genocide does not in itself prove that the postwar expulsions were genocidal but raises scrutiny of an often unacknowledged comparative aspect to genocide studies. Even if an individual massacre carried out during the expulsion of Germans, for example, was widely identified as an act of genocide, it remains entirely possible that most accounts and analyses of expulsion would still draw a line short of genocide on the grounds that the Holocaust was far more deadly and radical. In general, the field of genocide studies treats genocide as a fixed thing. It is customary to begin with a definition of genocide and then determine whether an individual case fully meets that definition, but some scholars have touched on the question of whether genocide itself exists on some kind of scale. Adam Jones, for example, proposes using the term holocaust to refer to ‘especially destructive genocides’ while reserving the phrase ‘Jewish Holocaust’ for ‘the Nazi genocide against the Jews’.38 However, the vast preponderance of historical literature retains the phrase the Holocaust (or Shoah) to indicate the destruction of European Jews.

Postwar expulsions – history in context The rediscovery of the history of postwar expulsions outside of Germany, where the topic had never been entirely forgotten, signaled a step forward in the long and complex process of coming to terms with the past after the Second World War. This concept was most often applied to the challenge of Germans in coming to terms with the past of their own history as well as problems that other Europeans encountered in coming to terms with the past of occupation that included a range of responses beyond resistance all the way to complicity and collaboration. Moving beyond a previous historical boundary, a broader history of the war and its effects now includes the massive episodes of postwar expulsion that blurred and in some cases switched the categories of perpetrators and victims. Despite historical advances, the analysis of postwar expulsions struggles with its own version of coming to terms with a problem: charting the relationship between postwar expulsions and genocide. As so often stressed at the outset in accounts and analyses by historians and social scientists, the postwar expulsion can be distinguished from campaigns of genocide carried out by Nazi Germany, most notably the Holocaust. The expulsions did not share the same intent to destroy in whole or in part, or the same outcome: these were real and critical differences. However, the postwar expulsions also arose from a broad cycle of mass violence and shared similarities with other episodes of mass violence. Indeed, the history of the postwar expulsions demonstrates the flaws in treating genocide as entirely isolated from related phenomena. Once the conceptual barrier against even referring to the possibility of genocide is removed, analysis of the postwar expulsions reveals not a complete separation between expulsions and genocide, but rather a pattern of convergence and divergence. On the whole, the expulsions were not genocidal, but at times they appeared on the verge of following a genocidal path.

Notes 1 Philipp Ther, Die dunkle Seite der Nationalstaaten: ‘Ethnische Säuberungen’ im modernen Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 233–4.

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2 Eagle Glassheim, ‘The Mechanics of Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia, 1945–1947’, in Philipp Ther and Ana Siljak (eds), Redrawing Nations: Ethnic Cleansing in East-Central Europe, 1944–1948 (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), pp. 209–10. 3 T. David Curp, A Clean Sweep? The Politics of Ethnic Cleansing in Western Poland, 1945–1960 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), p. 189. 4 Eric Langenbacher, ‘Ethical Cleansing? The Expulsion of Germans from Central and Eastern Europe’, in Nicholas A. Robins and Adam Jones (eds), Genocides by the Oppressed: Subaltern Genocide in Theory and Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), p. 58. 5 Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006). 6 R.M. Douglas, Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 5. 7 Thomas Urban, Der Verlust: Die Vertreibung der Deutschen und Polen im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Beck, 2004), pp. 13–14. 8 Robert G. Moeller, ‘Germans as Victims: Thoughts on a Post-Cold War History of World War II’s Legacies’, History and Memory 17, 2005, p. 163; Robert G. Moeller, ‘War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany’, American Historical Review 101, 1996, pp. 1010–11, 1043; and Robert G. Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Useable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001). 9 Alfred M. de Zayas, Nemesis at Potsdam: The Anglo-Americans and the Expulsion of the Germans: Background, Execution, Consequences (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1977). 10 Detlef Brandes, Der Weg zur Vertreibung, 1938–1945: Pläne und Entscheidungen zum ‘Transfer’ der Deutschen aus der Tschechoslowakei und aus Polen (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2001), p. 95. 11 Eagle Glassheim, ‘National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing: The Expulsion of Czechoslovak Germans in 1945’, Central European History 33, 2000, p. 471. 12 Urban, Der Verlust, p. 96. 13 Václav Kural, ‘Tschechen, Deutsche und die sudetendeutsche Frage während des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, in Detlef Brandes, Edita Ivaničková, and Jiří Pešek (eds), Erzwungene Trennung: Vertreibungen und Aussiedlungen in und aus der Tschechoslowakei, 1938-1947: im Vergleich mit Polen, Ungarn und Jugoslawien (Essen: Klartext, 1999), pp. 85, 91. 14 Urban, Der Verlust, pp. 91, 99. 15 Ther, die dunkle Site der Nationalstaaten, pp. 234–5. 16 Matthew James Frank, Expelling the Germans: British Opinion and Post-1945 Population Transfer in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 17 Tomás˘ Stanek, ‘1945 – Das Jahr der Verfolgung. Zur Problematik der außergerichtlichen Nachkriegsverfolgungen in den böhmischen Ländern’, in Brandes et al., Erzwungene Trennung, p. 127; and Glassheim, ‘National Mythologies and Ethnic Cleansing’, p. 465. 18 Bernard Linek, ‘“De-Germanization” and “Re-Polonization” in Upper Silesia, 1945–1950’, in Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations, p. 126. 19 Stanek, ‘1945 – Das Jahr der Verfolgung’, p. 133. 20 Ibid, p. 132. 21 Urban, Der Verlust, pp. 121. 22 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 135–6; and Stanek, ‘1945 – Das Jahr der Verfolgung’, pp. 141–2. 23 Paul Mojzes, Balkan Genocides: Holocaust and Ethnic Cleansing in the Twentieth Century (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011), pp. 115–18; and Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 140, 150–51, 156. 24 Douglas, Orderly and Humane, pp. 168–70. 25 New York Times, 4 February 1946. 26 Pertti Ahonen et al., People on the Move: Forced Population Movements in Europe in the Second World War and its Aftermath (Oxford: Berg, 2008), pp. 85–6. 27 Rüdiger Overmans, ‘Personelle Verluste der deutschen Bevölkerung durch Flucht und Vertreibung’, Dzieje Najnowsze 26, 1994, pp. 51–65; and Ingo Haar, ‘Die deutschen ‘Vertreibungsverluste’ – zur Enstehungsgeschichte der ‘Dokumentation der Vertreibung’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 35, 2007, pp. 251–71. 28 Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust: Crimes of the Local Police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), p. 145.

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29 Timothy Snyder, ‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians in Poland, 1943–1947’, Journal of Cold War Studies 1, 1999, pp. 86–120; Orest Subtelny, ‘Expulsion, Resettlement, Civil Strife: the Fate of Poland’s Ukrainians, 1944–1947’, in Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations; and Marek Jasiak, ‘Overcoming Ukrainian Resistance: the Deportation of Ukrainians within Poland in 1947’, in Ther and Siljak, Redrawing Nations. 30 Ther, Die dunkle Site der Nationalstaaten, pp. 190–91. 31 Ahonen, People on the Move, p. 83. 32 Pamela Ballinger, ‘Who Defines and Remembers Genocide after the Cold War? Contested Memories of Partisan Massacre in Venezia Giulia in 1943–1945’, Journal of Genocide Research 2, 2000, pp. 11–30; and Pamela Ballinger, History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), pp. 81–2. 33 Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 34 ICTY, Facts about Srebrenica, http://www.icty.org/x/file/Outreach/view_from_hague/ jit_srebrenica_en.pdf. 35 Douglas, Orderly and Humane. 36 Martin Shaw, What Is Genocide? (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), pp. 52, 57. 37 Mojzes, Balkan Genocides, p. 109. 38 Adam Jones, Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (Milton Park and New York: Routledge, 2006), 12 note.

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7 RES P ONDING TO T H E H O LO C A US T Bystanders, colonialism and conflicting priorities Jennifer Reeve

Holocaust historiography has broadly fallen into the study of three main categories: perpetrator, victim and bystander. It is the last of these categories, that of the bystander, that this chapter charts. It is generally argued that the response of bystander countries such as Britain and the US, identified by Tony Kushner as ‘liberal democracies’,1 failed to produce an effective response to the Holocaust. Into the mid-2000s, reviews of the literature on the British and American responses, led mainly by Kushner, contended that more nuance was still needed.2 While reviewing the developments of the bystander historiography to date, this chapter will also suggest an area for further investigation which illuminates the subtleties of assessment still needed in bystander studies: the colonial response to the refugee crisis and the Holocaust. Colonialism (albeit defined differently in the cases of the British Empire, British Dominions and the American Commonwealth) offers a new and uniquely informative framework for expanding the historiography beyond details of bystander responses towards explanations for those responses. Not only does the colonial context highlight the juxtaposition of three dominant conceptual schemas in liberal democracies during the interwar period – liberalism, race and humanitarianism – but more significantly, it provides a point where all three ideologies clearly met. This affords the opportunity to analyse more specifically the subtleties and complexities of the reasons behind Allied inaction and thereby move to a fuller understanding of the responses of Britain and the US. Indeed, in the displacement of the refugee problem to colonial areas, we can see most clearly the way that these issues were prioritised and acted upon (or not) by British and American officials. Bystander studies developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with work on the US generally flourishing before that on Britain. However, the earliest work on Allied knowledge and action, Andrew Sharf’s The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (1964), did in fact deal with the British response.3 While it did not generate much further debate within Britain for some time, it marked a starting point for an emerging American historiography. The first of these works, Arthur D. Morse’s While Six Million Died and David S. Wyman’s Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–1941 were first published in the US in 1967 and 1968 respectively. These works were highly critical of American policy, arguing that because Nazi extermination policy was known to the American government, more should have been done to help Europe’s Jewry. To highlight this, Morse sought to establish the extent of American knowledge of Nazi plans for Jewish extermination. Drawing similar conclusions, Wyman identified, influentially, three main reasons for 89

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American inaction: unemployment, nativistic nationalism and antisemitism.4 The publication of these works coincided with a growing interest among the American public in the Holocaust. Indeed, the late 1960s and early 1970s marked the start of a new focus on the victims of the Holocaust. Undoubtedly, this broader social and cultural interest in the Holocaust, along with ‘a growing ethnic pride and self-confidence on behalf of American Jewry’5 made it possible for historians to argue that the American government should have done more in response to the specifically Jewish tragedy. Other important works on the American response soon followed, including Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970) and Saul Friedman’s No Haven for the Oppressed (1973).6 A.J. Sherman’s British-focused Island Rescue, published in 1973, was the first assessment of British policy since Sharf. Sherman, an American Jew, concluded his work with the now infamous ‘Balance Sheet’ of British action, arguing that British policy was ‘comparatively compassionate, even generous’, particularly in comparison to the US.7 In a later work, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (1979), Bernard Wasserstein made a more negative assessment of British action: ‘the fact that Jews were subject to special dangers figured little in official consideration of such matters as immigration to Britain or the British Empire’, meaning that ‘there is little to celebrate in the account of British policy towards the Jews of Europe between 1939 and 1945’.8 In 1997, William Rubinstein’s book The Myth of Rescue sought to challenge this largely critical historiography. Controversially, Rubinstein systematically dismantled the established perspective on Allied action, arguing that no Jews could have been saved by the combined forces of Britain and the US. Although a re-evaluation was needed, his work focused on the assumption that German Jews (other European Jews were not included in his assessment) were ‘prisoners’ rather than ‘refugees’, and therefore there was no option of ‘rescue’ by the Allies.9 Certainly, recognition that Nazi policy prohibited Jewish movement after October 1941 is necessary. However, as David Cesarani asserts, Rubinstein’s ‘analysis contradicts all recent scholarship and defies the evidence’.10 Moreover, such deterministic conclusions limit discussion of the reasons for Allied inaction by simply claiming that Britain and the US had no choice in how they responded to the unfolding events of the Holocaust. It is this aspect, as Kushner has argued, which accounts for the greater popular success of Rubinstein’s book. In fact, Kushner has contended that the work appeals to those ‘anxious about the moral integrity of the British and American war memory’, because Rubinstein’s work ‘lets the reader off from any consideration of the dilemmas facing bystanders’.11 This swing back and forth between adamant criticism and more defensive works has been, to some degree, successfully bypassed in other scholarship which seeks to explain Allied actions by contextualising the period and the policy decisions of both the US and Britain. Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut, in their monograph American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (1987) assert the importance of assessing Allied action in its ‘historical and political context’ in order to understand ‘the real constraints and trade-offs faced by government officials’.12 Louise London, in Whitehall and the Jews 1933–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (2003), the principal and most recent account of British policy, outlines the bureaucratic and wider political parameters in which British policy was formed. London utilised Home Office, Foreign Office and Treasury files to build a detailed picture of the internal politics and bureaucracy of Whitehall that dictated British refugee policy. The result is a more complete, albeit still critical, assessment of the British response.13 90

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Kushner, in his 1994 work The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, explored ‘the reactions of liberal societies when confronted with an illiberal phenomenon’, the Holocaust. Rather than assessing state responses or the high-level diplomacy of Jewish agencies, Kushner focuses on the role of popular opinion. His findings show that although liberal ideology is closely connected with tolerance, the reaction of the Western Allies to the highly intolerant Nazi regime was not straightforward condemnation. Rather, the strength of liberalism, with its belief in assimilation, led many people to see refugees as essentially problematic. Indeed, in the context of a refugee crisis caused by Nazi antisemitism, the Jewishness of the refugees mattered. In line with this, Kushner concludes that ‘[o]utright hostility (or more rarely, sympathy) is easier to chart than what is the more normal and complicated response, ambivalence and ambiguity’.14 While the existing historiography suggests that political and social ideologies were important in the formation of policy, this has yet to be engaged with in particular detail or in a sustained way. An important exception to this is the work carried out by David Cesarani on the importance of anti-alienism in the UK. His work identifies anti-alienism as a discourse which included socio-biological vocabulary to describe the ‘Other’, as well as the wavering nature of humanitarian concern to provide asylum.15 Cesarani’s work certainly addresses some of the dominant ideological influences, particularly race; however the relative importance of antisemitism, the failure of motivation provided by humanitarianism, and the relative importance of liberalism remain in need of further investigation. Britain’s colonial response to the refugee crisis is most closely associated with the history of the British mandate rule of Palestine, the 1939 White Paper which limited Jewish refugee entry, and, of course, the creation of Israel in 1948. Scholarly work on Palestine has to navigate, in turn, the intensely personal and political nature of this complicated subject. However, there is a broader British colonial response that not only offers context to the question of Palestine but also provides a new angle from which to examine Britain’s response. It is within the British tropical empire and Dominions, as well as the American Commonwealth, where we can see most clearly the ideological building blocks of the British and American response. Some work has been carried out on refugees and entry in these various colonial settings. A brief review of this research helps identify important questions in the assessment of colonial refugee policy and of bystander studies more broadly. First, the British Dominions (white settler colonies) had, until 1931, been under the direct control of Westminster. However, in 1931 with the passing of the Westminster Act Britain’s Dominions gained more autonomy in areas including immigration. Australia’s, Canada’s and South Africa’s interwar immigration policies highlight the dominant trends in imperial immigration policy more broadly as well as those specifically aimed at Jewish refugees. All three of these Dominions tried to apply increasingly restrictive immigration policies from the turn of the twentieth century and therefore offer important insights into imperial manifestations of the tensions within and between liberalism, race and national identity. Even before the Jewish refugee crisis of the 1930s, racial discrimination had long been at the centre of Australia’s immigration policy. Indeed, there was a clear precedent of attempting to limit Chinese and other Asian settlers, along with a clear preference for white (British) settlers.16 This is not to say that Jewish refugees were not seen 91

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as particularly problematic. Many argued that Jews were unsuited to assimilation and would therefore choose to maintain cultural and religious practices that separated them from full integration into their new country.17 This was a fear felt by many receiving countries and was based on racial assumptions about the nature of Jewish settlers, which generally trumped concerns to appear liberal or humanitarian. Consequently, Australia did not adopt any explicit refugee policy, but rather granted officials the freedom to make a case-by-case assessment of refugees, thereby allowing them to increase the entry of desirable ‘white’ immigrants while specifically limiting Jewish refugee entry. Paul Bartrop interprets the importance of the Jewish identity of the refugees as contributing to ‘the way in which Australians saw themselves and others’.18 This raises questions worthy of further study: how was Jewishness seen in relation to Australian national identity and, more broadly, a racial identity of ‘whiteness’? Like Australia, Canada also implemented restrictive policies. The established historiography is very clear on the reasons behind this, highlighting ‘indifference’, ‘hostility’ and the failure of the ‘humanitarian appeal’ to prompt a more liberal policy.19 Although large numbers of immigrants had arrived in Canada around the turn of the century, the First World War saw a growth in restrictive immigration practices, which only increased throughout the 1920s. The racial identity of immigrants (and later refugees) was central to the restrictive nature of Canada’s immigration policy.20 This was particularly so in the interwar period, when Canada was in a period of transition and the very nature of Canadian identity (i.e. who was considered to be Canadian) was under scrutiny.21 Of the British Dominions, South Africa was unique in that even before the refugee crisis of the 1930s it had a large, established Jewish community. Immigration between the end of the First Boer War in 1881 and the eve of the First World War in 1913 brought 40,000 Jews to South African territory. However, a move towards nativism after the First World War was reflected in the 1930 Quota Bill which set the tone for future policy, whereby the ‘concept of “national origins” and its corollary, “assimilability” rather than individual merit’ became the criterion by which an immigrant’s application for entry was judged.22 The bill, with its distinction between countries of origin which required quotas and those which did not, placed Germany on the ‘scheduled’ list along with Britain, other Commonwealth countries and the US. By 1936 the number of German Jews looking to South Africa for refuge had significantly increased, and government and public attention once more turned to the issue.23 The reception of Jewish refugees in South Africa was further complicated by the presence of several pro-Nazi, antisemitic and nationalistic political organisations. These groups provided a constant source of anti-Jewish propaganda, pushing their antisemitic agenda into the heart of mainstream politics. More generally, this translated, as Edna Bradlow has argued, into cultural differences being perceived in racial terms.24 This, unsurprisingly, led to calls for restrictive policies. Although not presented in explicitly racist terms (arguments were often based on the view that South Africa had reached its absorptive capacity for Jewish settlers, particularly at a time of economic difficulty), views on race certainly impacted South Africa’s response to Jewish refugees. South Africa’s large black population meant the government was keen to limit poor white migration (which would have included those impoverished Jews fleeing persecution in Nazi Europe), even against the British desire to bolster ‘white British’ entry. These perceived problems were exacerbated by the divisions within the 92

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white population, especially between British and Afrikaner groups.25 As a result, the government used ‘unspecified and subjective criteria’ in deciding on the suitability of immigrants.26 Race, liberalism and the ways in which they impacted national identity were clearly defining features of the Dominions’ response to immigration generally, and the Jewish refugee question specifically. That the Dominions, designated ‘white settler colonies’, wanted to limit Jewish settlement highlights the complexities of liberal attitudes towards assimilation as well as interwar racial categorisation. Conceptions of ‘otherness’ were based on more than just colour. Indeed, ‘whiteness’ (and therefore, ‘superiority’) itself was a complex category that evolved over time, especially when emerging nation states (white settler colonies were only given Dominion status in 1931) were keen to create a hegemonic society. The Jewishness of the refugees threatened the perceived ‘whiteness’ of emerging countries. This is an area little studied but highly important in a context where race was a common lens through which many viewed the world. Despite the limitations of settlement in the Dominions, Jews did find safety in various other imperial contexts. While a study of the Dominions’ responses to Jewish refugees offers views into a British colonial setting, albeit more constitutionally advanced and generally with larger and more dominant white settler communities than formal colonies, a study of the policies adopted in the Philippines (which was a US Commonwealth between 1935 and 1946), the Dominican Republic (which was part of the US sphere of influence in Latin America) and Shanghai (which was not officially under British rule but was an international settlement until 1941, where Britain had vested interests) provide contexts of the more practical difficulties of settlement in tropical climates. Although the Philippines was a site of significant settlement for the Jewish diaspora, historians have only recently turned their attention to the matter. It was briefly discussed by Feingold in the 1970s, but since then the issue has received little academic attention.27 More recently, Frank Ephraim, a Holocaust survivor who spent eight years in the Philippines after his family escaped to the territory from Berlin in early 1939, has penned Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror. His book details the settlement of 1,200 Jewish refugees in Manila between 1938 and 1939. In a separate article, ‘The Mindanao Plan: Political Obstacles to Jewish Refugee Settlement’, Ephraim discussed a failed scheme for proposed large-scale colonisation in the Philippine territory of Mindanao. An article by Dean Kotlowski in 2009 examined the role of the High Commissioner of the Philippines, Paul McNutt, in this settlement of refugees. This developing field of study is starting to provide information about some of the restrictions and priorities that influenced refugee settlement in the Philippines and colonial space more generally.28 In the interwar period, the Philippines was part of the American Commonwealth under direction, in part, from Washington. The original settlement of refugees in Manila originated in 1938, when 28 Jewish refugees, fleeing Shanghai, were received by the local Jewish community. Hearing of their plight, McNutt sought legal advice for further ways to help. He was informed that, as High Commissioner, he had the power to waive visa requirements. He did this for a further 40 Jewish families who had made their way to the territory independently. Working with the local Jewish community, McNutt aimed to settle an additional 100 Jewish families. The established Jewish community insisted on the entry of the ‘right kind’ of refugees, largely linked 93

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to employment opportunities in the territory. These included medical workers but also mechanics, farmers, barbers and accountants. As the plan progressed, the Jewish community in the Philippines took control of the immigration venture, and many more Jewish families were able to enter.29 The success of the scheme highlighted the importance of the positive working relationship established between McNutt, Jewish representatives and Philippine officials, including President Quezon, in the pursuit of securing Jewish settlement. McNutt was unusual in his support for Jewish entry, especially at a time when severe restrictions were in place in the US. However, as a pro-Zionist, anti-racist and largely tolerant man, he truly believed that liberalism was the antithesis of the fascism sweeping across Europe. These views were eventually translated into his actions regarding Jewish refugees. McNutt broke no laws when he pushed for refugee settlement. This strict procedural adherence, along with the nature of the settlers who were deemed to be suitable for assimilation in the territory, was at the heart of its success.30 The financial independence of refugees (necessary to ensure that refugees did not become a ‘burden’ on the state) was one of the key criteria in many immigration laws. Therefore, in the Philippines, entry was only afforded to refugees with financial means and highly regarded skills and was based on the assumption that the refugees would be assimilated into life in the territory, particularly the already established Jewish community.31 This, again, suited ‘liberal’ views on race and assimilability. Although the US was more open to ‘ethnic pluralism’ than Britain, it still preferred assimilation of refugees and immigrants,32 even in its Commonwealth territory. Prompted by earlier successes, a much larger plan for refugee settlement was then pursued in the Philippines. The Mindanao Plan aimed to colonise part of the Philippines with 10,000 agricultural settlers. Although it was initially popular with the US State Department, enthusiasm waned as war approached and difficulties emerged, especially in regard to local Filipino opposition. The plan ultimately failed. Ephraim argues that the large-scale settlement of a ‘racially and religiously different’ group was ‘fraught with difficulties’.33 The failure of the Mindanao Plan demonstrated the importance of potential refugees being financially independent and assimilable to the success of settlement schemes. Liberal and humanitarian agendas only stretched so far, and as a result, large-scale agricultural and development colonisation schemes, which went against these strongly held liberal principles, were largely unsuccessful. Nonetheless, large-scale Jewish colonisation was also attempted in the Dominican Republic. In this case, historical assessments of the venture have highlighted the practical difficulties that settlement schemes faced in tropical territories. In 2008, Marion A. Kaplan outlined the settler response in her work Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosúa 1940–1945. Allen Wells (the child of Sosúa settler Heinrich Wasservogel) wrote Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa (2009), in which he contextualised the settlement in terms of the local (General Trujillo and the Dominican Republic) and geopolitical (American refugee and rescue policy action) realities.34 Jewish settlement in the Dominican Republic is estimated to have saved about 3,000 lives, taking into account the settlers in the capital, the specific settlement of Sosúa and the visas given to potential refugees. As countries around the world were adopting increasingly restrictive immigration legislation, the Dominican Republic was unique in actively encouraging Jewish refugee settlement. It was the only country in attendance at the Evian Conference (1938) that offered any settlement opportunities, offering 94

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entry for up to 100,000 Jewish refugees. While other countries refused refugee entry because of concerns regarding what large-scale entry would do to their population demographics, the Dominican Republic wanted to encourage white settlement, particularly Jewish settlement, as a way of combating its own perceived racial crisis. In fact, Dominican ‘leaders attributed European bourgeois values, that they themselves shared, to Jews, including thrift, hard work, urbanity, cosmopolitanism, and business skills, and hoped to bring Jews to their developing nation’.35 Ironically, the president of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, while offering safety to persecuted Jews, had overseen the massacre of several thousand Haitians at the border, in the attempt to lessen the Caribbean/African population. Despite its complicated origins, the Dominican Republic settlement eventually saw around 500 refugees settle in Sosúa (with an additional 200 passing through). Although the Sosúa settlement received local and international support (and finance), it never flourished. Importantly, the settlement did not suffer because of negative racial perceptions of Jewish settlers. Rather, the failure can be attributed to practical reasons. For example, the US, despite its initial support, eventually restricted the issuing of transit visas necessary to reach the Dominican Republic. Jewish attitudes to the difficulties of settlement also limited Sosúa’s success. The farming enterprises were challenging, and these difficulties were often compounded by some settlers who, although they needed to leave Nazi-occupied Europe, were not necessarily practically equipped or mentally adjusted to the hard life of physical labour the project required. Moreover, social issues, such as the significant disparities between single Jewish men and women, could not be redressed. Cultural differences between Eastern and Western Jews were also a source of tension.36 After the creation of Israel in 1948 and the assassination of Trujillo in 1961, problems only mounted. Today only a few of the settlers or their families remain in the area.37 Not on the scale originally offered, the settlement scheme was a well-researched project, led by Jewish agencies with the tacit support of the Dominican and American governments, and became an important example of the success, but also the inherent limitations, of agricultural European settlement in a tropical climate. Similar problems were also evident in the case of Jewish settlement in Shanghai. In the 1930s Shanghai was an ‘open port’, which meant that no visa was required for entry. As immigration restrictions increased across the world, many European Jews sought safety there. In the end, approximately 17,000 Jewish refugees entered Shanghai, mostly settling in the Hongkew district of the international settlement.38 In 1941, as war spread to the Pacific theatre, Jewish refugees found themselves under Japanese rule (as did those Jewish people who had settled in the Philippines). Scholarly work on Jewish settlement in Shanghai started with David Kranzler’s Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (1976) in which he argued that rather than mirroring Nazi Jewish policy, the Japanese sought to utilise alleged Jewish power and money for Japan’s benefit.39 Later work by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto places Japanese action towards Jewish refugees in a diplomatic context.40 Gao Bei, in Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II, has taken up the story from Chinese and Japanese perspectives, emphasising the importance of perceptions of Jews in policy formation.41 Other work, such as Marcia Reynders Ristaino’s book, Port of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai, shifts the focus to the refugee communities themselves and examines the Slavic and Jewish refugees who settled in Shanghai in the 1920s.42 All 95

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of these works serve to highlight the importance of racial identity in refugee policy and experience and, perhaps most significantly, as Gao Bei suggests, ‘[t]he Great Powers’ policies toward the Jewish refugee issue [in Shanghai] reveal much about their national priorities, their international agendas, and their perceptions of the global balance of power’.43 The work already carried out on the Dominions, the Philippines, the Dominican Republic and Shanghai suggest that ideas about race, liberalism and humanitarianism interacted over refugee settlement in colonial contexts. In the context of British tropical colonial territory, these issues are brought into even starker relief, but this remains largely absent from the historiography.44 While schemes of settlement discussed for various colonial territories have been acknowledged by some historians, they have not been fully studied. Indeed, Wasserstein pays little attention to colonial settlement plans, arguing that they were soon ‘consigned to the oblivion of the archives’, never being transformed into active policy.45 However, by removing these schemes from the ‘oblivion of the archives’ and studying them anew, the complexities and priorities of liberal democratic policy-makers in response to the Holocaust come into sharper focus. In the interwar period, the US’s and Britain’s positions of influence and control over colonised nations (whether formally or informally) were affected by the particular ideological frameworks that were central to official thinking at that time. In the case of Britain’s tropical colonies, theories of trusteeship and paternalism were of paramount importance. These principles, largely taken from Lord Lugard’s influential work The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa (1922), outlined a policy of ‘dual responsibilities and reciprocal benefits’ and were broadly encouraged from Whitehall. Essentially, Britain was to act as a trustee for the development of resources and the welfare of indigenous people, while the tasks of local government would be carried out by traditional authorities in the colonies.46 There was some move toward a more developmental perspective, highlighted by the adoption of the Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1940, but this did not remove completely the idea that the people in Britain’s colonies were the charge of His Majesty’s Government until they had been ‘civilised’ and able to take their own lead in development and democracy.47 The study of the British colonial response offers clear examples of the conflict of ideas and perceptions that dominated policy. These included tensions between: the rights and responsibilities of the British government to different races; humanitarianism and paternalism; and liberalism and imperialism. Settlement schemes were discussed in the colonies from the mid-1930s until after the war. They included territories as diverse as Cyprus, Kenya and British Guiana. Although they were, as the current historiography states, largely unsuccessful, the discussion and investigations that took place in relation to them help illuminate the nuances of British (in)action. A brief examination of the refugee question in the British colonial empire through the examples of settlement schemes in Kenya, the issue of internment and the connections made between refugee doctors and colonial development, highlights the potential of further study of the conflict of ideas and perceptions that dominated the interwar years and helped shape colonial policy, and more broadly how these helped shape bystanders’ refugee policies. The conflict raised by Britain’s perceived responsibilities to different peoples was most clear in Kenya. Although refugee settlement in Kenya is discussed, at least briefly, in the major works on British refugee policy, they tend to focus on the small-scale settlement scheme involving 25 young Jewish agriculturalists that was announced at the 96

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Evian Conference.48 The issue of refugee settlement in Kenya, however, was much more complex than these accounts suggest. The best and most fertile land in the colony, the White Highlands, was cleared of indigenous Africans and thereafter reserved for white British settlers. Meanwhile, members of the established Indian settler community were deliberately barred from land ownership. The question of Jewish settlement challenged this bar to Indian settlement and raised questions of how refugee needs should be prioritised in relation to those of African subjects, the Indian settler community and white (British) settlers. When Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald proposed ‘killing two birds with one stone’ by linking Jewish refugee settlement with schemes to encourage white settlement, some colonial officials, as well as the governor of Kenya, Robert BrookePopham, were outraged.49 As well as a desire to protect the interests of British white settlers, there was concern that such action would threaten wider Anglo–Arab relations in the Empire. Moreover, the governor viewed Jewish settlers as a possible malign influence over colonial subjects and considered their settlement over that of white British people to be a disservice to colonial subjects who would be best served by British influence. He wrote to MacDonald that: [b]elieving as we must do in our British ideals of freedom and justice, there would appear to be no better way of contributing to the advancement of the native peoples than by imparting these ideals to them. This can best be done by forming in their midst a British settlement where British principles may not only be preserved but also extended throughout Kenya and other East African territories.50 This example exposes the constant balancing act demanded of British colonial officials who had to weigh their perceived responsibility to their kinsmen (the white settlers) with their perceived responsibility to colonial citizens and the humanitarian demands of refugees. The meeting of these various races in the colonial system demonstrated that antisemitism or indifference are in themselves insufficient explanations for the failure of colonial settlement schemes. Jewishness mattered, but it mattered specifically in relation to ‘black’ and ‘Indian’ identities as well as to official perceptions of ‘whiteness’. The issue of internment illustrates the way that a clash of ‘humanitarianisms’ limited British action. In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France and the events of Dunkirk (which prompted fifth column paranoia), the British government called for the internment of all enemy aliens. A similar policy was then implemented in the colonies. In Britain, the decision for internment was quickly revised, and by the autumn of 1940 the vast majority of internees had been released. Although many involved with colonial policy felt that this was the right course of action for Britain, there was debate in Whitehall about how relevant this policy reversal was for the colonies. In Britain, humanitarian concern and the desire to be, or at least appear to be, ‘liberal’ was central to the swift reversal of internment. However, these concerns were, for colonial officials, weighed against their assumed responsibility to protect indigenous populations – a manifestation of paternalism, but also something that Michael Barnett has linked to ‘alchemic’ humanitarianism. Barnett argues that alchemic humanitarianism seeks longer-term answers to humanitarian needs. This is linked to development, particularly of social welfare infrastructures, as well as much larger projects of 97

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state-building, such as the development of democracy. Barnett also identifies another strand of humanitarianism – emergency humanitarianism – which responds to specific events and seeks to alleviate suffering in an immediate sense.51 I argue that the whole question of refugee entry into the colonies prompted a clash of these two strands of humanitarianism: emergency humanitarianism towards refugees versus more alchemic humanitarianism towards indigenous peoples, encapsulated by colonial development and welfare policy. In the specific case of internment in the colonies, officials were forced to prioritise these humanitarian impulses. As one official argued, ‘we cannot . . . afford to take the risks which might be involved in the application of a liberal policy which may be perfectly safe [in Britain]’.52 There was concern whether the indigenous population would understand a sudden change in policy, as well as over indigenous populations’ inability (in comparison to Britain) to fight off the possible negative influence of enemy aliens, who, although Jewish, were still considered to be enemy nationals with questionable loyalty. One colonial official wrote that he was ‘sceptical about the “antiNazi” German, whether in this country or elsewhere. Germans are first and foremost Germans. Some of them may dislike the Nazi regime, but I would not trust a single individual among them not to help the German government . . . when it is fighting for its life.’53 In other words, while the loyalty of German Jews could not be trusted, African people were not ‘educated’ enough to deal with the former’s influence, which in turn reinforced Britain’s self-perceived role in safeguarding the people of the empire. As a result of these conflicts, a policy of compromise emerged in regard to refugee settlement in the colonies. It aimed to balance broader imperial concerns with liberal ideology and manifested itself by clear and consistent attempts by colonial officials, including Malcolm MacDonald, to connect refugee entry to colonial development. The small-scale entry of suitable and individually selected refugees based on official estimates of their ability and willingness to assimilate within the established community, particularly by adding much-needed skills or finance, was pursued with more success than the large-scale projects that had proved unsuccessful in other colonial contexts, such as the Philippines and the Dominican Republic. In the British colonial context, these preferences developed into a very specific policy trend. While colonisation schemes (of any size) challenged already difficult racial politics and while the presence of refugees in wartime pitted paternalism against humanitarianism, liberalism was balanced successfully with imperialism through a focus on colonial development, particularly in regard to the admission of refugee doctors. Between 1938 and 1939, there was a concentrated and determined effort by Malcolm MacDonald to utilise refugee skills to aid refugee entry and benefit the colonies. In a circular despatch sent to the colonies on 30 September 1938, MacDonald stated plainly his desire to utilise the skills offered by refugee doctors for the benefit of the colonies, writing that ‘I am sure that you will agree with me that the possibility merits careful consideration, of making use of this reserve of professional talent, where this can be done to the advantage of Colonial communities’.54 In several colonies, legislation was amended to allow refugee doctors with qualifications from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia to practise there. Contrasting MacDonald’s liberal Jewish doctor policy with his rather public pro-Arab stance over Palestine highlights the complexities of official attitudes towards Jewish refugees and is just one further way in which the framework of colonialism provides access to a more complete explanation of Allied refugee policy. 98

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Kushner argues that the lack of nuance in bystander studies is ‘dangerous’ because rather than advancing ‘our understanding of the complexity of human responses during the Holocaust, the bystander category is in danger of aiding the tendency to see the subject in Manichean terms, as a symbol of mass evil alongside much less prevalent absolute good’.55 These black and white distinctions allow no room for Primo Levi’s ‘gray zone’56 and much less room for a holistic understanding of the motivations behind Allied inaction, which was in fact full of ambiguities and ambivalence. Nowhere were these ambiguities more clear than in a colonial setting; nowhere is nuance more necessary. Indeed, in colonial settings, policy-makers were not presented with bilateral choices but rather multifaceted ones: the needs of different races had to be considered; humanitarian action towards refugees (and its foreign policy consequences) had to be weighed against paternalism; and liberal tolerance, universalism and the belief in progress had to be squared with a firm belief in imperialism. Imperialism, like Allied inaction in the face of the Holocaust, offers us unsettling questions about Britain and the US, places generally conceptualised as ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’ and ‘free’. To seek a fuller understanding of bystander inaction is not to condone or to excuse that inaction. Rather, seeking a thorough understanding of the reasoning behind the policies adopted or not adopted by bystanders – including a range of sometimes conflicting ideologies – reveals how events like the refugee crisis and the Holocaust challenged contemporaries’ perceptions of the world and forced them to prioritise and act based on these perceptions. Indeed, some of these questions would return, especially for British policy-makers, when, after the Second World War and the Holocaust, the problems of race, humanitarianism and liberalism once again had to be engaged with and then prioritised as the Empire came home in the form of the imperial migration of colonial ‘others’.

Notes 1 The term forms an essential part of Kushner’s argument in The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). ‘Liberal democracies’ are described as providing ‘both a discrete overview but also a window into the strengths and limitations of bystander studies as a whole’ in Donald Bloxham and Tony Kushner, The Holocaust. Critical Historical Approaches (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 179. 2 Tony Kushner, ‘Britain, the United States and the Holocaust: In Search of a Historiography’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of the Holocaust (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Tony Kushner, ‘“Pissing in the Wind”? The Search for Nuance in the Study of Holocaust “Bystanders”’, Holocaust Studies: A Journal of Culture and History, Vol. 9, No. 2–3, 2000; Bloxham and Kushner, The Holocaust. 3 Andrew Sharf, The British Press and Jews under Nazi Rule (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964). 4 Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1968); David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis 1938–1941 (New York: Pantheon, 1985). 5 Bloxham and Kushner, The Holocaust, p. 187. 6 Saul Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy Toward Jewish Refugees, 1938– 1945 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1973); Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938–45 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970). 7 A.J. Sherman, Island Refuge: Britain and Refugees from the Third Reich 1933–1939 (London: Paul Elek, 1973), p. 267.

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8 Bernard Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe 1939–1945 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 132, 345. 9 William D. Rubinstein, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis (London: Routledge, 1997). 10 David Cesarani, ‘Review of The Myth of Rescue’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 113, No. 454, 1998, p. 1258. 11 Kushner, ‘Pissing in the Wind’, p. 71. 12 Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 2. 13 Louise London, Whitehall and the Jews 1938–1948: British Immigration Policy, Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 14 Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, pp. 17–18. 15 David Cesarani, ‘An Alien Concept? The Continuity of Anti-Alienism in British Society before 1940’, in David Cesarani and Tony Kushner (eds), The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1993). 16 See: Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); R.A. Huttenback, ‘The British Empire as a “White Man’s Country” – Racial Attitudes and Immigration Legislation in the Colonies of White Settlement’, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1, 1973; Daniel Gorman, ‘Wider and Wider Still?: Racial Politics, Intra-Imperial Immigration and the Absence of an Imperial Citizenship in the British Empire’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, Vol. 3, No. 3, 2002. 17 For example, Assistant Secretary of the Department of the Interior, T.H. Garrett, argued ‘Jews as a class are not desirable immigrants for the reason that they do not assimilate; speaking generally, they preserve their identity as Jews’. Quoted in Paul R. Bartrop, ‘Indifference and Inconvenience: Jewish Refugees and Australia, 1933–45’, in Paul R. Bartrop (ed.), False Havens: The British Empire and the Holocaust (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), p. 129. 18 Bartrop, ‘Indifference and Inconvenience’, p. 149. 19 Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933–1948 (Toronto: Lester & Orpen Dennys, 1983), pp. 280–81, quoted in Lois Foster, ‘No Northern Option: Canada and Refugees from Nazism Before the Second World War’, in Bartrop, False Havens, p. 81. 20 Foster, ‘No Northern Option’, pp. 80–81. See also W. Peter Ward, White Canada Forever: Popular Attitudes and Public Policy Towards Orientals in British Columbia (Montreal: McGill– Queens University Press, 1990) and Valerie Knowles, Strangers at Our Gates: Canadian Immigration and Immigration Policy, 1540–1990 (Toronto: Dundrun, 1992). 21 H.B. Netby’s (the biographer of McKenzie King, Canadian Prime Minister) argument outlined in Foster ‘No Northern Option’, pp. 88–9. 22 Edna Bradlow, ‘South African Policy and Jewish Refugee Immigration in the 1930s’, in Bartrop, False Havens, p. 239–40. 23 See: Frieda Sichel, From Refugee to Citizen: A Sociological Study of the Immigrants from HitlerEurope Who Settled in Southern Africa (Cape Town: A.A. Balkema, 1966). 24 Bradlow, ‘South African Policy’, p. 248. 25 Edna Bradlow, ‘Empire settlement and South African immigration policy, 1910–1948’, in Stephen Constantine (ed.), Emigrants and Empire British Settlement in the Dominions Between the Wars (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp. 174–5. 26 Bradlow, ‘South African Policy’, p. 245. 27 Feingold, The Politics of Rescue, pp. 76, 94, 97–9, 108, 111, 300. 28 Frank Ephraim, Escape to Manila: From Nazi Tyranny to Japanese Terror (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Frank Ephraim, ‘The Mindanao Plan: Political Obstacles to Jewish Refugee Settlement’, Holocaust Genocide Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2006; Dean J. Kotlowski, ‘Breaching the Paper Walls: Paul V. McNutt and Jewish Refugees to the Philippines, 1938– 1939’, Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 5, 2009. 29 Kotlowski, ‘Breaching the Paper Walls’, pp. 882, 885. 30 Ibid, pp. 873–5, 887–8.

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48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56

Ibid, pp. 877, 885. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination, p. 58. Ephraim, ‘The Mindanao Plan’, p. 429. Marion A. Kaplan, Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement In Sosúa, 1940–1945 (New York: Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008); Allen Wells, Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosúa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009). Kaplan, Dominican Haven, pp. 3, 22. Ibid, pp. 3, 135. These difficulties are discussed in full in Chapter 6. G. Antonia Espinoza, ‘Review of Tropical Zion’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3, 2010, p. 490. ‘German and Austrian Jewish Refugees in Shanghai’, USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, available at: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10007091, retrieved 14 April 2014. David Kranzler, Japanese, Nazis and Jews: The Jewish Refugee Community of Shanghai, 1938–1945 (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 1976). Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Gao Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary: Chinese and Japanese Policy toward European Jewish Refugees during World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Marcia Reynders Ristaino, Port Of Last Resort: The Diaspora Communities of Shanghai (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). Bei, Shanghai Sanctuary, pp. 3–4. Major works on the British and American response to the refugee crisis mention colonial settlement options in passing, but mainly do so with reference to Foreign Office and Home Office files. Colonial Office files are referenced in regard to Palestine, but otherwise they remain an under-used resource. Exceptions to this pattern include Frank Shapiro, Haven in Africa (Jerusalem: Gefen, 2002) and Anne Hugon, ‘Les Colonies, un Refuge pour les Juifs? Le Cas de la Gold Coast (1938–1945)’, Vingtième siècle, No. 84, 2004. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, p. 46. Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 13–14. See: Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy 1914–1940 (London: Frank Cass, 1984); Michael Harinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London: Routledge, 1993); L.J. Butler, ‘The Ambiguities of British Colonial Development Policy, 1938–48’, in Anthony Gorst, Lewis Johnman and W. Scott Lucas (eds), Contemporary British History, 1931–1961: Politics and the Limits of Policy (London: Pinter, 1991). See: Sherman, Island Refuge, pp. 103–6, 118, 120–23, 135, 163, 174; Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, pp. 28, 214; London, Whitehall and the Jews, p. 108. Minute by Malcolm MacDonald, 3 July 1938, CO533/497/7, National Archives of the United Kingdom (TNA). For example, Brooke-Popham to MacDonald, 6 April 1939, CO 533/511/6, TNA. Michael Barnett, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011). Barnett’s work was the first in a recent proliferation of studies examining the connections between humanitarianism and empire. Other works which have dealt with this issue and shaped my own interpretations include: Brendan Simms and D.J.B. Trim, Humanitarian Intervention: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); R. Skinner and A. Lester, ‘Humanitarianism and Empire: New Research Agendas’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 40, No. 5, 2012; K. Vongsathorn, ‘Gnawing Pains, Festering Ulcers and Nightmare Suffering: Selling Leprosy as a Humanitarian Cause in the British Empire c. 1890–1960’, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. 40, No. 5, 2012. A.J. Dawe, minute, 8 June 1941, CO 968/33/13, TNA. Shuckbrugh, minute, 9 June 1941, CO968/33/13, TNA. MacDonald, circular despatch to the colonies, 30 September 1938, CO 152/474/10, TNA. Kushner, ‘Pissing in the Wind’, pp. 60–61. Primo Levi, ‘The Gray Zone’, in Omer Bartov (ed.), The Holocaust: Origins, Implementation, Aftermath (London: Routledge, 2000).

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Part 2 G ENO CI D E A ND ID EO LO G IES OF R A CE , CL A S S A N D N A T IO N

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8 THE PE RF E CT S T O R M Japanese military brutality during World War Two Mark Felton

Hong Kong, Christmas Day 1941. British nurses stood clutching each other in terror, tears of anguish running down their weary and grimy faces. Japanese soldiers were all around them, bayonets glinting dully in the early morning sun, their khaki uniforms dirty and their faces blackened by smoke and streaked with sweat. Nearby were 21 men, some British, some Canadian, some Chinese, all of them naked. They were kneeling with their hands tied behind their backs.1 A Japanese officer strode imperiously around, his katana sword held stiffly in his left hand. His commands were sharp and guttural. Beside the British and Chinese nurses stood Major Barfill, commanding officer of the Salesian Mission Advanced Dressing Station in Hong Kong. He was pale and strained by the last few days of intensive work. Kneeling on the grass in a rough line before the Mission were five fellow army doctors. Men who had dedicated their lives to easing the pain of others now were victims of an army seemingly devoid of compassion. The nurses were terrified, and rightly so, for the Japanese had a fearsome reputation for murder and rape gained from a war on the Chinese mainland. The Japanese officer strode towards the kneeling doctors, drawing a Nambu pistol from its brown leather holster and cocking it with a harsh metallic click. Standing behind the first British doctor the officer levelled his pistol at the back of his head, Major Barfill watching through unbelieving eyes. The Japanese officer squeezed the trigger. The pistol shot seemed dreadfully loud as the doctor’s body slumped to the ground, the head half shot away. Calmly, the Japanese officer moved slowly down the line, shooting each of the doctors once in the back of the head. The nurses were sobbing uncontrollably by this point, as were many of the young medical orderlies and volunteers who were watching. The Japanese officer shouted some instructions to his subordinates, and eight young soldiers from the Royal Rifles of Canada, who had been volunteering in the hospital or driving ambulances, were savagely kicked and beaten forward. Other Japanese drew their katana swords as their men pushed the Canadians down on their knees. This was followed swiftly by the swish of a sword blade cutting the air, then cutting flesh and bone. The watching Japanese soldiers cheered and applauded. Other Japanese ran their bayonets through British medics, the Japanese soldiers’ screams and shouts echoing across the hills. After murdering five doctors and thirteen orderlies ‘the Japanese then started butchering some of the wounded patients, forcing Major Barfill to watch’.2 Such was the fate of many of those unfortunate enough to be taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Second World War. Japanese troops killed up to, according to some estimates, 30 million people during the war, most of them civilians. Imperial forces also murdered prisoners-of-war on 105

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numerous occasions. Many massacres have entered the national consciousness of the countries that were affected while others remain largely unknown. The accounts make for sobering reading. At Parit Sulong hundreds of wounded Australian and Indian troops were shot, and in some cases burned alive, by Japanese Imperial Guards when a forward aid station in Malaya was overrun in early 1942.3 At the fall of Hong Kong on Christmas Day 1941 captured British Army nurses were gang-raped and in some cases decapitated.4 At the fall of Singapore in February 1942 hundreds of British and Australian soldiers were butchered when Japanese troops ran amok inside the Alexandra Hospital on the day of the surrender, even bayoneting wounded in the operating theatre along with the surgeons who were treating them.5 When the Bataan Peninsula capitulated in March 1942 tens of thousands of American and Filipino soldiers were forced on to the infamous ‘Death March’, during which 5,000 US troops perished along with many thousands of Filipinos.6 In Singapore, between 10,000 and 30,000 Chinese civilians were brutally machine gunned on the island’s beaches during the infamous Sook Ching Massacre.7 Hundreds of American prisoners were burned alive inside rudimentary air raid shelters at Puerto Princesa Camp in the Philippines in 1944 when the Japanese feared an imminent American invasion.8 Thousands more British and Australians perished during the death marches from Sandakan to Ranau in Borneo in 1945.9 This is only a random sample of the cruelties committed by Emperor Hirohito’s soldiers. Murder was only one aspect of the experience of the victims of Japanese imperialism. Slavery was another. Slave labour was forced upon British, Australian, Dutch and American prisoners as well as hundreds of thousands of native labourers who perished in vast numbers attempting to construct the infernal Railway of Death through the steaming Thai–Burma jungle or labouring in mines in Japan, Manchuria and Korea. Survivors like Eric Lomax, who wrote The Railway Man,10 were left deeply disturbed and traumatised by their experiences, their lives effectively ruined. ‘The guards belted the men hourly with bamboos and rifle butts, or they kicked them’, wrote LieutenantColonel J.M. Williams, an Australian POW on the Death Railway. ‘I have seen them use a five pound hammer and anything they could lay their hands on. One man had his jaw broken with a blow from a rifle butt because he bent a spike while driving it into the rail.’11 Native peoples died in bewilderingly huge numbers as slaves of the Japanese. Thousands of Korean and Chinese women, and a handful of Dutch girls, were forced to become ‘comfort women’, a euphemism for impressed prostitutes. European women and children were sexually assaulted at Tarakan, Menado, Bandoeng, Padang and Flores Island in the Netherlands East Indies in 1942. At Blora, close to Semarang in Java, 20 European women and girls were imprisoned in two houses beside a main road. Over a period of three weeks, as Japanese units passed by these houses, the women and their daughters were brutally and repeatedly raped.12 The Japanese even conducted human experiments on Asian civilians and Allied POWs at the infamous Unit 731 and its several associated units, murdering thousands in cruel biological and chemical warfare tests that rivalled the worst experiments of Nazi doctors in the concentration camps.13 The murders, rapes, slavery and destruction were driven by forces that it is necessary to try to comprehend. It is simply not adequate to label the Japanese military of the Second World War ‘barbaric’ and assume there must have been some policy or agenda that made criminals out of young Japanese soldiers and tarnished the 106

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reputation of a major nation for generations. Brutality in the Second World War was not a solely Japanese preserve, but the Japanese were the only combatant nation in the war that treated all enemies with equal scorn and brutality, be they Chinese civilians, British POWs, Filipino labourers, American pilots, Dutch colonialists or Korean ‘comfort women’. The Nazis applied oppression and murder more selectively, on the one hand brutally massacring Jews and Soviet POWs in the Eastern Territories, but on the other hand scrupulously abiding by the Geneva Convention in their treatment of British and American prisoners-of-war. The differences between the death rates in German and Japanese POW camps are just one startling fact. Only 4% of Allied prisoners (excluding Soviets) in German hands perished during the war, whereas 27% of Allied prisoners of the Japanese died. Explanations for Japanese wartime brutality are by no means simple, but, as the title of this chapter suggests, there was no single reason; rather, it was a combination of factors occurring at a certain point in history that caused an explosion of Japanese military violence – a perfect storm. There are eight broad ‘threads’ that help to explain patterns of behaviour among the Japanese military in the 1930s and 1940s: pre-Meiji Restoration samurai culture; post-Meiji Restoration ultra-nationalism; the influence of Prussia upon Japanese military philosophy and statism; emperor worship; the reaction against democracy, capitalism and the Western Powers in the 1920s and 1930s; military training methods and the ‘group ethic’; attitudes to enemy combatants and non-combatants, and finally the concept of an ‘honourable death’. Twisted together, these historical and philosophical threads created an explosive cord of enormous destructive power. Japan was almost entirely closed to the outside world from the early seventeenth century until the mid-1850s. For over 200 years one social class, the samurai, enjoyed the unquestioning obedience of the people. The shogun and his military government ran Japan, with the emperor reduced to a cipher. The rigid behaviour of the samurai was determined by the Bushido Code (‘the way of the warrior’) governed by the seven cardinal virtues of rectitude, courage, benevolence, respect, honesty, honour and loyalty and the associated virtues of filial piety, wisdom and care for the aged. The nonsamurai Japanese majority counted for little in such a society, ordinary Japanese not even possessing surnames. Failure to show adequate respect to a samurai of whatever rank usually resulted in the hapless peasant being decapitated on the spot. Merchants were a despised class, the samurai disdaining money and wealth accumulation in return for ‘higher’ and more ‘honourable’ military, administrative and artistic pursuits. They lived by a code of behaviour that could demand suicide without question or hesitation. The samurai daimyo lords were harsh and often brutal in ruling Japan, and the people that they ruled mostly pliable and respectful. Elements of samurai culture would cast a shadow over Japanese history and evolve into something far more brutal when it was reclaimed by ultra-nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s. The samurai system entered a sudden and unexpected decline and then collapse following the arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s ‘Black Ships’ in Edo Bay in 1854. Japan was forcibly opened to the world, and to new ideas and technologies that often sat uncomfortably with the old ways. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the Japanese realised the threat that the technologically advanced civilisations from across the sea posed to their nation and the growing role of the British, French, Dutch and Americans in Asia. Japan’s inherent military and economic backwardness was exposed after centuries of self-imposed isolation, and progressive forces among the samurai 107

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moved to remove the shogunal military government and restore the emperor to titular leadership over the nation and, as important, to began a programme of rapid modernisation of industry and the military.14 The Japanese had no intention of ending up like Qing Dynasty China, a nation being slowly carved up into European colonies and trading enclaves. Japanese ultra-nationalism had its roots among disaffected samurai who with the Meiji Restoration of 1868 quickly lost their social status and economic privileges. Some of these clans, which had backed the losing side and supported a continuation of the shogun’s military government, attempted to rise up against the central government in Tokyo and resist the new regime. The Saga and Satsuma Rebellions are the two most famous examples of traditionalist samurai challenging the new status quo.15 When the government, with its new Western-style army trained by French and Prussian instructors, easily crushed these rebellions, some disgruntled samurai turned instead to politics and militant secret societies like the Black Dragon and other reactionary groups. Almost all of Japan’s leaders during and after the Meiji Restoration were either samurai or claimed descent from samurai, and regardless of their political allegiances they shared common class values and outlook. This meant that the ultra-nationalist samurai could find allies even among their more progressive colleagues. Over time, the preRestoration samurai period and the last desperate stands of resistant samurai during the 1870s began to be romanticised by the Japanese and looked upon as an ideal of the ancient concepts that underlined Japanese society, particularly the Bushido Code rules of courage, honour, loyalty, and a heroic death in battle. The most prominent example was that of Saigo Takamori, leader of the failed Satsuma Rebellion who died during a last stand with 400 of his remaining followers during the Battle of Shiroyama in 1877. Takamori, who may have committed seppuku, ritual disembowelment, to avoid capture, was widely known as ‘the last real samurai’.16 There was widespread agreement among Japan’s political elite during the last quarter of the nineteenth century that the nation needed to build up a strong military to protect it from the dangerous Western Powers. The resulting Fukoku kyohei (‘enrich the country, strengthen the military’) policy sought to build up the economy and industry with the object of not only modernising the nation with factories, railways and modern communications, but primarily to construct a strong, modern army and navy. Advice on how to achieve this had been sought from Otto von Bismarck, and Prussian influence during this crucial period would be far-reaching and extremely important to the development of Japanese nationalism and thirst for empire. In 1873, universal conscription was introduced for the first time in the nation’s history and in 1882 the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors was promulgated, indoctrinating conscripts from different social backgrounds with military-patriotic values and stressing unquestioning obedience to the emperor. The document symbolised the personal bond between the emperor and the military, in effect making the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy his personal troops. The Rescript stressed ‘proper respect to superiors’ and concluded with the words ‘duty is heavier than a mountain: death is lighter than a feather’. These were to have important ramifications when Japan went to war with the Western Powers. Born in the Kingdom of Prussia in 1842, Major Klemens Jacob Meckel was the Westerner who perhaps did more than most to revolutionise the Japanese army. Japanese War Minister General Aritomo Yamagata, often called the ‘father of ultranationalism’, had been responsible for introducing universal conscription in 1873. 108

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Yamagata was strongly influenced by Prussia’s recent success in transforming from an agricultural state into a modern industrial and military power and its role in the creation of a unified Imperial German state in 1871. Prussian political ideas, of authoritarian government at home and military expansion abroad, were very attractive to Yamagata and many of his colleagues in the higher echelons of the military and government. The Prussian model devalued the notion of civilian control over the military, effectively creating a state within a state. This model would eventually be wholeheartedly adopted in Japan. In 1885 Imperial Germany’s Chief of Staff, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke, dispatched Major Meckel to Japan as a military advisor, in an effort to wean the Japanese off French advisors and tactics.17 Meckel worked closely with future prime ministers Taro Katsura and Aritomo Yamagata as well as army strategist General Soroku Kawakami. Meckel’s influence upon the Imperial Japanese Army was extraordinary, from reorganising the command structure along traditional Prussian lines, to increasing its mobility, connecting its bases by railways, abolishing virtually all exceptions to conscription, meaning that practically every young man became a soldier, to introducing the radical concept of ‘war games’. Perhaps the most striking import was a philosophy that would do much to reinforce ideas of emperor worship among the Japanese, particularly by linking it with war and success. Crucially, Major Meckel taught his pupils that Prussian battlefield success during the 1870–71 Franco–Prussian War had been due to the officer class’s unswerving obedience to its sovereign emperor, an ideal popularised by Hermann Roesler. Meckel found a willing and receptive audience among Japanese officers and this idea was already codified in the Meiji Constitution, aiding its acceptance throughout the military.18 So important was Meckel that his bust was sited in front of the Japanese Army Staff College from 1909 until 1945. The Japanese absorbed Clausewitz’s theories and Bismarck’s statism, and during his three years in Japan, Meckel trained 60 of the army’s highest-ranking officers, the very men who would shape Japan’s destiny. In modern Japanese military history almost all threads tend to lead back to the emperor. To understand the wartime Japanese soldier and his barbarism it is necessary to understand the place of the emperor in his mind, and in that of the nation as a whole. The evils perpetrated by the Japanese armed forces were committed in the emperor’s name and it is perhaps surprising to realise how central and powerful was the idea and myth of the emperor in an otherwise outwardly modern and thrusting nation state. The absorption of Prussian philosophy played a vital role in the repositioning of the emperor at the heart of the Japanese military consciousness. War Minister Yamagata’s interest in Prussian autocracy helped to reinforce emperor worship as a tool for inculcating obedience among Japan’s new conscript soldiers. The lifting of recruitment restrictions, another Prussian influence, meant that virtually every young Japanese male was put through the mill of military training, so that Japanese society was militarised and populated by men inculcated in the military’s ways of thinking and behaving. In 1890 the position of the emperor had been formally enshrined in law when he was declared to be ‘divine’ within the state religion, Shinto. Japanese were taught that the emperor was directly descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu, and this idea was rigorously enforced until 1945. They were taught that Japan was the world’s oldest nation state, ruled since the mists of time by an unbroken line of emperors without a single dynastic change. These ideas were used to generate feelings of racial and national superiority. Japanese were led to believe that the emperor’s divinity justified 109

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obeying without question not only him, but also his representatives in the government and military who ruled in his name. This was kokutai or ‘national body/structure’, the national polity and basis for the emperor’s sovereignty. Kokutai taught students to put the nation before the self, that they were a part of the state and not separated from it. They were educated to follow the central precepts of loyalty and filial piety, with the emperor as ‘divine father’ of them all. Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, a nationalist army leader who would be instrumental in causing the war in China in the 1930s, hijacked kokutai for his ultra-nationalist movement Kodo (‘The Kingly Way’). ‘It is necessary to have politics, economics, culture, national defence and everything else, all focused on one being, the Emperor,’ he wrote. ‘This system is the strongest and the grandest of all . . . there is no nation that can compare with our national blood solidarity.’19 The place of the emperor in the minds of Japanese soldiers helps to explain how many of these men behaved in ways that went well beyond the bounds of accepted morality and international law. For a Japanese soldier, any order, no matter how immoral or repugnant, had to be obeyed without question because he had been taught from birth that superiors were always right. It was a modernised version of the older samurai tradition of service to one’s liege lord. His superiors, after all, took their orders from the infallible emperor. Of course, the level of complicity of wartime Emperor Hirohito in government policy and war crimes is impossible to know due to the Imperial Household Agency’s refusal to open the Imperial Archives to historical scrutiny, but the generals and admirals did act ‘in his name’, and draw their legal and moral authority from their close proximity to the emperor. Therefore, to question a superior’s orders was in effect to question a god, and what mere mortal could do that? Such a simple and direct mindset also relieved the ordinary soldiers of taking individual responsibility for their actions because of the infallibility of one’s superior officer. ‘It didn’t matter to us whether women lived or died’, said Anji Kaneko in 2007, a Japanese veteran of the brutal occupation of China, when discussing soldiers’ attitudes to local women. ‘We were the Emperor’s soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance.’20 The system seemed to give many Japanese soldiers a feeling of invincibility and invulnerability, and also complemented the already deeply ingrained group ethic that frowned upon individuality. Ultra-nationalists inside and outside of government and the military drove forward rearmament as well as the quest for natural resources and colonies using, as a pretext, the perceived threat to Japan posed by the Western Powers. This movement gained particular momentum, as well as widespread support, because of the Western Powers’ snubbing of Japan at the international level, particularly over membership of the imperialists’ club. Such slights would engender feelings of hatred for the Occidentals, and when the opportunity arose to take ‘revenge’ against them, some senior Japanese officers openly encouraged the maltreatment and murder of Allied POWs by their men. A philosophical revolution occurred in Japan. An idea developed that Japan was at the centre of the world, and that Japanese people were superior to all other races. This would eventually lead to Kodoshugisha (‘Imperial Way’), a divine mission to bring all nations under one roof. The Japanese term adopted for their putative empire was the ‘Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere’, demonstrating how those in power attempted to cloak their empire building under the lie that Japan was ‘liberating’ fellow Asians from the cruel yoke of Occidental imperialism. Ideas of racial superiority common to the Japanese military by the mid-1930s certainly contributed to the barbarism displayed by its forces. Ironically, much of that barbarism was directed against 110

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fellow Asians, making a mockery of Japan’s claims to be a ‘liberator’ rather than just another imperialist. The worst example is the Rape of Nanking in 1937, when the Japanese occupation force commanded by Hirohito’s uncle General Prince Asaka murdered over 300,000 Chinese POWs and civilians in the Chinese capital. One of the major events to push Japan much further down the militarist road was the failure of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles to recognise Japan’s territorial claims in Asia. Before the First World War, Japan had already started building a small empire, gaining Taiwan and China’s Liaodong Peninsula in 1895. The nation had defeated China in 1895 and Russia in 1905, the latter a spectacular coup that made the world sit up and take notice of this grasping little Asian power. In 1905 Korea was added to Japan’s growing empire before being formally annexed five years later. Japan had been an ally of Britain, France and the United States during the Great War, capturing German colonies in China and the Pacific and even sending warships to the Mediterranean, yet when it came time to divide up the spoils Japan was effectively snubbed by its own allies. Many influential Japanese felt the heavy hand of racism and disparaged the League of Nations, which existed, in the words of leading nationalist thinker Shumei Okawa, ‘to preserve the status quo and further the domination of the world by the Anglo-Saxons’. In turn, Okawa argued that ‘Japan would strive to fulfill her predestined role of champion of Asia’, a reference to the ‘Imperial Way’. Okawa was one of four very significant philosophers who managed to place militarism and ultra-nationalism into mainstream Japanese life between the wars. Ikki Kita was another, who advocated blending the ultra-nationalist movement with the Japanese military. He also advocated a coup d’état to rid Japan of its ‘corrupt’ democratic government. Kita’s plan was for the military to rescind the 1889 Meiji Constitution, ban political parties, reform the Imperial Diet (parliament), and nationalise industry. Then, the Japanese would embark upon their crusade to ‘free’ Asia from Western imperialism, i.e., build their own empire.21 The government banned Ikki Kita’s books, but they soon became very popular with young army and navy officers who were most susceptible to such radical and nationalist ideas. Okawa proposed the idea of a clash of civilisations between Japan and the West. He created an ideology that neatly encapsulated many Japanese’s desire for hegemony which he christened hakko ichui (literally: ‘eight cords, one roof’ which has been interpreted as ‘eight corners of the world under one roof’). Okawa believed that as Japan was the world’s oldest nation state, it was her divine mission to rule the world. Racial superiority, creating an Asian empire and the divinity of the emperor were all strongly highlighted by the media to actively encourage such thinking among the Japanese population.22 These ideas again found particularly willing disciples among the Japanese military. Another philosopher, Seigo Nakano, believed in the rebirth of Japan through the old samurai ethics blended with a more modern form of Chinese Confucianism and a populist nationalism modelled on European fascism. Nakano was one of the many philosophers to highlight the story of Saigo Takamori, calling his death in 1877 the ‘true spirit’ of the Japanese, and, again, such heroic stories were very popular between the wars. General Sadao Araki, whose appointments as Education and later Army Minister gave him a unique platform from which to actually disseminate ultra-nationalist ideas into the mainstream, was another prominent driving force behind Japan’s quest for empire. Araki, who had a wide following among junior officers, introduced suishin kyoiku (‘spiritual training’) into the military and civilian worlds, a modified and perverted form of the old samurai Bushido Code. Importantly, the old compassionate 111

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elements of the Code were deleted, with important ramifications for those captured by the Japanese, leaving only a pitiless catalogue of martial prowess, rigid duty and utter loyalty as the underlying tenets to be absorbed by society. War was presented as purifying and death as a duty. Other events during the 1930s propelled Japan towards war. The London Naval Treaty signed in 1930 had been forced on the Japanese by Britain and America, the idea being to put the brakes on Japanese naval expansion, which threatened the Occidentals’ military superiority in Asia and the Pacific. All it did was confirm in the minds of many Japanese the idea that their nation was being prevented from following its pre-ordained ‘destiny’, and, importantly, was being held to double standards. The Occidental countries could do as they pleased while Japan could not, simply because her people were Orientals. The Treaty engendered deepseated hostility and racism towards the Western Powers, particularly the United States, in all levels of Japanese society. It was an opportunity for the more radical elements inside the military to attempt to seize control and push the country towards completing their dream of hakko ichui. The May 15th Incident in 1932, when Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai was assassinated by a group of young naval officers and army cadets, was viewed by many in Japan as a patriotic act, further reinforcing the by-now widely held view that Western-style democracy and party politics was corrupt and useless, and actually hindering Japan’s destiny to rule Asia. The first stage in making hakko ichui a reality was a ‘holy war’ against China. The nature of Japan’s wars in China in 1931–2 and 1937 onwards arguably demonstrated the ingrained attitudes of the wartime Japanese towards their enemies and the success of the ‘spiritual training’ that the troops had received since they were schoolboys. It also indicated that when Japan made war on the Occidentals, they could expect the same doctrines to be applied to them. ‘On the battlefield, we never really considered the Chinese humans,’ said Japanese veteran Uno Shintaro. ‘When you’re winning, the losers look really miserable. We concluded that the Japanese race was superior.’23 This is a common enough attitude during a war and not limited to the Japanese. It is estimated that 10.2 million Chinese perished in China proper (exclusive of ethnic Chinese murdered in Western colonies) between 1931 and 1945. One of the most notorious murder campaigns outside of the Rape of Nanking was the infamous Jinmetsu Sakusen (‘Burn to Ash Strategy’) popularised in 1957 as the more ominous sounding Sanko Sakusen (‘Kill All, Burn All, and Loot All’). This scorched-earth offensive was conducted by the Japanese in eastern China between 1942 and 1945 in response to the December 1940 Chinese Communist-led Hundred Regiments Offensive. Japanese historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta estimates that 2.7 million Chinese were killed during the ‘Three Alls Policy’. In 1940 Prime Minister Prince Konoe proclaimed the ‘National Defence State’. Mobilisation was announced, as well as the government’s complete control over the nation’s assets. All political parties were abolished and the Japanese prepared for total war. Japanese school textbooks taught children all about Japan’s divine mission to unite east and west under Tokyo’s control. Democracy, that ‘Western imposition’ which so frustrated and angered many Japanese philosophers and military officers, was shouldered aside for a return to military government. Young Japanese military recruits were not only moulded into obedient tools of the militarists through propaganda and school textbooks, but also through a military training programme that employed physical violence to punish even the slightest transgressions. Recruits were beaten, made to perform unnecessarily strenuous tasks and very often were not fed 112

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properly.24 One of the explanations for Japanese military barbarity is the way in which its soldiers were trained. As superiors literally beat inferiors, the ordinary Japanese soldiers at the bottom of the system were left with little outlet for their frustrations and pent-up anger other than those unfortunates that came into their power – usually defenceless civilians and prisoners-of-war. This important point also occurs in the Japanese soldier’s relationship with his Korean and Formosan colleagues. During the war the Japanese impressed thousands of young Korean and Formosan men as army auxiliaries, using them particularly as prison camp guards. The Germans did much the same in the death camp system, where brutal Ukrainian auxiliaries worked under SS supervision. Japanese officers and soldiers routinely treated Korean and Formosan soldiers with utter contempt, beating and humiliating them even though they were ostensibly allies. In turn, Allied POWs consistently noted that Korean and Formosan guards were among the most brutal of their captors as these humiliated underdogs of the Japanese war machine worked off their shame and loss of face on POWs. At Sandakan Camp 1 on the island of Borneo the Australian prisoners noticed a dramatic change in the level of brutality once a large party of Formosan guards arrived in April 1943. The Japanese treated the Formosans as their inferiors and the Formosans took to delivering mass beatings of POW work details under the flimsiest of pretexts. ‘My gang would be working all right and then would be suddenly told to stop . . . The men would then be stood with their arms outstretched horizontally, shoulder high, facing the sun without hats,’ recalled Warrant Officer Class 1 Bill Sticpewich of the Royal Australian Army Service Corps. The guards would form themselves into two groups, one group covering the prisoners with their rifles ‘and the others doing the actual beating. They would walk along the back of us and . . . smack us underneath the arms, across the ribs and on the back,’ said Sticpewich. ‘They would give each man a couple of bashes . . . if they whimpered or flinched they would get a little more.’25 ‘Japanese guards treated Koreans no better than prisoners’, writes Gavan Daws in Prisoners of the Japanese: like another breed of mongrel dog to kick . . . One said to an Englishman, ‘Inggeris-Korean samo, all prisoner Nippon’. Another said it to an Australian: ‘You me samo.’ But for every one miserable Korean who saw life in the camps that way, there were all the others, Hatchet Face, Shadrach the Shitbag, and the rest, taking out their rage against the Japanese on the prisoners. ‘Samo?’ said the Australian, with feeling. ‘Like hell’.26 Within the paradigm of superior–inferior relationships, the violence and humiliation characteristic of those relationships flowed ever downwards until it found an outlet, and that outlet was always those peoples that the Japanese military already considered ‘worthless’ – the ‘racially inferior’ Chinese or the ‘dishonourable’ and ‘cowardly’ Allied prisoners-of-war. The ingrained violence of Japanese military training and power relationships does not fully explain wartime patterns of behaviour but it does suggest that the Japanese soldier was partially desensitised by the training that he had received, and coupled with the strong influence of the radicalised officer corps, it made him more susceptible to blindly following orders through fear of brutal punishment or exclusion from the group. The Japanese soldier was also labouring under the rigorously (and violently) enforced concept that superiors were completely infallible and that any order issued 113

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by a superior should be treated as an order given by the divine emperor himself. The Japanese military already had young minds that were more readily prepared to accept such ideas because Japanese society itself was hierarchical and highly Confucian in design, where elders, teachers and parents were minor gods to be obeyed without question, and where the ‘group ethic’ was a central unifying concept of the nation. The Japanese preoccupations with ‘face’, conformity and ‘the group’ were powerful inhibitors to any Japanese soldier questioning his leader’s decisions. To refuse an order was to commit social suicide and risk exclusion from the group. Ultimately, there are very few examples of Japanese soldiers refusing to carry out patently ‘criminal’ orders, and those that do exist are almost exclusively those of senior officers who due to their rank and status within the pyramidal military structure were largely immune from punishment. During the early twentieth century Japanese imperialism was largely held in check through military cooperation and diplomatic agreements with the Western Powers. Japan’s leaders desperately wanted their nation to be given equal status with the Occidental nations and to acquire an equal right to sit at the imperialists’ table. The Japanese were frustrated, as we have seen, because the Western Powers never viewed the Japanese as anything other than a slightly superior form of Asian, and certainly not as their racial, ideological or political equals. The insecurity and anger felt by Japanese politicians and military leaders at not being fully admitted to the imperialists’ club, and the often-subtle racism that their nation suffered, contributed enormously to xenophobia towards foreigners that grew rapidly during the 1920s and 1930s in Japan, and to the rise of militarism and even fascism amongst the country’s leaders. It would be one of the major reasons why Caucasian prisoners were often humiliated, tortured and/or murdered during the Second World War. The Japanese rejected the Geneva Conventions and other such symbols of ‘civilised’ warfare. ‘The Japanese had torn the Geneva convention to pieces. White men could go to hell, and the Japanese would be the ones to send them there.’27 The Hague and Geneva Conventions had no place within a military society that advocated death in battle or ritual suicide as the greatest expressions of manhood. The Japanese labelled the Conventions the ‘Coward’s Code’, and they meant it. The Japanese often tried to impress other Asian peoples by parading starving Allied prisoners before them – this was motivated by a racist Pan-Asianism and a desire to show former colonial subjects the impotence of their Western masters.28 Japanese feelings of inferiority transmogrified easily into violence when whites fell under their power, a classic example of ‘the boot on the other foot’ mentality. ‘The march went on all day under a hot sun with only two halts in the playgrounds of two schools where the children were allowed to come close up to the prisoners to jeer and spit at us,’ recalled one British POW who was paraded before locals in Japanese-occupied Korea. It was those at the pinnacle of military power, the generals, who decided to brutalise prisoners-of-war, and who made the conditions so deplorable inside the camps. More junior officers and other ranks went along with these crimes because they believed the orders to be legal and that the Emperor wished them to commit such outrages. In some cases they were correct. Concerning the aforementioned ‘Three Alls Policy’ in China, Emperor Hirohito personally sanctioned this genocidal campaign. The generals who commanded this operation were hanged as war criminals, but their ultimate authority, the emperor, was never placed on the stand for his part in killing millions of innocent people. 114

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The Japanese were also no respecters of bravery in their opponents, for they only acknowledged the battlefield superiority of their own men and accordingly treated all POWs with the same lack of humanity. A Malay platoon that had made a particularly valiant stand before Singapore City at the end of the conflict in Malaya in 1942 was massacred after they ran out of ammunition and surrendered, and its young commander, Lieutenant Adnan bin Saidi, was hung upside down from a tree and bayoneted to death.29 The generals knew that the deeply ingrained respect for authority of the average Japanese, coupled with the fear of exclusion from the group and concomitant loss of face, meant that very little resistance was encountered among Japanese troops. The whites had been the masters of Asia before 1941, and it was they, went official Japanese military thinking, who had tried to keep the Japanese down, and had refused to recognise Japan’s legitimate right to be a great power. The war could be conceived of as a race war, and the levels of barbarity and cruelty indicative of the hatred and loathing, and the hidden inferiority complex, harboured by many Japanese soldiers towards their white foes. ‘By 1941 they were ready to take on the white world in war, and they truly did not care anymore what the white man thought of them.’30 During Japan’s Blitzkrieg across Asia between December 1941 and mid-1942 they captured 320,000 Allied soldiers. At the fall of Singapore in February 1942, the Japanese, who were outnumbered virtually two-to-one, were astounded when 70,000 British, Indian, Malay and Australian troops laid down their arms and marched themselves off to captivity at Changi. To young and propaganda-conditioned Japanese soldiers, who saw themselves as modern-day samurai, surrender was the most dishonourable concept imaginable; especially surrender to a numerically inferior opponent. Better to die than to accept such a humiliating and shameful fate. They neither cared for nor understood the Occidentals’ acceptance of surrender under certain circumstances, nor the lack of shame attached to saving lives when fighting no longer served any useful military purpose. The Japanese had already constructed the Geneva Conventions as the ‘coward’s code’ and the behaviour of white soldiers appearing to be another Western ideology as morally corrupt and contemptible as ‘democracy’ or ‘party politics’. ‘Remember your status as prisoners of war. You have no rights. International Law and the Geneva Convention are dead,’ announced one Japanese camp commandant to his prisoners in 1942. ‘If the POWs believed they were victims with rights, to the Japanese they were a sullen, disgraced mob, who had lost their rights as individuals and were to be treated as such,’31 comment Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper. The Japanese herded their prisoners into over 600 camps across Asia. The common factors that linked these camps together were privation, disease, torture and murder, all deliberately promulgated by the Japanese high command and rigorously enforced by camp commandants and their minions. One example is what occurred during the construction of the infamous ‘Railway of Death’ through the Thai–Burma jungle. ‘In one camp we spent five months in a very crowded area . . . where for the first three weeks there was no roof on our building,’ wrote Australian survivor Lieutenant-Colonel J.M. Williams. ‘I complained to the Japanese commander about the accommodation and he said that they were equally crowded. In fact, twenty-three officers and twentythree other ranks of my Force occupied the same space as three Japanese soldiers.’32 A British officer, Major Cyril Wild, who spoke Japanese, was at Songkrei Camp on the railway in August 1943. He testified to the Tokyo War Crimes Trial that inside one hut lay 700 POWs arranged two deep along each side on shelves. All of them were painfully thin and nearly naked. Down the middle of the hut were around 250 men who 115

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were suffering from tropical ulcers. ‘These commonly stripped the whole of the flesh from a man’s leg from the knee to the ankle,’ Wild stated. ‘There was an almost overwhelming smell of putrefaction.’33 Providing their slaves with even basic medical facilities was not planned for. Sickness was endemic among the prisoners. Cholera roared up and down the railway line, killing hundreds each time it struck, and the usual POW diseases of malaria, dysentery, beriberi and typhus carried off hundreds more. The Japanese issued rules that exacerbated already perilous situations further. Only 15% of the prisoners were ‘allowed’ to be sick, and sick men were only permitted one disease. Everyone else had to work – and work fast on starvation rations. The choices forced upon prisoner doctors were terrible: One British doctor and his work detail officer had a private formula. Take two men, one classified as sick, the other as sickest. Send the sick man out to work and he would probably die. Keep the sickest in camp and he would certainly die. But keep the man who was merely sick back in camp and he had a better chance of surviving. That was medical ethics under the Japanese.34 General Hideki Tojo, leader of the proto-fascist Taisei Yokusankai (‘Imperial Rule Assistance Association’) set up by Prime Minister Prince Konoe in 1940 to create a totalitarian one-party state, was the Japanese Prime Minister and Minister of War for much of the Second World War, and he was personally responsible for running prisoner-of-war camps. Ideology manifested itself practically as Tojo ordered commandants: ‘You must not allow prisoners to lie idle, doing nothing but enjoy free meals, for even a single day. Their labour and technical skill should be fully utilized for the replenishment of production, and contribution thereby made toward the prosecution of the Greater East Asiatic War for which no effort ought to be spared.’35 The feeling among the Japanese military towards prisoner welfare was often seen as a cultural, rather than a practical, difference between East and West. ‘In Japan we have our own ideology concerning prisoners of war,’ wrote Tojo, ‘which should naturally make their treatment more or less different from that in Europe and America.’ Tojo even instructed camp commandants to harden their hearts. ‘It is necessary to take care not to be obsessed with the mistaken idea of humanitarianism or swayed by personal feelings . . . ’ This was the manifestation of ‘spiritual training’ and a corruption of the Bushido Code. Japanese soldiers were taught to view death as a glorious release, and some accounts suggest that they also viewed murdering prisoners in the same light. ‘It is amazing, he had killed him with one stroke. The head, detached from the trunk, rolls in front of the crowd . . . the dark blood gushes out. The head is dead white like a doll’s,’ recalled a Japanese sailor who witnessed a prisoner being put to death by sword. ‘The savageness which I felt only a little while ago is gone, and now I feel nothing but the true compassion of Japanese Bushido. A senior corporal laughs loudly, “Well, he will enter Nirvana now”.’ The sword was, after all, both the soul of the samurai and the soul of Japan. The ill treatment of Allied POWs by the Japanese and the suicidal bravery of the Japanese soldier in battle both partly had their roots in the rejection of the idea of surrender as an acceptable military response. Military honour, which had once been the exclusive preserve of the samurai warrior elite, had been extended since the late nineteenth century to all ranks of the army and navy, and indeed to the general public, through ‘spiritual training’ achieving common acceptance. Avoiding the shame of 116

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surrender meant that the Japanese soldier willingly embraced death, even by his own hand. The philosophical idea of ritual suicide was called gyokusai (lit. ‘jade shards’) and it had its origins, somewhat ironically considering later history, in a seventh-century Chinese text, The Book of Northern Qi, where one passage reads: ‘a man would rather be a shattered jade than a complete roof tile’. Japanese servicemen were inspired to seek an idealised and romanticised death in battle, often making reference to the deaths of samurai heroes like Saigo Takamori. The Japanese government presented war as a purifying experience, with death in combat seen as a patriotic duty rather than a personal choice: The fact is that innumerable soldiers, sailors and pilots were determined to die, to become eirei, that is ‘guardian spirits’ of the country. Many Japanese felt that to be enshrined at Yasukuni was a special honour because the Emperor twice a year visited the shrine to pay homage. Yasukuni is the only shrine, deifying common men, which the Emperor would visit to pay his respects.36 During the 1930s and 1940s the Japanese soldier was presented with two possible suicide scenarios if the military situation was lost. The first was the concept of a glorious death in battle, often achieved en masse during so-called ‘banzai charges’, when entire military units, sometimes several thousand strong, would launch themselves headlong at the enemy knowing that they stood little or no chance of victory. The term ‘banzai charge’ originated with the United States military and was derived from what Japanese soldiers would scream as they charged their opponents: Tenno Heika Banzai (‘Long Live the Emperor’). The Japanese Army had often used direct frontal assault during various campaigns before the war, notably during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900 and during the Russo–Japanese War. This form of assault, not then considered a last resort but an accepted military tactic, had worked particularly well in China during the 1930s, when the often numerically inferior Japanese would fix bayonets and aggressively charge Chinese positions head on. Japanese soldiers would then close with their Chinese opponents hand-to-hand, where the Japanese preference for edged weapons, primarily the officers with swords and other ranks with bayonets, would decide the matter. The Japanese soldier was very aggressive and handled his weapon with skill because bayonet fighting had been practised obsessively since recruit training. Japanese troops often used live or recently deceased Chinese and later Allied POWs for bayonet practice in order to desensitise their soldiers, for it is one thing to shoot an enemy soldier with a rifle from several hundred yards away, but quite another to run him through with a bayonet less than an arm’s length away. The reason for the tactic’s success was because the Chinese were armed with slow-firing bolt-action rifles and possessed few automatic weapons. During the Second World War the banzai charge became more a weapon of last resort than a useful battlefield tactic. And if the Japanese intended to seek an honourable death they were usually granted one courtesy of British and American machine guns, mortars and artillery. American forces in particular faced down some enormous banzai charges during their island-hopping campaigns across the Pacific. On 21 August 1942, on Guadalcanal in the British Solomon Islands, Colonel Kiyonao Ichiki led 800 of his men in a massed banzai charge against the American defenders of the strategically vital Henderson Field airbase, attempting to overwhelm US troops by sheer weight of numbers and frenzied bayoneting and slashing with swords. But 117

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instead nearly every Japanese soldier was mown down by American machine guns. The largest banzai charge ever mounted occurred on the island of Saipan in 1944 when 4,300 Japanese troops died assaulting American positions. Though the Japanese died in enormous numbers they still managed to kill 650 US troops before expiring. Colonel Ichiki, of the Guadalcanal banzai charge, realising that his attack had utterly failed, resorted to the second honourable suicide option available to Japanese soldiers – ritual disembowelment. Seppuku, or hara-kiri as it was more commonly known among Allied soldiers, was another hangover from the old samurai days, when a disgraced warrior would plunge a short wakizashi sword into his stomach before being beheaded by another samurai. Disembowelling with a sword or a bayonet was common during the war, and if all else failed many Japanese simply held a hand grenade to their heads to achieve the same effect. Seppuku was popularised in modern Japan by the death of a soldier during the Shanghai Incident in 1932, when Japanese forces invaded China’s largest city. The soldier had been captured by the Chinese and after his release he returned to the site of his capture, knelt down and disembowelled himself to exorcise his shame.37 It was an action that was widely praised in the Japanese media at the time. If Japanese soldiers were trained to think and act in this way, then it comes as no surprise that they should have greeted the mass Allied surrenders of 1941–2 with complete mystification and disdain. As we have seen, surrender in the Japanese military mind rendered the combatant soldier a nonentity, and nonentities could be treated worse than animals. Much has been made of the Japanese military’s rejection of the terms of the Geneva Conventions during the Second World War. In 1929 the Geneva Conference was organised and Japan, along with 40 other nations, did sign the human rights agreements. Although Japan had signed, the Diet never ratified the agreement, so its terms regarding the treatment of prisoners-of-war and civilian internees were not legally binding on the Japanese military. POWs therefore fell under Imperial Japanese Army regulations and not binding international agreements. Any transgression by a ‘worthless’ POW was severely punished, as one would punish a slave. Japanese soldiers believed that physical violence was the only proper way to deal with ‘disobedience’, and violence was liberally used.38 As we have seen, violence and humiliation had played an integral part in the Japanese soldiers’ own recruit training, so it had become an ingrained reflex action in dealing with problems. ‘I believed and acted this way because I was convinced of what I was doing,’ said former Japanese soldier Uno Shintaro. ‘We carried out our duty as instructed by our masters. We did it for the sake of our country. From our filial obligation to our ancestors.’39 Obeying one’s ‘masters’ led to some very extreme reactions in the governance of POWs. The following harrowing example demonstrates a common Japanese reaction to attempted escape by Allied prisoners from slave labour camps. The Geneva Conventions state that it is a soldier’s duty to attempt to escape, but in the eyes of the Japanese such ‘lawful’ attempts were equated more to slave rebellions and were dealt with accordingly. Two young Australian POWs managed to slip out of a prison camp at Ranau on Borneo in March 1945. Gunners Albert Cleary and Wally Crease, already starved skeletons, remained on the run for four agonising days before they were recaptured. Cleary was the first to be brought back, his face already showing the marks of a vicious beating that had been meted out to him by the Japanese immediately after his apprehension. He was taken to one of the POW barrack blocks known as the ‘Guard House’. 118

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Cleary’s arms were tied up high behind his back and he was made to kneel with a log tied behind his knees. Japanese soldiers then systematically punched and kicked him all over his body. Sometimes one guard held his head while another rabbit punched Cleary in the throat. At other times guards with rifles and fixed bayonets would charge screaming at Cleary, stopping only when their razor-sharp bayonets were inches from his face. This went on for three-and-a-half hours, witnessed by many of the prisoners. Cleary was made to stand up every half an hour so that blood would rush into his numb lower limbs causing him extreme pain, much to the amusement of the guards. The beatings continued unabated, with rifle butts, bamboo sticks and anything else the guards could lay their hands on. Incredibly, Cleary managed to stay alive through all of this abuse and torture. The next morning the Japanese start to beat Cleary again. Gunner Crease appeared back at Ranau under armed escort and together with Cleary he was brutally tortured for the rest of the day and all through the night. The next morning, somehow, Wally Crease managed to escape again, hobbling painfully off into the jungle in a hopeless attempt at freedom. It may also have been a case of suicide by the guard, and if so it was successful. The Japanese shot him dead. Gunner Cleary was tied to a tree by his neck. He was still just about clinging to life but covered in bruises, cuts and dried blood. He was suffering from dysentery, but the Japanese just left him to sit in his own mess, dressed only in a filthy fundoshi, a Japanese cloth undergarment that most of the POWs wore in the heat. Every so often a passing Japanese guard would bash the semi-conscious Cleary with his fist or the butt of his rifle for no reason other than sadistic pleasure. Cleary endured between eleven and twelve days of this treatment before the Japanese realised that he was dying and they cut him down. A group of guards tossed Cleary into the gutter that ran beside the main camp road. To the assembled POW witnesses they stated several times: ‘If you escape the same thing will happen to you.’ The Japanese, having lost interest in Cleary, eventually permitted him to be taken away by his fellow prisoners. A group of Australians carefully carried him down to a stream and washed away the filth and blood before carrying him to a bed in one of the huts where he could die peacefully among his friends. On 20 March 1945 Albert Cleary passed away at the age of 22.40 This horrific story is only one example and the treatment that was dished out to Crease and Cleary was not unusual. Surrender to Japanese soldiers was as mystifying as kamikaze pilots, banzai charges and hara-kiri were to American and British troops. The gulf between enemies was vast and unbridgeable, and became increasingly pronounced as the war dragged on, with both sides and the propaganda machines behind them increasingly dehumanising each other. The war in Asia was not so much a clash of nations, but rather a clash of cultures and expectations. It was the brutal culmination of decades of Japanese philosophy and radicalisation of the nation. So what conclusion can be drawn from this case study? Japanese prewar xenophobia and fear of Western domination had undoubtedly been mixed with a desire to be admitted to the Europeans’ imperial club, and anger at not being treated as equals to the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, as well as perceived racism by Britain and America over arms limitations agreements, had coalesced in prewar Japan with more esoteric but nonetheless very attractive nationalistic and racist ideologies. Racial superiority, a holy war against China, a belief that Japan was destined to rule the world, a distorted Bushido Code, a young, disaffected officer corps seething with Imperial Way ideology, the powerful message that the emperor was an infallible living god, the brutality of military training and the glorification of death above surrender – all of these strands made for 119

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a very complex cord. All had a direct bearing on the treatment of the peoples that the Japanese conquered and enslaved. By themselves, none of these strands would have led to the deaths of millions of people, but even the binding together of two or three of the causes of Japanese military barbarity that were listed at the beginning of this chapter could have made brutality more likely. The fact that all the major causes coalesced at a certain point in history meant that Japanese military brutality became astonishingly cruel and yet coldly calculated and extremely well organised. These threads ended up concentrated on the blade of a razor-sharp sword that decapitated morality as cleanly as the heads of Allied prisoners-of-war. Japanese war crimes continue to engender enormous debate not only in the nations that suffered at Japan’s hands, but also in Japan itself. Worrying is the continued perception in certain quarters in Japan, including amongst some senior politicians and military officers, that her former enemies for financial and political reasons have exaggerated the nation’s wartime atrocities. Those Japanese who were executed as war criminals by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East are not considered as such by the Japanese government today. The wartime Japanese soldier was such a formidable opponent precisely because he had been dehumanised by his own government in their cruel quest for empire. Many remain concerned that a nation that refuses to take responsibility for its past deeds has the potential to repeat them, and that the destructive threads that created the horrors of the 1930s and 1940s may not be completely unravelled or severed.

Notes 1 A Nursing Sister’s Story: In Memory of Lieutenant Kay Christie, Hong Kong Veterans Commemorative Association, http://www.hkvca.ca (accessed 2 January 2014). 2 Ron Taylor (ed.), Hong Kong – Invasion, Far East Prisoners of War Association, http://www. fepow-community.org.uk (accessed 27 December 2013). 3 Dark Evening by Lieutenant Ben Hackney, typescript account of the Parit Sulong Massacre, AWM (Australian War Memorial) MSS0758. 4 Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes (London: Greenhill Books, 2002), pp. 97–8. 5 The Alexandra Hospital Massacre by BBC Open Centre, Hull, BBC People’s War, Article ID: A8515460 (accessed 27 December 2013). 6 Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes (London: Greenhill Books, 2002), pp. 137–42. 7 1942 – Sook Ching WWII by Lim Gek Hong, Ministry of Defence Singapore, Volume 4, Issue 2. 8 Mark Felton, The Final Betrayal: Mountbatten, MacArthur and the Tragedy of Japanese POWs (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2010), pp. 34–6. 9 Mark Felton, Never Surrender: Dramatic Escapes from Japanese Prison Camps (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2013). 10 Eric Lomax, The Railway Man (London: Vintage, 1995). 11 Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes (London: Greenhill Books, 2002), p. 86. 12 Mark Felton, The Real Tenko: Extraordinary True Stories of Women Prisoners of the Japanese (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2009), p. 91. 13 See: Mark Felton, The Devil’s Doctors: Japanese Human Experiments on Allied Prisoners of War (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Books, 2012). 14 Lynn Hunt, Thomas R. Martin, Barbara H. Rosenwein et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures, Vol. C (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009), pp. 712–13. 15 See Mark Ravina, The Last Samurai: The Life and Battles of Saigo Takamori (New York: Wiley, 2004).

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16 Andrew M. Belerle (ed.), ‘The Last Real Samurai’, Emory Magazine, Emory University, Spring 2004. 17 Meirion Harries and Susie Harries, Soldiers of the Sun: The Rise and Fall of the Imperial Japanese Army (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 48. 18 Claude Welch, Civilian Control of the Military: Theory and Cases from Developing Countries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1976), p. 162. 19 Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes (London: Greenhill Books, 2002), p. 4. 20 ‘Japan’s Abe: no proof of WWII sex slaves’, Washington Post, 1 March 2007. 21 James L. McClain, Japan: A Modern History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002), p. 438. 22 Bob Wakabayashi, Modern Japanese Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), pp. 226–7. 23 Haruko Taya Cook & Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), p. 153. 24 Allison B. Gilmore, You Can’t Fight Tanks with Bayonets: Psychological Warfare against the Japanese Army in the South West Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), p. 87. 25 Laden, Fevered, Starved – The POWs of Sandakan, North Borneo, 1945, Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australian Government, http://www.dva.gov.au (accessed 6 January 2014). 26 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of the Second World War (London: Pocket Books, 1994), p. 104. 27 Ibid, p. 97. 28 Eri Hotta, Pan-Asianism and Japan’s War 1931–1945 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 201. 29 Colin Smith, Singapore Burning: Heroism and Surrender in World War II (London: Viking, 2005), p. 539. 30 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of the Second World War (London: Pocket Books, 1994), p. 97. 31 Christopher Bayly & Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: Britain’s Asian Empire & the War with Japan (London: Allen Lane, 2004), p. 337. 32 Lord Russell of Liverpool, The Knights of Bushido: A Short History of Japanese War Crimes (London: Greenhill Books, 2002), p. 85. 33 Ibid, p. 88. 34 Gavan Daws, Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of the Second World War in the Pacific (London: Pocket Books, 2007), p. 205. 35 Ibid, p. 158. 36 Herbert Axell and Kase Hideaki, Kamikaze: Japan’s Suicide Gods (New York: Longman, 2002), p. 35. 37 Edwin Hoyt, Japan’s War: The Great Pacific Conflict (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 2001), pp. 100–101. 38 John Toland, The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire 1936–1945 (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 301. 39 Haruko Taya Cook and Theodore F. Cook, Japan at War: An Oral History (New York: The New Press, 1992), p. 153. 40 Mark Felton, Never Surrender: Dramatic Escapes from Japanese Prison Camps (Barnsley: Pen & Sword, 2013), pp. 152–3.

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9 CAMBO D I A Paranoia, xenophobia, genocide and auto-genocide T.O. Smith

Brother Secretary of the Party is a forceful Party member politically, ideologically, and organisationally. He is the iron rudder of the ship of Kampuchea leading Kampuchea to its destiny of making socialist revolution and building socialism and advancing toward permanent communism in Kampuchea. Non Suon’s biography of Pol Pot produced during his confession in Tuol Sleng.1 Democratic Kampuchea strives to promote solidarity with the peoples of the Third World in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and with peace and justice-loving people the world over. Article 21 of the constitution of Democratic Kampuchea.2

On 25 December 1978 Vietnam invaded Cambodia. The Vietnamese aimed to effect a ‘Blooming Lotus’, first by seizing the capital of Phnom Penh – thereby destroying the central command structure of Democratic Kampuchea – then spreading out into the rest of the country. Vietnamese troops along with Cambodian rebel forces quickly overpowered Kampuchean forces and by 7 January 1979 Phnom Penh had been liberated.3 Four days later, at a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, the Vietnamese Ambassador claimed that the invasion had been carried out for two reasons. Firstly, Vietnam had intervened to protect its own sovereignty. There had already been a number of border confrontations with Kampuchea from May 1975 onwards. These had resulted in Vietnam suspending diplomatic relations with Kampuchea in December 1977, followed by major incursions by Kampuchean forces into Vietnam in 1978. Secondly, Vietnam had intervened on humanitarian grounds to support the Cambodian people in an attempt to overthrow the oppressive regime that had enslaved them.4 As the Vietnamese advanced further into Cambodia, Western observers were able to give clarity to the varied but increasingly graphic accounts, given by refugees assembled on the nation’s borders, concerning the brutal and totalitarian nature of Democratic Kampuchea. The Australian journalist Wilfred Burchett reported that the Cambodian nation under the Khmer Rouge had been consumed by ‘sadism, paranoia, xenophobia and megalomania’.5 François Bugnion of the International Commission for the Red Cross summed up his experience in a single word: ‘Buchenwald’.6 When Burchett drove across the interior, he discovered an acute absence of human activity. There were no houses and no villages. Cambodia had become a ‘ghost 122

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country’.7 Hard on the heels of Burchett was the English filmmaker David Munro, who went on to produce four documentaries about Cambodia. Munro discovered that the Cambodian cities had been abandoned to the jungle. Typhoid, cholera, anthrax and other forms of pestilence were widespread. Famine was rife. There was no infrastructure: ‘no trucks, no cars, no fuel, no tyres, no phones, electricity or pure water supplies. No hospitals, no medical equipment, or beds. No food, no drugs, no nurses or doctors.’8 How did Cambodia end up in this post-apocalyptic nightmare? This chapter outlines the paranoia, the xenophobia, the genocide (the destruction of ethnic and religious minorities) and the auto-genocide (the destruction of the Khmer majority) at work in the heart of Democratic Kampuchea. It traces the rise of the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique to, firstly, the leadership of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, and secondly, an unchallengeable position of political control in the nation. Initially, this was achieved with Vietnamese assistance. Yet the same assistance also fuelled the clique’s paranoia and xenophobia, thus leading to the mass purging of the party structure in order to eliminate potential traitors such as those with pro-Vietnamese sympathies, ideas and connections. This chapter also examines the mechanisms that the clique employed to achieve mass control – especially at the village level of society. This was necessary to facilitate both the genocide and auto-genocide that followed. The key components of mass control included breaking the population into manageable units (the evacuation of the cities), the formation of loyal village cooperatives, the deconstruction of family and traditional relationships, the manufacture of difference (ethnic, racial, religious, urban, rural, etc.) and the blending of the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s ideology with psychosocial dissonance (the need to commit violence versus personal inhibitions) in order to both desensitise and prime the population to enact mass violence.9

The struggle for political control Cambodian opposition, to French colonialism and later to the government of Prince Norodom Sihanouk, represented a patchwork quilt of differing ideologies and political allegiances.10 But even the first attempts to overthrow the shackles of French imperialism in Indo-China (Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam) following the Second World War were dominated by Vietnam. In 1950 the People’s Republic of China and the Soviet Union diplomatically recognised Ho Chi Minh’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Vietnam declared Indo-China a single battlefield and sought to sponsor the development of revolutionary movements in Laos and Cambodia.11 Vietnam regarded Cambodia as an important source of finance. This was achieved through both the control and taxation of large sections of the fishing, pepper and rice industries.12 Before long, Vietnamese-controlled trading networks stretched across Cambodia to the Thai capital, Bangkok. In Bangkok, Vietnam established a mission so that Vietnamese and Cambodian products could be traded on the world market in order to fund the Vietnamese struggle against the French.13 Over the next few years a number of young Cambodian communists, including the Paris-educated Pol Pot, gravitated to the Vietnam–Cambodia border for training by the Vietnamese. Ieng Sary was left to conclude that the struggle against French colonialism had been ‘monopolized’ by the Vietnamese.14 Following the Geneva Accords in 1954 (which ended the First Indo-China War) a number of Cambodian cadres moved permanently to North Vietnam. Pol Pot, however, 123

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returned to Phnom Penh. This represented a significant split in the Cambodian communist movement and later added fuel to the xenophobic belief that North Vietnam possessed regional imperialist intentions, which were bent towards the possible future annexation of Cambodia. Meanwhile, Pol Pot spent nine years establishing a worker’s party in Cambodia under the tutelage of the veteran Cambodian communist Tou Samouth. At the same time Vietnam continued to develop its own Cambodian cadres, in North Vietnam, independently from those that were being covertly established in Phnom Penh. In the early 1960s Tou Samouth vanished. Sihanouk’s police probably orchestrated the disappearance.15 The loss of Tou Samouth prompted the ascension within the party of a younger generation of Cambodian radicals. This included Pol Pot, who replaced Tou Samouth in the key position of party secretary.16 It should be noted that the Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) was not the only left-wing political entity and, despite numerous repressive measures introduced by Sihanouk, that a number of committed leftists including the socialist Hu Nim continued to serve the Sihanouk regime.17 Nevertheless, in 1963 Sihanouk launched a more general campaign of suppression against the Cambodian left. Many members of the Communist Party of Kampuchea, including Pol Pot and Ieng Sary, fled to the border with Vietnam. The remaining party members in Phnom Penh went underground, led by Nuon Chea. Once on the border with Vietnam the Cambodian exiles were once again dependent upon the support of the Vietnamese. Pol Pot was no doubt unimpressed with the guidance of his hosts. At this stage Vietnam favoured a political rather than a military solution to the growing Cambodian quandary.18 When the first anti-Sihanouk rebellion broke out in 1967, Hu Nim, Hou Yuon and Khieu Samphran also joined Pol Pot on the Vietnamese border.19 Over the next few years a broad based left-wing coalition was established. Eventually the coalition was assisted by the inclusion of Sihanouk as the association’s figurehead. This resulted from the action, in 1970, of Lon Nol, a pro-American member of the Cambodian military, who had forcibly removed Sihanouk from office. Sihanouk now sought to assist with the augmentation of disparate groups within a united front against the Lon Nol regime. The united front was also greatly aided by the 1970 American invasion and the 1973 secret bombing of Cambodia. These were part of American efforts, during the latter stages of the Vietnam War, to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Pol Pot, however, was still clearly not enamoured with his Vietnamese hosts. He had already received stricture from the Vietnamese for his haphazard political programme. Pol Pot would later boast that the Vietnamese did not believe that he had sufficient forces to defeat the Lon Nol government.20 Nevertheless, the Communist Party of Kampuchea found sanctuary along the border with Vietnam and at this stage did not refuse Vietnamese support. The Vietnamese undertook to train Khmer Rouge forces and supplemented Pol Pot’s troops with Cambodian cadres from North Vietnam in order to develop the Khmer Rouge’s effectiveness in combat. But despite such valuable assistance, the relationship remained tense. From 1971 onwards, Pol Pot became increasingly keen on asserting a greater degree of self-sufficiency for the Khmer Rouge. He also began to espouse the creation of a Cambodia fit solely for the Cambodians.21 Not all of the leaders within the façade of the united front agreed. Hou Yuon, for example, favoured greater cooperation with Vietnam.22 As further tensions arose, sporadic fighting broke out between Vietnamese 124

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troops and the Khmer Rouge. At the same time Pol Pot tightened his grip on the united front, while his supporters systematically began to purge the Vietnamesetrained Cambodian cadres. The remnant fled.23 During 1972, Vietnam became increasingly involved in trying to negotiate a settlement to the Vietnam War (the Second Indo-China War) with its American adversaries. At this point the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s mistrust of Vietnam intensified. The subsequent American bombing of Cambodia following the establishment of the Paris Peace Treaty with Vietnam and Laos aggravated an already bitter feeling of isolation and betrayal. Pol Pot’s blunt refusal to enter into any kind of negotiated settlement with the Lon Nol regime prolonged the war for another two years.24 It also accentuated an already xenophobic craving to establish a fiercely independent Khmer Rouge regime. Yet when Phnom Penh fell on 17 April 1975, Pol Pot still only controlled sporadic elements of the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s machinery. He also had no popular powerbase or grassroots support outside of the southwest of the country. In addition, the Communist Party of Kampuchea was itself a relatively small party compared to its Laotian and Vietnamese neighbours, both of whom possessed a larger proportion of party members vis-à-vis the total size of their respective populations. With the immediate prospect of North Vietnam capturing Saigon and unifying North and South Vietnam, the fear of Vietnamese domination intensified. The decision by Pol Pot and Ieng Sary to empty the cities owed much to this deep-seated paranoia towards Vietnam. Their desire was to disrupt pro-Vietnamese Cambodian cadres and thereby forestall an imagined Vietnamese takeover. The evacuation also enabled the Khmer Rouge to break the urban civilian population into controllable components. This was essential as the Communist Party of Kampuchea possessed few urban cadres. But ironically the chaos that resulted fractured Pol Pot’s limited clasp on the party. It greatly strengthened the hand of local leaders against the party centre and provoked an almost perpetual state of civil war.25 The Communist Party of Kampuchea’s leadership divided Democratic Kampuchea into a number of administrative zones. These were to be managed by the party executive, based in and around Phnom Penh, but known only by the anonymous name of the Centre. The Centre benefited from the unwavering support of the Southwest Zone – the powerbase for the Pol Pot clique.26 The first attempt by the Pol Pot clique to solidify the regional zones behind the Centre occurred at a special assembly of the new regime undertaken on 20 May 1975. The meeting was held in a sports centre in Phnom Penh. Thousands of administrators and military personnel listened to Pol Pot and Nuon Chea outline a radical programme of reform for the new regime.27 Sin Song, a political commissar based in the Eastern Zone, was not present at the assembly but his immediate superior had attended. His superior reiterated to him that Pol Pot had précised eight key objectives to the assembled delegates: 1 2 3 4 5

Evacuate people from all towns. Abolish all markets. Abolish Lon Nol regime currency and withhold the revolutionary currency that had been printed. Defrock all Buddhist monks and put them to work growing rice. Execute all leaders of the Lon Nol regime beginning with the top leaders. 125

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6 7 8

Establish high-level cooperatives throughout the country, with communal eating. Expel the entire Vietnamese minority population. Dispatch troops to the borders, particularly the Vietnamese border.

Despite the policy announcement at the special assembly, not all of the senior leadership agreed with Pol Pot’s eight priorities. Hou Yuon, for example, opposed the principle of communal eating.28 Even in the early days of the new regime, the bitter and suspicious Pol Pot clique sought to eliminate all untrustworthy elements as it tried to enact a ‘Super Great Leap Forward’.29 Hou Yuon, who had previously favoured cooperation with Vietnam, disappeared not long afterwards. Khieu Samphran replaced Sihanouk as Head of State. The socialist ex-minister Hu Nim lasted a little longer but he was eventually forced to confess his betrayal of the revolution in 1977. Although Pol Pot was not named in Hu Nim’s confession, lurking behind the examination was the everpresent spectre of Brother Number One – Pol Pot. Hu Nim’s confession began the final paranoid, bloody and brutal ascent of a small group of radical Cambodian students who had studied together in Paris – Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Son Sen and Khieu Samphran. This group along with Nuon Chea and Ta Mok now sought to concentrate ultimate power amongst themselves and their families. Ta Mok, the Secretary of the Southwest Zone, was a brutal enforcer for the Centre. For example, at Angkor Chey in Kompot province Ta Mok presided over the execution of 30,000 people. Therefore the successful removal and execution of Hu Nim emboldened this clique to widen the purge to other zones and to solidify their grasp upon the state apparatus. Although as Minister for Information for Democratic Kampuchea Hu Nim had been a leading member of the government, there was no evidence that Hu Nim shared Pol Pot’s hatred of the Vietnamese. Rather, what marked out Hu Nim and a number of other leaders including Ros Nhim, Secretary of the Northwest Zone, was a desire to establish a more compassionate communist regime. These views were clearly seditious and led to their elimination. Hu Nim should have been a valuable asset to the successful governance of Cambodia. He was the only senior member of Democratic Kampuchea with any prior executive knowledge. He had previously served Sihanouk during the early 1960s, both as a Deputy President of National Assembly and as the Secretary of State for Commerce.30 Yet such a wealth of national decision-making experience, in contrast to the dearth amongst his peers, made him a direct threat to a paranoid and irrational party Centre. The dysfunctional and highly secretive nature of Democratic Kampuchea enabled the Communist Party of Kampuchea to continue to eliminate suspected opponents of the Pol Pot clique. This policy of quietly coordinated disappearances stretched back to before the creation of a united front against Lon Nol.31 Because of mistrust of most elements outside the inner circle, responsibility for the purges was delegated to the Centre’s Santebal (security police) led by Kaing Kek Iev – a former schoolteacher.32 After the fall of Phnom Penh, the dark heart of the Centre’s security apparatus was located in the notorious prison of Tuol Sleng, a former secondary school, which was also under the directorship of Iev. Son Sen acted as the conduit between Tuol Sleng and the rest of the Pol Pot clique. Son Sen directed Iev’s activities and set out the Centre’s minimalist parameters for interrogations: 126

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1 2

You must conserve paper. You must be careful about getting confessions. Some enemies are real enemies but don’t confess. Others confess because of fear and don’t tell the truth. Others just say what they think the interrogators want him to say. So in each interrogation you must be on your guard against subjectivism.33

When prisoners arrived at Tuol Sleng they were routinely photographed and forced to confess their life histories. The intense nature of the prison regime was abhorrent. Prisoners were stripped, shackled and issued with starvation rations. They were held in overcrowded cells and repeatedly beaten for breaking rules – for example, talking, sitting or defecating all required prior permission. One by one prisoners were called for interrogation. Examination techniques ranged from repeated beatings to water boarding, electric shock treatment, suffocation, burning, the forced removal of nails, stabbing with needles, the forced consumption of urine and excrement.34 The extreme barbarity reflected the severity of the Centre’s paranoia. Approximately 18,000 people were killed in Tuol Sleng.35 From 1977 onwards, when Pol Pot strengthened the power of the Centre vis-à-vis the provinces, the Eastern Zone commanders refused to implement the Centre’s harshest policies and later the Centre’s demand for a massive purge of Eastern Zone traitors. Up until this point, the Eastern Zone had preserved a strong independent powerbase under the leadership of So Phim. The Centre’s retaliation was swift. Son Sen and Ta Mok launched a full-scale military offensive against the Eastern Zone. Within the zone they implemented a brutal scorched earth policy.36 Approximately 250,000 inhabitants were killed in this repression. This in turn forced a full-scale rebellion within the Eastern Zone against the Centre, and although this was eventually suppressed rebel troops managed to escape across the border and find sanctuary in Vietnam.37 The remaining Eastern Zone population was subjected to brutal treatment and made to wear blue scarves in order to be more readily identifiable. The humiliation of being identified with a particular type of clothing was comparable with the Nazi treatment of forcing the Jewish population to wear the yellow Star of David.38 Thus the Centre’s internal paranoia also blossomed into xenophobia. In the west, Thai support for the right-wing Khmer-Serei resulted in a number of border skirmishes. In the east, the persistent fear of being overrun by Vietnam and a desire to reconquer the lost province of Kampuchea Krom, which had been annexed by Vietnam during the early nineteenth century, resulted in a border war between Cambodia and Vietnam.39 When this eventually escalated into a full-scale Vietnamese invasion in 1978, rebel Eastern Zone forces – led by Heng Samrin and Hun Sen – assisted, thereby overthrowing the Democratic Republic of Kampuchea and establishing a people’s republic in its place.40 Heng Samrin became the new prime minister and Hun Sen the new foreign minister in the Vietnamese-backed regime. The Communist Party of Kampuchea had gambled total control of Cambodia against wider regional fears and ambitions, and they had lost. Henceforth the Khmer Rouge leadership would seek to regroup on the western and northern borders of Cambodia. The irony of their overthrow was that a number of the former Eastern Zone commanders that they had tried to purge were now ensconced in Phnom Penh. Therefore the Communist Party of Kampuchea, which despite frequent denials owed a lot to international Sino–Vietnamese support (Pol Pot’s decision to suspend the armed rebellion in the mid-1960s was due to the influence of the leaders of China and North Vietnam), was thrown into a wider Sino– Vietnamese Third Indo-China War.41 127

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Mechanisms for mass control Democratic Kampuchea was not just a brutal regime with a callous method of dealing with political dissent and an irrational and disastrous approach to foreign relations. The Pol Pot clique’s megalomania extended far beyond their desire to eliminate political opponents or enact gunboat diplomacy against neighbouring foreign states. The entire population was subject to a devastating policy of collectivisation and forced into a frenzied labour camp state. Genocide was perpetrated against racial minorities and auto-genocide was enacted upon the indigenous Khmer population as the Centre sought to eradicate all opposition to its rule.42 When the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in April 1975 they were welcomed as liberators.43 In order to create the façade of unity, instructions were issued from the anonymous Centre by the faceless entity of the Angkar (organisation). At this stage the Khmer Rouge was still a broad-based coalition united by a common desire to defeat the Lon Nol regime. Troops from the different regions were therefore incongruent to each other.44 The immediate issue for the victorious Angkar was one of control and security. This had previously been overcome, for example at Ang Tassom, by moving people from the town into the countryside. It was logical to repeat the same practice, but on a much larger scale, with Phnom Penh. Thus the plan to evacuate the capital was part of a consistent long-standing policy for dealing with enemy territory.45 Threatened with the story that the Americans were about to bomb the city, the urban population was forced to enact an immediate mass evacuation that enabled their numbers to be broken down into manageable units. Phnom Penh’s population was already grossly swollen by war but no one was excused from the exodus. The hospitals were emptied. Operations were cancelled. The seriously ill were abandoned on the operating table or left in their beds to die. Some were rescued by family members and pushed through the streets with their drip feeds still attached. The march was symbolic of the new regime’s disregard for life and its ability to kill through gross fatigue, exhaustion and execution. An estimated 20,000 people died in the evacuation of Phnom Penh.46 With the emptying of the cities, Democratic Kampuchea barricaded its doors to the outside world. All foreigners were expelled.47 This was a ‘closed’ regime. The Angkar abolished all means of mass communication. There were few press releases by the new regime. News was scarce. The only source of information available from inside Democratic Kampuchea was either official state radio, which was used by the Angkar to issue directives to the zones, or reports from the increasing number of Cambodian refugees fleeing to the borders.48 Thus the disastrous policies of Democratic Kampuchea were largely ‘hidden’ from global attention. In the meantime, intellectuals, journalists, doctors, teachers and other members of the literate middle classes simply disappeared. Most were transported into the countryside with the rest of the urban population. A small number were removed to Tuol Sleng.49 Control of people and information was paramount for the Angkar. There would be few invitations for foreign diplomats, academics or journalists to visit Cambodia. Those that were given access were subjected to fixed itineraries and lavish displays of state propaganda. But even these rare and highly controlled visits could prove perilous. On one such visit in 1978, the veil was temporarily lifted on the schizophrenic nature of the Centre when the naive Scottish academic and Pol Pot admirer, Malcolm Caldwell was murdered following an audience with Brother Number One.50 128

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A conscious attempt was made by the Angkar to deconstruct both society and the family. Individual thought and expression was eradicated. This was part of a deliberate policy to repress human emotion and destroy human relationships. A mistrustful Angkar jealously guarded loyalty to the party Centre and regarded all other forms of emotional attachment as betrayal. The purpose was to turn the population into automatons who would mechanically carry out, without question or dissent, any instructions issued by the Angkar. In such circumstances human rights ceased to exist. Love was replaced by discipline. Loyalty to the Angkar was considered absolute. Even Buddhism, the traditional religion of Cambodia, was banned in order to protect the focus on the Angkar.51 The Cambodian population was thereby programmed to enact what the Chair of the United Nations Sub-Commission on Prevention and Protection of Minorities into Human Rights in Cambodia, Mr Bouhidiba, termed ‘auto-genocide’ against the indigenous Khmer population. Angkar ideology created the favourable circumstances for both genocide and auto-genocide to develop.52 Democratic Kampuchea’s external political philosophy adhered to a broad diffusion of ‘Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao’. But Democratic Kampuchea was a fiercely independent and xenophobic state. Therefore external philosophies were amalgamated with a haphazard set of indigenous priorities focused upon state expansion, racism, societal dissection, rural veneration, the oppression of business and urban centres, collectivism and the suppression of the family unit.53 Angkar ideology was enforced through the party cadres. These cadres were educated in party schools. At the Central Party School in Phnom Penh, senior members of the Pol Pot clique including Brother Number Two – Nuon Chea – conducted the teaching.54 The blending of Angkar ideology with psychosocial dissonance (the intuitive discord between the need to commit violent behaviour and deep-seated personal inhibitions) enabled the Centre to prime local perpetrators to activate both genocide and auto-genocide. This was achieved through the manipulation of traditional societal levers. These included Cambodian notions of manufacturing difference, identity and meaning, disproportionate revenge, sanctioned rage, power, patronage, status, face (self-image) and honour. Woven together the result was a culture of dislocation, humiliation and the mass participation in violence.55 The collectivised village was central to the Angkar revolution. The Centre ‘trusted’ the peasants and the workers vis-à-vis intellectuals, former city dwellers, people from abroad or members of the former Lon Nol regime – especially the military. These groups were subject to a vigorous process of re-education. But even the successful completion of a course of re-education did not spare the returnees from abroad or members of the Lon Nol regime from random summary executions.56 Each village cooperative was supposed to be self-reliant.57 The Angkar regarded rice production by the cooperatives as essential to Cambodia’s economic and military strength.58 But in reality the cooperatives struggled to maintain self-sufficiency. Public health in the villages therefore deteriorated rapidly and in some cooperatives infant mortality reached 80%.59 Someth May, a former Phnom Penh medical student, was evacuated to a new model village. In his cooperative the resettled population was segregated into Cambodian, Chinese and Vietnamese sub-divisions.60 Racism was a key component of Khmer Rouge ideology. Between 1975 and 1979 36% of the Muslim Cham population, 40% of the Laotian population, 50% of the Chinese population and 100% of the Vietnamese 129

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population living in Cambodia died. Over 1,000,000 ethnic Khmer also died in an auto-genocide. But the eliminated proportion, of 15–25%, of the total Khmer population was significantly lower than the genocide enacted upon the ethnic minorities. Indeed, Centre paranoia also led to action against both the indigenous forest minorities of the northeast highlands and Cambodia’s Christian population. But the Vietnamese suffered proportionally more than any other group.61 The logic of Cambodian history enabled the Angkar to play upon the racist fear of the general population of being overrun by their larger ethnic neighbours. For centuries Cambodia had been a vassal fought over by its larger Thai and Vietnamese neighbours. The Centre therefore regarded Vietnam as acting like a malevolent ‘big brother’, who intended to expand at the expense of its weaker and smaller sibling. Even the Chinese, upon whom the Centre depended for economic and international support, were not isolated from outbursts of racial arrogance. Indeed, the Centre held that Cambodian cadres were far superior to their Chinese counterparts. Ieng Sary argued that ‘Kampuchea had been liberated not only from US imperialism but also from Vietnam’s occupation forces as well as local Chinese capitalists’.62 Racism also fed Khmer nationalism. The loss of the province of Kampuchea Krom and the desire to re-establish a larger Cambodia in Southeast Asia played to the glory of Cambodia’s mythic past when the ancient Khmer civilisation of Angkor Wat had dominated the region. Behind the village cooperative lurked the power of the Angkar: behind the Angkar was the Centre and behind the Centre existed the spectre of Tuol Sleng and the Santebal. Tuol Sleng was at the heart of an industrious killing machine but beyond Tuol Sleng – away from Phnom Penh – existed a wider national network of 158 prisons, 309 mass gravesites and 19,000 grave pits.63 Lorn, a member of Kompong Som city Standing Committee, reflected that although Pol Pot’s attitude towards the poor from the countryside was correct, some local party chairmen resorted to needless killing when re-education failed. According to Lorn this was wrong. Nonetheless some of those killed were responsible for crimes: they had been too liberal; they had indulged in alcohol; and they lacked discipline and a desire to seek self-improvement. Occasionally innocent people were also killed due to false accusations. This resulted, Lorn concluded, in the population being ‘insecure psychologically’.64 The haphazard nature of the regime, and the disposition of both the Cambodian genocide and auto-genocide, does not lend itself to the accurate recording of statistics. Estimates for the total number of people killed during Pol Pot’s control of Democratic Kampuchea varies. In 1995 the Vietnamese-sponsored Hun Sen regime put the figure at close to 3,100,000.65 However, the cataloguing of Democratic Kampuchea gravesites by Yale University’s Cambodia Genocide Program resulted in a more conservative, but still horrific, estimate of 1,700,000 to 2,000,000 deaths.66

Conclusions How have historians reported the Cambodian genocide? Initially the responsibility for analysing Democratic Kampuchea fell to a small group of Asian journalists and an eclectic handful of Western diplomats, academics and intelligence officers. At the forefront of these endeavours were David Chandler, Michael Vickery and Ben Kiernan. Since that time, Kiernan (a historian) has produced a colossal canon of scholarly literature concerning Cambodian history. The Cambodian Genocide Program at Yale 130

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University, founded by Kiernan, has published thousands of primary source documents and preserved the records of the Santebal for use in the trials of the surviving Khmer Rouge leaders. The scholarly contribution of Chandler, Kiernan and Vickery cannot be overstated. Under their guidance a younger generation of academics has emerged to broaden our understanding of the chronicle of Democratic Kampuchea and the tortured path leading to the healing of the nation.67 The historiography, however, remains incomplete. In time, scholars will be able to benefit from the completion of the Khmer Rouge trials. This alone will result in a further rich vein of debate, but there are a number of key historiographical omissions. Despite the best efforts of Kiernan, a comprehensive survey of the Khmer Rouge economy is needed – including the Communist Party of Kampuchea’s plans for international currency exchange given acute xenophobia, the abolition of a national currency and the destruction of the national bank. Likewise, with greater grave pit mapping and access to Santebal sources now available, room now exists to paint a broader geographical picture concerning the ebb and flow of the Centre’s control vis-à-vis the regional zones. Finally, an assessment of the interplay of international brokers – including China, North Korea, Thailand and the United States amongst others – in Democratic Kampuchean affairs from the fall of Phnom Penh in 1975 to the 1991 Paris Peace Treaty requires more scholarly attention. But alas, in this case, political sensitivities, language barriers and closed archives stand guard over any immediate breakthrough. Nevertheless, despite the apparent drawbacks in dealing with the closed and secretive nature of Democratic Kampuchea, an intricate picture of a brutal, paranoid and xenophobic regime has emerged. It is clear that, for a small group of Paris-educated Cambodian radicals, early resentment of Vietnamese tutelage morphed into a dangerous xenophobia, and that this in turn fed a deep-seated internal paranoia as the Pol Pot clique tried to establish their grasp on both the party and the nation. Eventually this led to genocide as the Khmer Rouge sought to eliminate minorities living in Cambodia – the Vietnamese, the Thai, the Cham, the Chinese, the highland population and the Christians. But for a paranoid clique to achieve mass control, societal programming of the indigenous Khmer population was required. At the same time, psychosocial dissonance also needed to be overcome in order to prime local agents to perform violence. This was achieved by the blending of internal and external ideology, and it was enacted through societal levers focused upon the manufacture of difference: for example creating a schism between the urban population and the rural population to enforce collectivisation. This was reinforced by the dogmatic indoctrination of loyal party cadres in party schools. The national anthem for Democratic Kampuchea proudly boasted that Bright red blood which covers our fields and plains, Of Kampuchea, our motherland! Sublime blood of workers and peasants, Sublime blood of revolutionary men and women fighters! The blood changing into unrelenting hatred And resolute struggle, On 17th April, under the flag of the Revolution, Free from Slavery! 131

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In this climate, paranoia, xenophobia, ideology and the manufacture of difference combined to produce both genocide and auto-genocide to devastating effect. Genocide was consciously driven by paranoia and xenophobia, thereby programming the nation for the elimination of the minorities. Auto-genocide was a frenzied selffulfilling and continuous cycle of death for the indigenous Khmer population. This self-harm extended from the evacuation of the cities to political purges, from the exhaustion of the collectivised camps to the eradication of the family unit. In carrying out such policies, Pol Pot, Ieng Sary and the other members of a brutal central clique preconditioned Cambodian society to enact a continuous murderous sequence of both genocide and auto-genocide in order to build their particular version of communism in Cambodia.68

Notes I am grateful to Ben Kiernan (Yale University), David Roberts (Loughborough University) and the late R.B. Smith (SOAS) for their patient guidance and advice over many years. I also owe a debt of gratitude to the late journalist and filmmaker David Munro for giving me a number of primary sources including the People’s Revolutionary Court documents for the genocide trial in absentia of the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique in August 1979. Finally, I am deeply indebted to Stephen Heder (SOAS) for generously providing me with transcripts of his interviews undertaken with Cambodian refugees along the Thai–Cambodian border in 1980. 1 D.P. Chandler, Brother number one: A political biography of Pol Pot, rev. and enl. edn. (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999), pp. 197–9. 2 C. Etcheson, The rise and demise of Democratic Kampuchea (London: Westview Press, 1984), p. 227. 3 N. Chanda, Far Eastern Economic Review, 19 January 1979, 26 January 1979. 4 Ha Van Lau, Vietnamese Ambassador to the United Nations, 2108 Meeting of the United Nations Security Council, New York, 11 January 1979, p. 12. 5 W. Burchett, At the barricades (London: Quartet Books, 1980), p. 312. 6 François Bugnion cited in W. Shawcross, ‘Cambodia: some perceptions of a disaster’, in D.P. Chandler and B. Kiernan (eds), Revolution and its aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight essays, monograph series, No. 25 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1983), p. 249. 7 Burchett, At the barricades, pp. 305, 308. 8 D. Munro, The four horsemen: The flames of war in the third world (Secaucus: Lyle Stuart, 1987), p. 139; D. Swift, The Guardian, 13 August 1999. 9 G. Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law (Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1989), pp. 62, 177; B. Kiernan, ‘External and indigenous sources of Khmer Rouge ideology’, in O.A. Westad and S. Quinn-Judge (eds), The third Indochina war: Conflict between China, Vietnam and Cambodia, 1972–79 (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 188; A.L. Hinton, Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide (London: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 7, 15, 25–9, 31–4, 236–7, 264–5, 288–9. 10 See V.M. Reddi, A history of the Cambodian independence movement 1863–1955 (Triupati: Sri Venkasteswara, 1973). 11 Messages establishing diplomatic relations between Vietnam and China, 15–18 January 1950, in A.B. Cole (ed.), Conflict in Indo-China and international repercussions: a documentary history 1945–1955 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1956), p. 121; Recognition of Vietnam by the USSR, 30 January 1950, Cole, Conflict in Indo-China and international repercussions, p. 122; M. Furuta, ‘The Indochina Communist Party’s Division into Three Parties: Vietnamese Communist Policy Toward Cambodia and Laos, 1948–1951’, in T. Shiraishi and M. Furuta (eds), Indochina in the 1940s and 1950s (New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1992), pp. 151–2. 12 Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, France, GGI/65498, ‘Etudes sur les movements rebelles au Cambodge 1942–1952’, pp. 85–90. For a detailed discussion of the

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13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36 37 38

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wider significance of Indo-Chinese rice production for Southeast Asian stability see T.O. Smith, ‘Lord Killearn and British diplomacy regarding French Indo-Chinese rice supplies, 1946–1948’, History, Vol. 96, No. 324, October 2011, pp. 477–89. C.E. Goscha, Thailand and the Southeast Asian networks of the Vietnamese revolution, 1885–1954 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1999), pp. 201–3. B. Kiernan, How Pol Pot came to power: Colonialism, nationalism and communism in Cambodia, 1930–1975, 2nd edn (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 309. Chandler, Brother number one, p. 191. G. Evans and K. Rowley, Red brotherhood at war: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos since 1975, rev. and enl. edn (London: Verso Books, 1990), p. 91. B. Kiernan, ‘Planning the past: the forced confessions of Hu Nim’, in D.P. Chandler, B. Kiernan and C. Boua (eds), Pol Pot plans the future: Confidential leadership documents from Democratic Kampuchea, 1976–1977, monograph series, No. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), p. 228. D.P. Chandler, A history of Cambodia, 3rd edn (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000), p. 198. Kiernan, ‘Planning the past’, p. 228. R.B. Smith, Communist Indochina (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 185. This is the second volume in an edited collection of essays by the late R.B. Smith – B. Williams (ed.). For a detailed analysis of the international context for the Cambodian coup of 1970 see pp. 149–77. Chandler, Brother number one, p. 91. Kiernan, How Pol Pot came to power, p. 308. S. Heder, anonymous interview with a party member from Takeo (Southwest Zone), 8 March 1980. Evans and Rowley, Red brotherhood at war, pp. 91–2; Chandler, Brother number one, p. 193. Smith, Communist Indochina, pp. 185–6; Evans and Rowley, Red brotherhood at war, p. 92. M. Ebihara, ‘A Cambodian village under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979’, in B. Kiernan (ed.), Genocide and democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the international community, monograph series, No. 41 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), p. 54. B. Kiernan, The Pol Pot regime: Race, power and genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975–79 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), p. 55–6. B. Kiernan, ‘Wild chickens, farm chickens and cormorants: Kampuchea’s eastern zone under Pol Pot’, in D.P. Chandler and B. Kiernan (eds), Revolution and its aftermath in Kampuchea: Eight essays, monograph series, No. 25 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1983), pp. 178–9. Evans and Rowley, Red brotherhood at war, p. 93. Smith, Communist Indochina, p. 186; Kiernan, ‘Planning the past’, pp. 228, 230–32; T. Jackson, ‘How Pol Pot dominates the coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea’, Oxfam staff briefing paper, September 1988, p. 4. Evans and Rowley, Red brotherhood at war, p. 93. B. Kiernan, ‘Documentation delayed, justice denied: the historiography of the Cambodian genocide’, in D. Stone (ed.), The historiography of genocide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 483. For a detailed study of Kaing Kek Iev see N. Dunlop, The lost executioner: A story of the Khmer Rouge (London: Walker and Company, 2006). Heder, joint interview with Ong Thong Hoeung (a student in Paris 1966–76) and Sauv Kim Hong (a cousin in law of Hou Yuon), 29 February 1980. Hinton, Why did they kill?, pp. 174–80. Jackson, ‘How Pol Pot dominates the coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea’, p. 3. Evans and Rowley, Red brotherhood at war, pp. 98–9. Kiernan, ‘Documentation delayed, justice denied’, p. 476. G.H. Stanton, ‘The Cambodian genocide and international law’, in B. Kiernan (ed.), Genocide and democracy in Cambodia: The Khmer Rouge, the United Nations and the international community, monograph series, No. 41 (New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), pp. 141–2. For a more detailed comparison of the totalitarian similarities between Pol Pot’s Cambodia and Hitler’s Nazi Germany see Hinton, Why did they kill?, pp. 4–5, 22–4, 29, 212, 278, 282–3, 285. N.J. Wheeler, Saving strangers: Humanitarian intervention in international society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 80–81; Evans and Rowley, Red brotherhood at war, pp. 102–11.

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40 D.W. Roberts, Political transition in Cambodia: Power, elitism and democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 6, 8–9. 41 Smith, Communist Indochina, p. 182. 42 Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, pp. 62, 177. 43 S. May, Cambodian witness: The autobiography of Someth May (London: Random House, 1986), p. 103. 44 Kiernan, The Pol Pot regime, pp. 40–41; B. Kiernan, ‘External and indigenous sources of Khmer Rouge ideology’, p. 188. 45 Heder, anonymous interview with a party member from Takeo (Southwest Zone), 8 March 1980. 46 People’s Revolutionary Court, report on public health under the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary regime, August 1979; Kiernan, The Pol Pot regime, p. 49. 47 Kiernan, ‘Documentation delayed, justice denied’, p. 469. 48 People’s Revolutionary Court, report on the crimes committed by the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique against culture, information and the press, August 1979. 49 People’s Revolutionary Court, report on public health under the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary regime, August 1979. 50 E. Becker, When the war was over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge revolution, rev. and enl. edn. (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), pp. 399–431; A. Andrew, The Observer, 9 January 2010. 51 People’s Revolutionary Court, report on the crimes committed by the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique against culture, information and the press, August 1979; Report by the Minister of National Education (People’s Republic of Kampuchea) on the crimes committed by the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique in the sphere of national education, (undated). 52 Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, pp. 62, 177. 53 Kiernan, ‘External and indigenous sources of Khmer Rouge ideology’, p. 188. 54 Heder, interview with a riverboat pilot (Democratic Kampuchea Water-Transport Unit 1975–8), 9 March 1980. 55 Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, pp. 62, 177; Hinton, Why did they kill?, pp. 7, 15, 25–9, 31–4, 236–7, 264–5, 288–9. 56 Heder, interview with Ong Thong Hoeung (a student in Paris 1966–76), 28 February 1980; interview with Lach Siphan (former Lon Nol army Captain), 28 February 1980; interview with Sauv Kim Hong (a cousin in law of Hou Yuon), 28 February 1980. 57 Heder, joint interview with Ong Thong Hoeung (a student in Paris 1966–76) and Sauv Kim Hong (a cousin in law of Hou Yuon), 28 February 1980. 58 Heder, interview with a former courier for Non Suon (plus interjections from people from the Southwest Zone and the ‘Special Region’), 7 March 1980. 59 People’s Revolutionary Court, report on public health under the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary regime, August 1979. 60 May, Cambodian witness, p. 117. 61 Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, pp. 62, 177; Kiernan, The Pol Pot regime, p. 458; R. Bottomley, ‘Contested forests: an analysis of the highlander response to logging in Ratanakiri province, northeast Cambodia’, in B. Kiernan (ed.), Conflict and change in Cambodia (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 96; Stanton, ‘The Cambodian genocide and international law’, p. 141. 62 Heder, interview with Ong Thong Hoeung (a student in Paris 1966–76), 28 February 1980; interview with Sauv Kim Hong (a cousin in law of Hou Yuon), 28 February 1980; joint interview with Ong Thong Hoeung (a student in Paris 1966–76) and Sauv Kim Hoeung (a cousin in law of Hou Yuon), 28 February 1980. 63 Kiernan, ‘Documentation delayed, justice denied’, p. 482. 64 Heder, interview with Lorn (a member of the Kompong Som City Standing Committee), 12 March 1980. 65 Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, pp. 62, 177; K. Schular, ‘Preparing for justice’, New Journal, Vol. 28, No. 2, 13 October 1995, p. 16. 66 Author correspondence with Ben Kiernan, 16 October 1995. 67 Kiernan, ‘Documentation delayed, justice denied’, pp. 468–86. 68 Jackson, ‘How Pol Pot dominates the coalition government of Democratic Kampuchea’, p. 2; Klintworth, Vietnam’s intervention in Cambodia in international law, pp. 62, 177; Kiernan, ‘External and indigenous sources of Khmer Rouge ideology’, p. 188; Hinton, Why did they kill?, pp. 7, 15, 25–9, 31–4, 236–7, 264–5, 288–9.

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10 THE GRE AT U K R A I NI A N FAMI NE O F 1 9 3 2 – 3 Nicolas Werth

Translated from the French by David Brown.

Over the past twenty years there has been considerable progress in our understanding of the Great Famine which struck the Ukraine and Kuban, a rich agricultural region of the north Caucasus with a majority Ukrainian population even though attached administratively to the Russian Republic, in 1932–3. Today the full extent of this major catastrophe of twentieth-century European history is finally recognised as the first act in a terrible cycle of violence carried out by the two powerful totalitarian regimes of Nazism and Stalinism against civilian populations in an immense region at the heart of Europe which the historian Timothy Snyder has rightly defined as ‘the Bloodlands’.1 It should be emphasised from the outset that the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3 was not like the others in the long series of famines that struck several regions of the Russian Empire at regular intervals. It was not preceded by any meteorological disaster like drought or floods, which often create the conditions for such a catastrophe. James Mace, a pioneer in the study of this event, has rightly stated that the Ukrainian famine was a ‘man-made famine’,2 the direct consequence of a policy of extreme violence – the forced collectivisation of the countryside implemented from the beginning of 1930 by the Stalinist regime. The regime had the double aim of extracting a heavy contribution in order to make the ‘first socialist accumulation’, indispensable to achieving the accelerated industrialisation of the country, and of imposing political control on the countryside which had up until then stayed largely outside the ‘value system’ of the regime. A direct if clearly unforeseen and still less ‘programmed’ consequence of a policy, the famine was, in the Ukraine and Kuban, aggravated from the autumn of 1932 by the unshakeable will of Stalin to break peasant resistance to collectivisation through the weapon of hunger and excessive levies on harvests, which was particularly onerous in these regions. Stalin also considered the Ukrainian peasantry to be the backbone of Ukrainian nationalism which was judged, in this time of serious economic and political crisis, as the principal threat to the construction of the Stalinist system and to the consolidation of the Soviet Union as a ‘new empire of nations’. Until Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Ukrainian Famine, which claimed around 3.5 million victims in the Ukraine and Kuban,3 was silently passed over by the Soviet regime, including during the Khrushchev ‘thaw’ when a number of Stalin’s crimes were condemned. It was notably omitted from the famous ‘Secret Speech’ given behind closed doors on 24 February 1956 by Nikita Khrushchev during the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of 135

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the Soviet Union (CPSU). In spite of the numerous eyewitness accounts gathered by the Ukrainian émigré community in Canada and the USA,4 it was not until the mid-1980s that British historian Robert Conquest wrote the first major work devoted to the famine, which was essentially based on émigré sources.5 The end of the USSR and the opening of Soviet archives have made it possible to access a number of long-closed sources such as the secret resolutions of the Politburo and the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, the correspondence between Stalin and his closest aides, Molotov and Kaganovitch, the reports of the political police on the situation in the countryside and the letters of hungry peasants intercepted by the postal censors to prevent the spread of news about the famine. These sources have allowed historians to understand the causes of the famine more deeply and to analyse the political and economic mechanisms at work. In turn this has facilitated an evaluation of the responsibility of the highest-ranking Soviet leaders from the outset of the crisis. This has led to examinations of the intentional worsening of the famine in the Ukraine and Kuban from the autumn of 1932 onwards and made it possible to construct an account of the incalculable suffering endured by the famine-stricken population, deprived of all aid, subjected to an actual blockade, to a ‘punishment by hunger’ for having resisted the imposition of the kolkhoz (collective farm) system, which was seen by a great number of peasants as a ‘second serfdom’. Today the Great Ukrainian Famine of 1932–3 has finally become, after more than half a century of absolute silence on the tragedy, a central subject for historians but also a major focus for memory. It is time to shine a light on the greatest mass crime of Stalinism – a crime that, in its scale, is comparable only to the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis a few years later. Given the size of the subject, we have chosen, in the limited scope of this chapter, to concentrate on certain aspects of the question and to reconstruct in rough outline the stages of the catastrophe through the decision-making process which led to and exacerbated the famine. This chapter concentrates particularly on the crucial period from the summer of 1932 to the start of 1933. Certain themes will be analysed, elucidated through sources that have recently become available. What do they tell us about the reality of the famine and the views of political and policy leaders at the regional and local level? What about aid given to the starving in extremis and with reluctance? How did the local authorities arrange the farm work in the devastated countryside to ensure the next harvest? How did the extraordinary social repression and brutalisation which came with the famine manifest itself? In the conclusion the chapter will return to the debates and controversies which divide historians on the subject.

The making of a deadly famine: The prologue in the first half of 1932 In 1931 the Soviet organs of state collection managed – at the national level – to gather a very mediocre harvest (69 million tons of grain, 20% below the exceptional harvest of 1930).6 Because of bad harvests in western Siberia and Kazakhstan, the Ukraine, Kuban and regions of the Volga – the three principal cereal-growing regions of the country – were forced to contribute heavily that year. Thus in 1931 the Ukraine was charged to the level of 43% of its total harvest,7 an exceptional levy which further disrupted a productive cycle already hit by forced collectivisation and dekulakisation (i.e. criticism and attacks on the so-called rich peasants or kulaks). To fulfil the 1931 plan numerous kolkhoz members were forced to hand over a portion of their seeds, vital for subsequent harvests, which jeopardised their future further.8 136

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In February and March 1932 the reports of the Department of Secret Police, the OGPU, sent to the principal Soviet leaders remarked on ‘isolated areas of food shortages’, a fact which the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party Stanislas Kossior confirmed in a letter to Stalin dated 26 April 1932. According to Kossior these ‘isolated cases’ were explained by the excesses and aberrations of local officials who had rather overdone it during the last collectivisation campaign. He added, ‘one must however categorically reject all suggestion concerning an alleged “famine” in the Ukraine’.9 Over the following weeks, which corresponded to the traditional break between two harvests, the food situation worsened considerably, to the extent that Petrovski, the President of the Executive Committee of the Soviet of the Ukraine, and Tchoubar, the Head of the Ukrainian Government, resolved to address, each in turn, long letters to Stalin and Molotov on 10 June 1932. In these they described the nowcritical situation in the Ukrainian countryside. ‘At least 100 districts (against 61 at the start of May) need urgent food aid,’ wrote Petrovski. ‘I visited numerous villages and I saw the famished everywhere . . . Women were weeping, sometimes the men also. The criticism cuts us very deeply: “Why have you artificially created famine? There has been a harvest so why did you confiscate everything? Even under the old regime no one did such a thing!”’10 Tchoubar, like Petrovski, imputed blame for the situation to the heady excesses of local officials, silently passing over the fact that they were obeying a precise order to fulfil the collectivisation plan at all costs. They indicated just what the dangers were: if the moujik (peasant) was too weak to work, the 1932 harvest would be catastrophic. Tchoubar demanded urgent aid at the very modest level of a million poods (16,000 tons) of grain. Petrovski was bold enough to ask for slightly more, 1.5 to 2 million poods (24 to 30,000 tons).11 These requests never received a reply. In front of an assembly of party apparatchiks, the Head of the Soviet Government, Molotov, declared on 12 June, ‘even if we are confronted today with the spectre of famine, above all in the cereal growing zones, the collectivisation plans must be accomplished at all costs’.12 On 18 June 1932 Stalin gave Kaganovitch his assessment. According to him, the Ukrainian situation was the result of a ‘mechanistic approach to the last collectivisation plan . . . The real situation in each kolkhoz has not been taken into account.’13 Yet it was out of the question, he explained, to reduce the plan for 1932. And this had been set very high at 29.5 million tons (which was 25% more than the previous year) for a ‘programmed’ harvest of 90 million tons which would, in reality, only reach 67 million.14 On 21 June Stalin and Molotov sent the Ukrainian Communist Party a very harsh telegram restating that ‘no decrease in the delivery plan expected from the kolkhozes and sovkhozes (i.e. Soviet collective farms) will be tolerated and no supplementary delay accorded’.15

The second phase July–October 1932: Moscow becomes aware of the ‘Ukrainian Problem’ At the Third Conference of the Ukrainian Party which met at Kharkov from 6–10 July, the great majority of speakers (secretaries of district and regional committees) judged that the harvest plan imposed by Moscow was ‘unachievable’. Nevertheless, under pressure from both Molotov and Kaganovitch, who rushed to Kharkov for the occasion and who also intervened in the debates in a particularly tough manner, the Conference did not hesitate to confirm that ‘any attempt to lower the plan is a fundamentally anti-Party and anti-Bolshevik act’. The delegates of the Conference finished 137

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by ratifying the plan which had been demanded by Moscow for 1932. Ukraine thus had to deliver 5.84 million tons of grain.16 The opposition shown by Ukrainian delegates did not go unnoticed by Stalin, as shown in the recently published correspondence between the Secretary General and Kaganovitch. In the course of July 1932, the first month of the new collectivisation plan, the wheat was not gathered in. By the end of July hardly 48,000 tons had been delivered, or seven times less than in July 1931.17 The reports of the political police record an unprecedented wave of departures by kolkhoz peasants, but also a disquieting growth of troubles in the Ukrainian countryside. As rumours grew of the imminent dissolution of the kolkhozes, tens of thousands of peasants retook their cows and horses, pillaged the silos where the wheat was stored, shared around machines and tools and harvested the plots which they had been given on an individual basis.18 The Ukraine was clearly the epicentre of peasant troubles. Of the 1,630 riots and mass demonstrations recorded at the end of July by OGPU in the whole of the country since the start of 1932, 1,096 took place in the Ukraine and Kuban and principally from May onwards. This agitation, just like the opposition of a great number of Ukrainian communist apparatchiks from the start of the collectivisation plan, was a considerable concern for Stalin. On 11 August he sent a long letter, vital to the understanding of the Ukrainian famine, to Kaganovitch, in which he wrote most notably, the most important thing now is the Ukraine. The Ukrainian issue is going really badly. This is bad for the party. It is said that in two regions of the Ukraine (Kiev and Dniepropetrovsk) around 50 district committees have expressed themselves against the collectivisation plan, having declared it unrealistic. In other district committees it is clear that things are no better. What does this all look like? It is no longer a party, it is a parliament, a caricature of a parliament . . . Instead of leading, Kossior does not stop wavering between the directives of the Central Committee of the Party and the demands of the district committees pressure him into watching his way . . . It is going badly from the Soviet side. Tchoubar is not a leader. Things are faring badly too for the GPU. Redens does not have the stature to lead a struggle against counter-revolution in a republic as large and specific as the Ukraine. If we don’t immediately redress the situation there we may lose the Ukraine. Note that the spirit of Piłsudski does not sleep, his spy network in the Ukraine is much stronger than Redens and Kossior think. Note equally that in the spirit of the Ukrainian Communist Party (with its 500,000 members, ha, ha!) one can find not a little (no, not a little!) rotten elements, Petliuran nationalists whether they are aware or unaware of it and finally those who are the direct agents of Piłsudski.19 If these things worsen these elements will not delay opening up an interior front (and an exterior one of the party, against the party . . . The most serious thing is that the Ukrainian leaders fail to see these dangers.20 Following this letter, Stalin suggested to Kaganovitch that he take control of the Ukrainian party, replace Redens as Head of the Ukrainian GPU in favour of Balitskii, and sack Tchoubar. Stalin’s letter ends thus, ‘One must, with the least of delays, transform the Ukraine into a real fortress of the USSR, a truly exemplary republic. Do not stint on the means to do this. Without these measures, reinforcing the economy and politics of the Ukraine, and most of all its frontier districts, etc., we risk losing the Ukraine.’21 138

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For Stalin, Ukraine was vulnerable, but not because of the imminent famine which threatened the lives of millions of Ukrainians. It was vulnerable politically as it appeared to be the weak link of the system. Stalin had not forgotten that for several weeks two years earlier, the Soviet regime had lost control of tens of frontier districts on the border with Poland, which had been taken over by a great consecutive wave of peasant insurrection against the forced collectivisation of the countryside. He had not forgotten that the Ukraine, on its own, had been the scene of nearly half of the roughly 6,500 riots and peasant disorders recorded by OGPU in the course of the single month of March 1930. Despite the signing of a non-aggression pact with Poland in July 1932, the fear of Ukrainian agitation manipulated by the Polish secret services remained omnipresent. In reality Stalin’s preoccupation with the Ukrainian question went back to well before 1930. It was present from the time Stalin assumed the role of Head of the Commissariat of the People of Nationalities in the first Bolshevik Government at the end of 1917, at a time when the question of Ukrainian independence proclaimed by the Rada was uppermost.22 It was 18 months later in the spring of 1919 that the Great Ukrainian Peasant Insurrection hampered plans for the Bolshevik reconquest of the Ukraine. It is important to understand Stalin’s position regarding the ‘Ukrainian Problem’ of 1932–3 in order to read into it Stalin’s reflections on the connection between the peasant question and the national question. For Stalin ‘the peasant question is in essence a national question of the peasantry’ making up the principal strength of the national movement. There could be no powerful national movement without the support of the peasantry. To break the national movement through the weapon of famine would at the same time break the only national movement capable of opposing the centralised process of constructing the USSR and, incidentally, secure a particularly unstable border which cut across the Ukrainian communities artificially separated since the 1920 Treaty of Riga. For the months of September and October 1932 the progress of collectivisation was catastrophic. In September only 32% of the monthly target was fulfilled in the Ukraine and only 28% in the north Caucasus. In October the pace of deliveries slowed still further. On 25 October the levels of collection for the Ukraine reached barely 22% of the obligatory deliveries fixed for the month. In the north Caucasus it only reached 18%.23 The confidential reports by OGPU clarify the many strategies put in place by the peasants, often aided by the kolkhoz administration, to try to ‘extract’ a part of the harvest from the state collectivisation. Newly harvested grain was buried in hidden ditches in ‘black storehouses’ (clandestine warehouses, located on the outskirts of villages), grain was thrashed in ‘hand mills’ of artisan construction, diverted during the transfer towards the silos. At the moment of weighing, children, women and the elderly, who the peasants thought less exposed to the rigours of the law, were sent to cut some ears of cereal, often at night. These were all acts of resistance and these were the ‘kulak sabotages’ that the Politburo resolved to break. On 22 October they decided to send two plenipotentiary commissions to the Ukraine and to the north Caucasus, one headed by Viatcheslav Molotov and the other by Lazar Kaganovitch.

The decisive phase (Nov 1932–Jan 1933): Using hunger as a weapon to defeat sabotage In the course of three decisive months (from the end of October 1932 to the start of February 1933) the highest officials of OGPU (and notably Genrikh Iagoda, the 139

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chief of the Soviet political police) played a decisive role in aggravating the famine. Exceptional sources, today declassified – telegrams sent by the two ‘plenipotentiaries’ to Stalin, rapid exchanges between officials of the Ukrainian Communist Party, speeches made by Molotov and Kaganovitch in front of the local assemblies of party leaders but also in front of kolkhoz members, a travel journal by Lazar Kaganovitch – paint us a vivid picture of the political and ideological arguments put forward by Stalin’s envoys, the escalation of repressive measures, and the increasingly resolute use of the weapon of hunger to break the resistance of the Ukrainian peasantry.24 On his arrival at Rostov on 1 November, Kaganovitch told regional leaders of the party that ‘it is useless to try not to give precise accounts of the reserves of grain. This step opens the way for all trickery and quite simply signifies a rejection of the collectivisation plan. The problem can only be overcome by crushing the counter-revolutionary kulak elements.’25 From Krasnador, Kaganovitch wrote on 5 November to Stalin, ‘the counter-revolutionary elements are well entrenched. The dreadful work of the local party organisation, liberalism, opportunism and carelessness leave the way open for the rise of the counter-revolution . . . Our principal task today is to break the sabotage, an organised sabotage directed from a unique centre.’26 The missions of Kaganovitch and Molotov, who put forward similar arguments as soon as he arrived in Kharkov in the course of his tour of the regions of Odessa and Dniepropetrovsk, led to militant campaigns against the insurgents. Hundreds of detachments of ‘activists’ and ‘plenipotentiaries’ arrived with an unclear mandate (more than 60,000 had been mobilised since September, for the most part members of the party and komsomols; half had come from the great cities of Russia but some were also from the Ukraine, former poor peasants promoted to administrative posts or officialdom) reinforced by 10,000 agents of OGPU; these were sent into the countryside to ‘take hold of the cereals’. Among the first measures taken by Molotov and Kaganovitch (but ratified as ‘resolutions of the Politburo of the Ukrainian Communist Party’) appears the obligation for the administration of the kolkhoz members – having failed in their collectivisation plan – to hand over to their administrators the natural advances (naturfondy) received over previous weeks. This measure was clearly very difficult if not impossible to apply, whether through punitive expeditions or systematic digging up of all the resources. It encouraged the growth of violence as some of the confiscated produce was being redistributed to those who had participated in the requisitions. The other repressive measure taken by Molotov and Kaganovitch was the halting of any provisioning of manufactured products to the districts which had not fulfilled the plan. Towns, villages and kolkhozes which had not fulfilled the collectivisation plan in the ‘foreseen manner’ (zlostno) were put on the black table. The label of being on ‘the black table’ led to the loss of all products, whether food or manufactures, from the stores, the total halting of trade, the immediate reimbursement of active credits both individual and collective, and above all the imposition of an exceptional fine equivalent to 15 times the normal tax on meat and potatoes. This measure meant in concrete terms the confiscation of kolkhoz cattle (if any remained) and the seizure of the last food reserves. All witness accounts from survivors underline the extraordinary violence of the confiscations undertaken most often by local ‘activists’ who understood that their participation on the side of the authorities would save their own lives from death by starvation. Everything edible was confiscated: chickens, rabbits but also the last reserves of flour, beans, buckwheat, even cabbage.27 The objective of this punitive measure was clearly not primarily economic but political. It acted to break the solidarity of the villages, 140

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to show to peasants that there was no means of escape. They could well sabotage the work of the collective farms, pinch the ears of grain, try to return to small individual lots, cultivate their gardens: they would not be safe anywhere. Someone could come and confiscate even their plates of buckwheat if they did not fulfil their obligations to the state. If in November 1932 the number of villages and kolkhozes on the ‘black table’ remained relatively low (a few hundred, although only 1,400 of the 23,000 kolkhozes in the Ukraine had fulfilled the plan), it grew considerably in the following two months. More than 9,000 kolkhozes and villages were on the black table by the end of January 1933. In parallel another form of repression was unleashed: in the course of November 1932 alone nearly 50,000 sentences (of which 700 were for the death penalty, and most of the rest for heavy terms of imprisonment) were handed out by exceptional itinerant courts against the saboteurs of the ‘collectivisation plan’ and the ‘thieves of social property’: 72,000 for these two charges in December.28 In the course of these requisitions/arrests led by ‘collectivisation groups’, thousands of grain-filled ditches were discovered. Yet looked at clearly, and as even Vsevolod Balitskii, the new head of the GPU in the Ukraine confessed, these ‘hunting trophies’ were derisory: barely 25,000 tons of cereal – or 0.5% of the collectivisation plan – had been discovered in the course of three months of requisitions!29 It appears clear that the countryside had been emptied of its last resources. At the same time however a press campaign developed the theme of an ‘immense underground city filled with hidden grain’ (podzemnyi pchenicnyi gorod) that the activists had to find at all costs and the discovery of which would ensure the prosperity of the Ukraine, ‘finally rid of kulaks, saboteurs and monopolists’.30 Another step in the escalating repression was the mass deportation of all the inhabitants of ‘rebel’ villages, who were ‘mounting a war against Soviet power’ as Kaganovitch declared on 6 November 1932, in front of villagers at Medvedovskaia. A few weeks later, because they had failed to fulfil the unrealistic collectivisation plan that had been imposed on them, all the inhabitants of three large stanitsy of the Kuban (Medvedovskaia, Oumanskaia, Poltavskaia) amounting to over 45,000 people were deported en masse to Siberia, the Urals and Kazakhstan.31 These coercive measures also aimed to break the last resistance offered by a certain number of Ukrainian Communist leaders and forced them to fulfil the collectivisation plan at whatever cost.32 In three months almost 30% of presidents of kolkhozes were dismissed from their posts; half of those sacked were also arrested. While delegating operations on the ground to Kaganovitch and Molotov, Stalin followed the situation closely. On 27 November 1932 at the plenary of the Central Committee he made a particularly hard-hitting speech in which he condemned not only the ‘sabotage’ of the ‘kulaks and enemies of the kolkhoz system’ but also the ‘naivety’ of communists who thought that the kolkhoz members, because they had joined collective farms, would become ipso facto ‘faithful elements’. One could be kolkhoz member, explained Stalin, and at the same time lead acts of sabotage at the heart of the kolkhoz. It was necessary to respond to this ‘war of attrition’ led by kolkhoz members with a ‘crushing blow’ (sokruchitel ‘nyi udar). Shortly after this plenary, from mid-December 1932 onwards, fatal measures were taken which condemned millions of Ukrainian peasants to starvation. They were to pay an unprecedented price for ‘Ukrainian nationalism’. This marked a watershed in the policy regarding nationalities and notably in the policy of the ‘indigenising 141

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of cadres’. On 14 December 1932 under a motion from Stalin, the Politburo condemned the policy of Ukrainianisation which had been followed since 1923 with the goal of promoting the language, culture and above all the training of cadres for the Ukrainian Communists, on the grounds that this favoured the emergence of a ‘Ukrainian nationalism’. The teaching of the Ukrainian language in all Ukrainianspeaking regions outside the Soviet republic of the Ukraine, such as the Kuban, in particular, was immediately stopped.33 On 19 December the Politburo demanded a ‘radical break in the cycle of collectivisation’. Lazar Kaganovitch, supported by a dozen high-ranking officials of the Party and the OGPU, emerged as a ‘plenipotentiary’ of the Ukraine with the mission ‘to occupy the strategic regions and all necessary measures to achieve the collection plan before 15 January 1933’.34 A few days later in a letter sent to Stalin from Odessa, Kaganovitch suggested annulling a resolution from the Ukrainian Communist Party which stipulated that only the Regional Executive Committee of the Soviets could authorise, as an exceptional sanction, the confiscation of the seed banks of the kolkhoz members and their inclusion in the obligatory deliveries of the state.35 Having received the enthusiastic agreement of Stalin, Kaganovitch imposed this measure on the Ukrainian Communist Party on 29 December. Those kolkhozes which had failed to fulfil the collection plan would be obliged to hand over their so-called ‘seed banks’ (tak nazyvaemye semennye fondy) within five days. These were the final reserves ensuring the next harvest or, at the very least, offering a last-ditch support to hungry kolkhoz members.36 Three days later, on 1 January 1933, Stalin sent a telegram to the Ukrainian Communist Party demanding a speeding up in the pace of searches and a harsher crackdown against peasants whose homes had been used to hide food. Any peasant whose dwelling had been found to contain such products was to be treated as a thief of social property and judged with all the harshness of the law of 7 August 1932. This meant ten years in prison camp or, in aggravated circumstances, the death penalty. This order opened the way for an intensification of violence towards peasants, and requisitions for ‘theft’ and total confiscation of the last food reserves under the guise of ‘fines’ for ‘deliberate sabotage’ of state collectivisation. In a few weeks the number of villages and kolkhozes put on the ‘black table’ soared. The Ukrainian historian Stanislas Kulcytsky believes a decisive stage was reached at the moment when it was no longer simply a case of confiscating cereals under the label ‘collectivisation campaign’ but when cattle were seized on the pretext of ‘fining’. This meant the loss of the last safeguard of a peasant family’s survival and the last of its food reserves. For Kulcytsky these extreme measures mark the transition from ‘dying of hunger’ (smert golodom) to ‘killing by hunger’ (ubiistvo golodom). The genocidal process was underway. How did the peasants react to this new escalation of violence? By a massive ‘every man for himself’ flight to the towns. Vsevolod Balitskii, the new head of the GPU in the Ukraine, reports for example on 21 January 1933 to Stalin that 16,500 ‘long distance’ train tickets had been sold over the two previous weeks in the little station of Lozovaia (in the Kharkov region), 15,000 in the small station of Soumy (in the same region). For him there is no doubt that these ‘massive departures are knowingly organised by counter-revolutionary groups . . . In a single week our forces have arrested 500 hardened instigators who push the peasants into leaving.’37 The next day, 22 January 1933, Stalin wrote a secret directive ordering an immediate end to the massive exodus of peasants fleeing the Ukraine and the Kuban ‘on the pretext of looking for bread’. According to Stalin, 142

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the Central Committee and the Council of Commissions of the People have evidence that this exodus coming from the Ukraine, just like last year’s exodus is organised by enemies of the Soviet, the revolutionary socialists and Polish agents with a propaganda aim, through the means of peasants fleeing to the regions of the USSR from the north of the Ukraine, the kolkhoz system in particular and the Soviet system in general.38 The very same day Genrikh Iagoda sent regional leaders of OGPU a circular which ordered the placing, notably at the stations and on the roadways, of special patrols charged with intercepting all those fleeing from the Ukraine and north Caucasus. After filtering from the arrested ‘the kulak and counter-revolutionary elements . . . the individuals propagating counter-revolutionary rumours of alleged food shortages’, those who refused to return home would be deported to ‘special villages of the people’ (or, for the most hardened amongst them, sent to camps). The other people fleeing would be returned home, a measure which condemned them to certain death in villages ravaged by famine and left them entirely to their lot without the slightest food aid.39 From 23 January the order seeking to stop all flight of the famished (and all spreading of news of a famine denied by the authorities) was completed by the directives suspending the sale of train tickets to the peasants.40 In the last week of January 1933 some 25,000 of those fleeing were arrested. Two months after the start of the operation more than 225,000 people had been apprehended, of whom 85% were sent home.41 The weekly records of OGPU ‘on the measures taken to end the massive exodus of the peasants’ which were addressed directly to Stalin and Molotov, clearly remained silent on the physical state of the apprehended people. However local reports, like those of the patrols of the Transport Department of the GPU of Berditchev railway station are much franker – ‘most of the hungry apprehended’ one reads, ‘are in such a state that they are no longer in a condition to move and die like flies around the station. There is no point in apprehending them nor in sending them back from wherever they came.’42 For the historian Stanislas Kulcytsky the blockade of hungry villages organised following Stalin’s directive of 22 January 1933 is, with the confiscations of the last reserves of peasant food, the second element constituting the crime of genocide perpetrated by the Stalinist regime against the Ukrainian peasantry.43

The height of the famine (January–July 1933): The effect of new sources on certain key questions Although it is possible to reconstruct the political mechanisms of late 1932 to early 1933 and their links to the famine with some precision, relatively little is known about what happened in the Ukrainian villages subject to ‘punishment by hunger’. Accounts from surviving witnesses are a vital source and a great deal of work has been done in recent years to add to the pioneer collection of accounts undertaken at the end of the 1980s by Volodymyr Maniak and Lidia Kovalenko.44 Other sources from political officials or police in the regions and districts struck by the famine have recently been recovered by Ukrainian historians. Thankfully these are less rare than they would have been if the instructions given by Vsevolod Balitskii to his subordinates on 22 March 1933 had been strictly applied: 143

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On questions relating to alimentary difficulties only inform the First Secretary of regional committees of the party and this only orally, after scrupulous verification of the reported facts. This is to prevent any handwritten notes on the subject finding their way into the machinery, thus becoming a source for various rumours and murmurings. Do not write specific reports for the GPU of the Ukraine. It is sufficient that I am informed myself in personal letters from the leaders addressed to me directly.45 The numerous reports and secret correspondence between officials and leaders of the party and the GPU rediscovered in the archives reflect the police vision of the reality behind the ‘food shortages’ (the term ‘famine’ is never used). This is blamed on ‘sabotage carried out on Ukrainian agriculture by kulak and counter-revolutionary elements who are trying to exploit passing food shortages for their real counter-revolutionary aims, spreading rumours of a supposed famine, purposefully refusing to bury the dead’.46 Particularly revealing of this mentality are, for example, the autopsies ordered by the head of the political police of Dniepropetrovsk to determine the exact causes of death of those who had succumbed to starvation. (Had these individuals really died of hunger? Was it not a case of enemy provocation?47) Police reports written on cases of cannibalism and eating of the dead were related with the detachment of a white colonialist describing the savage customs of a primitive people. ‘One notices’, wrote Rozanov, the head of the political police of Kiev, ‘that cannibalism is becoming commonplace. Those individuals suspected of cannibalism last year, reoffend and kill children and people they know, even strangers in the street. In the villages affected by cannibalism, each passing day strengthens these people in the notion that it is perfectly acceptable to eat human flesh.’48 Not one word in this report addresses what has suddenly transformed these peasants into cannibals. Through the correspondence between party leaders and the GPU one can see the ‘learning’ function of the famine – as perceived by political officials and Stalin’s police. The function was perfectly summarised in this short extract of a letter dated 15 March 1933 from Stanislas Kossior, the head of the Ukrainian Communist Party, to Stalin: the comrades who have gone into the fields in the villages of the Kiev region notice that the peasants no longer say, ‘the bread has been confiscated’, they recognise that they themselves have worked badly . . . Yet the insufficient preparation in the countryside for the current sowing shows that the famine has not yielded results and does not seem to have made the majority of kolkhoz members take the good route of honest work.49 This letter of 12 March 1933, from Alexandre Odintsov, the People’s Commissar of Agriculture of the Socialist Soviet Republic of the Ukraine, makes this point: I notice – and this is a source of satisfaction for us – that the kolkhoz members, including the hungry, are now convinced that the sole issue is to work conscientiously in sowing the land well. They have understood the true power of the State. An idea has been implanted thanks to the famine: only those who work honestly as regards the State can get by.50 Numerous survivors, if we are to believe a document written at this time, seem to have ‘learnt the lesson’ and duly taken on the Leninist principle: ‘Those who don’t work 144

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don’t eat.’ In the majority of villages the ‘moltchanka’51 was now broken. People began to talk in the meetings again, a lot more in fact, ‘just asking for bread whilst promising that if they are given food, they will work more conscientiously in the future’.52 For all this the spectre of an uprising of hungry peasants still worried the authorities.53 There are systematic reports of anti-Soviet feelings amongst the hungry, as well as their alleged ‘provocations’, the most frequent being ‘delaying the burial of the dead’.54 At the worst point of the famine, massive waves of arrest continued, tens of thousands of peasants were deported to Siberia, and tens of thousands of those locked up in prisons in the Ukraine and Kuban were transferred to the gulag camps through fear of trouble.55 The exceptional judicial powers of the political police were reinforced still further.56 The reports also show how risky it is to try to count the precise number of famine victims, to the extent that officials of the rural Soviets, themselves also decimated, no longer kept civil registers of population. More generally, as recognised by one district’s officials, great numbers of lesser cadres have so internalized the threats coming from above and know that it is forbidden not only to write but even to talk of cases of famine, that they become hardened. They have become so indifferent and so closed to all this that they have finally put the running of the district in a very awkward position by depriving them of all information about what is happening in the villages.57 One of the questions raised by the new bureaucratic sources is that of food aid allocated in extremis to the hungry. The question is at the heart of a debate between Russian historians, who see it as evidence that Stalin’s regime did not specifically target the Ukraine and that it was ready to send aid to the famished, and Ukrainian historians for whom this derisory aid, given under precise conditions and socio-political criteria, was merely a particularly cynical way of giving food to all those in submission (podkorm s ruk, to use S. Kulcytsky’s expression). What was the level of food aid unblocked by Moscow for the Ukraine? From 7 February 1933 (the day after the collection campaign was officially declared completed) to the beginning of July 1933, in the course of which the famine reached its greatest intensity and extent, the Politburo adopted 35 aid resolutions to the regions touched by ‘food difficulties’. The aid effectively unblocked around 320,000 tons which, for the 30 million people hit by the famine, only represented some 10 kilos of cereal per person, or barely 3% of the average annual consumption of a peasant! In 1933 the USSR exported 1,830,000 tons of wheat. In addition the state reserves at the height of the famine in June–July 1933 amounted to a million tons – enough to save the lives of millions of people.58 Stalin himself agreed to the aid asked for by the regional officials – albeit begrudgingly. He delayed his reply by more than two months, magnanimously authorising the local authorities of the town of Kharkov to ‘sell 5 pounds of flour for the working family, exceptionally and at State authorised prices’.59 In reality, an important part of the aid grudgingly accorded was destined for the towns, themselves also hit by food shortages. The great industrial centres of the Donbas were particularly targeted as the regime feared troubles amongst workers.60 As for the meagre aid distributed to the peasants, a secret resolution of the regional Communist Party of Dniepropetrovsk (20 February 1933) specified that it must be exclusively aimed at a sole goal, namely to 145

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reinforce the kolkhozes and for better preparation of the countryside for the spring sowing. The aid had to be ‘accorded on the basis of class . . . to those who merit it, that is to say, in priority and by order, to tractor drivers, to the kolkhoz members who, in the previous years did the most days’ work, to families with a son in the Red Army, to individual peasants who have undertaken to join the kolkhozes’.61 The numerous secret instructions sent to the kolkhoz administrations and to the political departments of the machine and tractor stations (new organisations under the control of the political police, put in place to watch over and purge collective farms), instil draconian rules for the distribution of food, in terms of the work undertaken by each person calculated every five days. To struggle against all ‘levelling’ which could favour the ‘laziest’, it was specified that there would be no group distribution on the basis of work brigades as was habitual from the outset of the kolkhoz system.62 Given their feeble state, a great number of kolkhoz members who survived the famine failed to regain the strength to work, as the editors of the reports somewhat cynically noted: ‘The rare ones who are still working are incapable of reaching the demanded norms. As a consequence they don’t receive sufficient bread and start to drop.’63 Whilst millions of peasants were dying of hunger, the party and GPU officials benefited from an absolutely correct provisioning distributed in the ‘closed network’ of stores at reserved cooperatives.64 A major preoccupation comes through strongly in the police and political reports in the spring of 1933; how to ensure in the regions devastated by hunger that the farm work would be done for the future harvest. In November 1932 Khataievitch, the Second Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, had warned Molotov in these terms: ‘for agricultural production to continue to grow and satisfy the need of the Proletarian State, we must consider the minimum needs of the kolkhozes and kolkhoz members, without which there will soon be no one to sow or reap’.65 A few months later, with the population decimated by famine, the question was asked effectively in these terms. To remedy the dramatic lack of labour the authorities for the first time sent a part of the urban population to work in the fields.66 There followed vast transfers of populations from other regions of the USSR – more than 200,000 peasants were thus displaced in 1933–4 towards the regions devastated by famine, most of them straight after their military service. The last point clarified by the reports is the extraordinary regression and brutalisation which accompanied the famine. It resulted notably in the rise of banditry and, more generally, in the growth of extraordinary social violence, in a world traumatised, shaken and permanently scarred by hunger. Thieves including hungry children caught whilst stealing a few vegetables were lynched, and summary judgements (samosudy) were administered by the peasants themselves. Brutality, revenge attacks, child abandonment, cannibalism and the eating of the dead have all been recorded.67 The extreme violence enacted by the regime and its officials against the population traumatised the survivors of the famine. Trauma linked to the famine persisted for years. This is evidenced by rumours which spread, long after the spectre of famine had gone, in the devastated countryside. Thus in the spring of 1937 a rumour persisted which NKVD documents called ‘the tale of the wheat bag, the pail of blood and the old man’. The kolkhoz members were convinced of an imminent order that would free them from the kolkhoz system. It was said that the peasants had discovered in several places a bag of wheat so heavy that no man could lift it. Besides this bag there was a pail filled with blood and in the background an old man who decoded the enigma. There would soon be a war and after the war the peasants would be free again and could take the bag of wheat, the fruit of their labour.68 146

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Since the start of the 1990s the ‘rediscovery’ of the famine has played a crucial role in political debate in the newly independent Ukraine, in the confrontation between those who favoured a rupture with Russia and those who wished to maintain close links with the ‘big Russian brother’. The ‘Holodomor’ – a new term created in the Ukraine to define the mass extermination of Ukrainians by famine and its intentional character (it comes from the fusion of the words ‘golod’, hunger, and ‘mor’ (root of the verb moryty which means exhaust, leave suffering unaided, kill by deprivation) – has not only been central to the political and cultural debate, it has been integral to the reconstruction of a national state and its identity in the post-Soviet Ukraine. In November 2006 the Parliament of the Ukrainian Republic, at a time dominated by those who wished to break links with Russia, officially recognised the 1932–3 famine as a genocide perpetrated by Stalin’s regime against the Ukrainian people. This designation, which has not been fully recognised by the United Nations, is still debated by historians, notably Ukrainian historians who mostly adhere to the theory of genocide and Russian historians who all reject it, regarding the Ukrainian famine as a regional variant of the ‘tragedy of the Soviet countryside’, wracked by a series of famines which also touched Kazakhstan, the regions of the Volga and certain areas of western Siberia. For most Ukrainian specialists on the famine69 three major elements constitute the crime of genocide: the confiscation of all food reserves of the peasants during certain key months (end of 1932 to start of 1933), the blockade of the famine-hit countryside, and the proof of intention shown by documents handwritten by Stalin, notably the instructions of 1 January 1933 calling for an intensifying of confiscation and repression against the peasants and 22 January 1933 introducing the blockade of villages. These historians also emphasise the fact that Raphael Lemkin, the ‘father of the concept of genocide’, considered the famine and the destruction of the Ukrainian elite to be a ‘typical example of Soviet genocide, its most complete expression in terms of Russification – the destruction of the Ukrainian nation’.70 If the famine of 1932–3 is today not only politicised in the Ukraine but also raised to the level of ‘genocide of the Ukrainian people’, a central element in the new Ukrainian national myth, by contrast there is silence on the subject in Russia. There is silence on the famine which struck Kazakhstan in 1931 following a deliberate policy of settling Kazakh nomads and the brutal collectivisation of livestock causing 1.4 million deaths (out of a Kazakh population of 4 million). There is silence too on the 1932–3 famines which struck the Volga region leading to 800,000 deaths and on the southern Urals and western Siberia where there were hundreds of thousands of deaths. A few rare historians like Nikolai Ivnitskii or Viktor Kondrachin maintain the great tradition of the Soviet school of ‘agrarian historians’ of which the late Ilia Zelenin and Viktor Danilov were notable figures. These historians vigorously deny the particularity of the Ukrainian famine and its ‘national dimension’. For them the Great Famine was a catastrophe for the whole Soviet peasantry which was sacrificed at the altar of the accelerated industrialisation of the country. They emphasise that the mortality rates were just as high in the Russian villages of the Volga as in the Ukrainian villages, that a blockade of the countryside was also enforced there, certainly some weeks later than in the Ukraine and with less police enforcement; that the ‘collective brigades’ also acted there with just as much brutality and that Ukrainian leaders like Kossior and the grassroots ‘activists’, most of whom were also Ukrainian, were themselves largely responsible for the situation in the Ukraine. Above all they affirm that ‘no document has been found in the Presidential Archives of the Russian Federation targeting the 147

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Ukrainians on the grounds of them being Ukrainians’.71 And therein lies the rub; while all the archives are open to the whole community of historians in the Ukraine, many ‘secret dossiers’ from Stalin’s side concerning the famine conserved in the Presidential Archives of the Russian Federation are closed to historians. In these conditions, in spite of undeniable progress achieved in recent years regarding our understanding of the famines in the early 1930s in the USSR, the debate can hardly progress on one of the greatest tragedies – and one of the greatest mass crimes – whether one describes it as ‘genocide’ or as a ‘crime against humanity’ or whatever other description could be applied to mass deaths in twentieth-century European history.

Notes 1 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 2 James Mace, Communism and the Dilemmas of National Liberation: National Communism in Soviet Ukraine, 1918–1933 (Cambridge University Press, 1983). 3 This figure is today the most commonly accepted by the scientific community as a whole. Note that in the Ukraine under President Iouschenko, i.e., up until the end of 2009, the figure commonly put forward in the media and in political circles close to the President was of the order of 7 to 10 (even 12) million victims of the 1932–3 famine. For a critical assessment of the number of victims of different Soviet famines from the start of the 1930s see Robert Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 4 See for example The Black Deeds of the Kremlin. A White Book, Vol. 2: The Great Famine in Ukraine in 1932–3, Detroit, 1955. 5 Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (University of Alberta Press, 1986). 6 Recalling that in the years of the NEP (1923–7) and in the frame of a market economy regulated by the state, for an average harvest of around 70–75 million tons per year, the peasants contributed in the different commercial circuits less than 10 million tons per year, the rest being consumed themselves. 7 Making 8.6 million tons for a total harvest of 20.4 million (see Report of V. Osinskii to Stalin and Molotov, 29 May 1932 in V.P. Danilov, R. Manning and L. Viola (eds), Tragedia sovetskoi derevni, Vol. III (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), pp. 375–8). 8 See for example the report of a journalist for Za pisceviuju industriju of 16 June 1932 on the confiscation of all the seeds to fulfil the plan in a certain number of kolkhozes in the district of Ouman (region of Vinnitsa), which resulted in the worsening of the famine from the spring of 1932, in Danilov et al., Tragedia, pp. 388–90. 9 S.V. Kulcyckyi, Holod 1932–3 rokiv na Ukraini: Ocyma istorykiv: Movoju dokulentiv (Kiev, 1990), pp. 147–8. 10 The letters of Tchoubar and Petrovski feature in the collection of J. Šapovalov, V. Vassiliev, Komandyry velikogo golodu (Kiev: Geneza, 2001), pp. 206–15. The passage cited here is from p. 213. 11 Ibid. 12 Cited in N.A. Ivnitskii, ‘Golod 1932–1933 godov:kto vinovat?’ (The famine of 1932–3: who was responsible?) in I.A. Fanassiev (dir), Sud’by rossiiskogo krestianstva (The destiny of the Russian Peasantry) (Moscow: Rossia XX vek, 1996), p. 351. 13 Stalin–Kaganovitch Perepiska (Correspondence between Stalin and Kaganovitch), introduction, notes and commentaries of Oleg Khlevniouk (Moskva: Rosspen, 2001), pp. 179–80. 14 See Davies and Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger, pp. 130–37. 15 Šapovalov and Vassiliev, Komandyry, p. 93. 16 On the Third Conference of the Ukrainian Communist Party see the article devoted to this ‘prologue to the tragedy of the famine’, Šapovalov and Vassiliev, Komandyry, pp. 152–78. 17 Šapovalov and Vassiliev, Komandyry, p. 98. 18 Danilov et al., Tragedia, p. 441. 19 Józef Piłsudski (1867–1935) was a Polish politician and nationalist, Head of State in independent Poland at the time this letter was written. Symon Petliura (1879–1926) briefly headed a Ukrainian independent formation during the Civil War and was a Ukrainian nationalist.

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20 Stalin–Kaganovic Perepiska, pp. 273–4. 21 Ibid. 22 The Rada was the name of the Ukrainian Nationalist Council during the Civil War from 17 March 1917 until 29 April 1918. 23 Šapovalov and Vassiliev, Komandyry, p. 104. 24 Ibid, pp. 250–70. 25 Ibid, p. 253. 26 Ibid, p. 267. 27 See the selection of witness statements collected by Volodymyr Maniak and Lidia Kovalenko, translated into French and published by Georges Sokoloff, 1933 L’Année Noire, Paris, Albin Michel, 2000. 28 Šapovalov and Vassiliev, Komandyry, p. 125 (concerning the arrests linked to ‘sabotage of the collections’). The number of arrests for ‘theft of social property’ is calculated after the report of A.N. Vinokurov, President of the Supreme Court of the USSR on the number of sentences carried out under the law of 7 August 1932 (GARF, 1235/141/1005/67-91). 29 Intervention of S. Kulcytsky at a meeting of Russian and Ukrainian historians on the Holodomor, 12 December 2009 (unpublished). I would like to thank S. Kulcytsky for sending me the text of these contributions to this colloquium. 30 See in particular the editorial of Pravda of 1 December 1932. 31 E. Oskolkov, ‘Golod, 1932–3 v zernovykh raionnax Severo-Kavkazkogo kraja’ (The famine of 1932–3 in the cereal growing regions of the north Caucasus) in Holodomor 1932–3 rr v Ukraini: prycyny i naslidsky, Mijdunarodnaia konferentsia (The 1932–3 Famine in the Ukraine: causes and consequences. Acts of the International Colloquium), Kiev, 1995, pp. 120–21. 32 The most publicised is that of G. Kotov, Party secretary of a large town in the Kuban condemned to death (see Davies and Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger, pp. 177–8). 33 Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939 (Ithaca & London: Cornell UP, 2001), pp. 302–3. 34 Šapovalov and Vassiliev, Komandyry, p. 125. 35 Ibid, p. 127 36 Ibid, p. 128 37 Ruslan Pyrikh (ed.), Golodomor 1932–1933 rokiv v Ukraini Dokumenti i materiali (Kiev, 2007), document no. 442, pp. 615–16. 38 37. RGASPI, 558/11/45/109. 39 Circular of OGPU no50 031 of 22 January 1933 in V.P. Danilov and A. Berelowitch (eds), Sovetskaia derevnia glazami VCK-OGPU-NKVD, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), pp. 262–3. 40 Danilov et al., Tragedia, pp. 635–6. 41 V.P. Danilov and A. Berelowitch (eds), Sovetskaia, p. 354. 42 Vinnitsa Party Archives, P-136, op3, d41, 1.8. 43 S. Kulcytsky, Tainy sovetskogo goloda, Otcet s Moskovskogo kolloqiuma, Den’, 14.1.2010. 44 See endnote 27. 45 Danilov and Berelowitch, Sovetskaia, p. 351. 46 Ibid, p. 376. 47 Ibid, p. 305. 48 Ibid, p. 332. 49 Complete text of the letter from Kossior to Stalin of 15 March 1933 in Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 770–72. 50 Among the numerous other letters written by high officials developing this theme, see the memorandum of Feigin, Secretary of the Communist Party of the region of Dniepropetrovsk, to Stalin and Molotov (12 April 1933): ’the attitude of the kolkhoz members is incomparably better this year . . . They have understood that to work badly in the kolkhoz leads to death by hunger’ (GARF, 5446/82/19/66). 51 Neologism that can be translated as the ‘plot of silence’. To protest against their situation the kolkhoz members, hungry and too weak to protest, found a final form of protest: no longer speaking to members of the administration. 52 Report of N. Brouk, instructor of the Central Executive Committee, on the preparation of the sowing campaign in the region of the Don, 17 March 1933 (GARF, 1235/2/1522/62–66). 53 Danilov and Berelowitch, Sovetskaia, pp. 293–301.

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54 The expression comes from V. Balitskii in the circular of 19 March 1933, in Danilov and Berelowitch, Sovetskaia, p. 351. A recurrent theme in a great number of reports, including the report of the information group of the CC of the Ukrainian Communist Party, is the situation in the province of Kiev, 28 February 1933, in Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 700–704. 55 See Resolution of the Politburo on the transfer of detainees imprisoned in prisons of the Ukraine and north Caucasus, 8 March 1933, in Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 737–41. 56 Protocol of the Politburo reunion of 12 March 1933 in the course of which it was decided to reinforce the prerogatives of the GPU of the Ukraine in matters concerning the ‘struggle against insurrections’ and ‘the application of the supreme measure of social defence’ (the death penalty) RGASPI 17/162/14/89-96. 57 Report of N. Bannik, secretary of the district committee of Pavlograd to Khataievitch, 30 March 1933 in Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 798–800. 58 V.P. Danilov and I.E. Zelenin, Organizovannyi golod, K 70-letiju obscekrestianskoi tragedii (The organised famine, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the tragedy of all the peasantry), Otecestvennaia Istorija 2004, No. 5, p. 108. 59 Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, p. 812. 60 Unrest broke out in 1932, notably in the industrial region of Ivanovo. On the priority accorded to resupplying the Donbas see the resolution of the CC of the Ukrainian Communist Party on 17 February 1933, in Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 689–90. 61 Secret resolution of the office of the regional committee of the Communist Party of Dniepropetrovsky, 20 February 1933, in Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 695–6. See also the circular of V. Balitskii, 19 March 1933 in Danilov and Berelowitch, Sovetskaia, pp. 350–51. 62 For an example of these instructions see Davies and Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger, pp. 222–3. 63 Danilov and Berelowitch, Sovetskaia, pp. 385–7. 64 On this ‘spetzsnabjenie’ (‘special provisioning’) see Pyrikh, Golodomor 1932–1933, pp. 361–4. 65 Danilov, Tragedia, pp. 555–6. 66 This is what the Italian consul in Kharkov wrote on the subject (20 July 1933), ‘the mobilisation of citizen forces has taken on huge proportions . . . This week, 20,000 persons were sent to the countryside . . . the requisition of men is like the slave trade . . . The day before yesterday one spotted the strange sight of all the able-bodied folk, men, women and adolescent boys and girls, being led to the railway station by the GPU and sent into the fields’ (Andres Graziosi, ‘Letters from Kharkov: the famine in the Ukraine and north Caucasus through the reports of Italian diplomats, 1932–34’, Notebooks on the Russian and Soviet World, Vol. XXX (1–2), January–June 1989, p. 77) 67 On the very numerous cases of cannibalism, see T. Snyder, Bloodlands, pp. 50–51. 68 See Elena Ossokina, Za fasadom ‘Stalinskogo izobilija’ (Behind the façade of ‘Stalinist abundance’) (Moscow: Rosspen, 1988), pp. 205–6. 69 Stanislas Kulcytsky, Valerii Vassiliev, Iouri Shapoval and Ruslan Pyrikh, to cite just the principal figures. 70 This text from an unpublished conference dating to 1950 was recently discovered in the archives of Raphael Lemkin, and has been published by Roman Serbyn, ‘Lemkin on Genocide of Nations’, Journal of International Criminal Justice, No. 7, 2009, pp. 123–30. 71 Cf the short-hand account on the meeting between Russian and Ukrainian historians in Moscow on 12 December 2009. I would like to thank Prof. Kulcytsky for kindly sending me this account.

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11 RE THINKING VI O LENC E Motives and modes of mass murder in the independent state of Croatia, 1941–5 Tomislav Dulić

Following the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH) in April 1941, the fascist Ustaša regime and its leader Ante Pavelić almost immediately embarked on a policy of ‘ethnic homogenization’ of NDH territory through an attack on its ‘undesirable elements’: the Jews, the Roma and the Serbs. However, the violence that affected the civilian population happened in two related although distinct processes. On the one hand, there was the systematic persecution of the victimized groups through ‘institutionalized’ destruction in concentration camps and mass murder in mobile killing operation, perpetrated by Ustaša units. On the other hand, the war also included indiscriminate killing of civilians during counter-insurgency operations carried out by the German Wehrmacht and the regular Domobranstvo armed forces of the NDH. As a result of the effort on the part of the communist authorities to overcome warinduced divisions in society, Yugoslav official historiography attributed the mass murders in the NDH to a tiny group of Ustašas often described as pathological murderers, who were placed in stark opposition to a ‘progressive’ and generally anti-fascist population at large.1 However, a shift occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when ethnic mobilization and the delegitimization of the communist master narrative about the war also came to affect historiography. Some Serbian historians thus began questioning the idea that the Ustašas lacked support among the general Catholic and Muslim population.2 The violence was even viewed as an expression of a Croatian ‘Sonderweg’, whereby the killings came to represent the culmination of a genocidal process that had its roots in the Croatian nationalist ideology of pravaštvo first formulated by Ante Starčević in the mid-1800s.3 There was, however, also the opposing view put forward by some Croatian historians in particular, according to which Ustaša violence was a reaction to rebellions initiated by Serbian ‘Četniks’ in response to the establishment of the NDH. Unfortunately, the war of the 1990s prevented scholars from moving beyond these polarizations and it is only in the last decade that a considerable increase in research interest has paved the way for a deeper understanding of violence in the NDH. Much of the work has been conducted by scholars outside of former Yugoslavia,4 who have paid particular attention to comparative aspects, cultural policy and micro processes, but the renewed interest has also returned some focus to the long-standing debate concerning the initial aims of the Ustaša regime. However, while important headway has been made insofar as historical fact-finding is concerned, there is still a lack of 151

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theoretically founded and methodologically sound comparisons. As a result, there is sometimes a tendency to lump various victim groups together, which often results in the muddling of differences concerning intentionality and motives across perpetrator groups. This chapter represents an effort to demonstrate how an appropriate operationalization of recent advances in theory from the field of political science and peace research can help move historical inquiry on mass violence in the NDH beyond the descriptive. More specifically, I show that the violence perpetrated by the military organizations was driven by a desire to control populations and/or territory in accordance with theoretical arguments presented by Stathis Kalyvas, Barry Posen and others. The Ustaša mass murders, by contrast, were part of a policy that sought to achieve a complete remoulding of society in accordance with a fascist ideology that included the ethnic homogenization of NDH territory. On the basis of data from the Jasenovac Concentration Camp, I show that these differences in motive and intent also produced diverging results insofar as victimization is concerned.

Theories on mass violence The most prominent theories on indiscriminate violence against civilians depart from the assumption that such behaviour is based on a desire to control territory and/ or populations. According to one view, indiscriminate violence is a means by which to establish control in contexts of asymmetric warfare. As a result of the fact that an incumbent – in particular if it is an occupying force that lacks the language skills and knowledge about local context to combat an insurgency ‘from within’ – uses retaliatory mass shootings of civilians and deportation as a means by which to ‘drain the sea’ of insurgent support.5 However, most theorists depart from the assumption that indiscriminate violence usually forces civilians to seek protection among rebels, which leads to the swelling of enemy ranks, deprives occupying forces of access to valuable resources and causes a generally deteriorating security situation.6 In order to explain behaviour patterns that seem to contradict rational aims, many scholars therefore attribute such forms of violence to incompetence and various shortcomings, ranging from breakdowns in command and control to information failure. In his recent important contribution to the field of civil war studies, Stathis Kalyvas for instance argues that indiscriminate violence happens in regions where an incumbent cannot acquire the necessary information for selective targeting.7 Although such activities are contrary to his original preferences, he therefore kills the many in the hope that by doing so he will also destroy those individuals that indeed oppose the regime.8 Barry Posen’s widely used ethnic security dilemma theory (ESD) also departs from information failure as a key explanatory variable, based as it is on the idea that mass killing of civilians happens when originally defensively oriented actors cannot accurately assess whether opposing sides are committed to peace in contexts of ‘emerging anarchy’. As a pre-emptive strike, temporarily stronger actors instead resort to the violent deportation of civilians in order to render a territory more defendable.9 Alternatively, proponents of the societal security dilemma (SSD) theory, first coined by the ‘Copenhagen School’ of international relations, argue that violence does not emerge from fears of attack among originally defensively oriented actors. Instead, it should be understood as a result of threats not of physical violence, but to identities, 152

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which typically surface in the context of state dissolution. This becomes particularly dangerous during democratic transition processes, when the arrival of a majoritarian democratic system might be perceived as a severe threat by, for instance, a previously empowered minority fearing loss of control.10 While it is probably reasonable to believe that insecurity will explain most instances of conflict-related mass violence, such models cannot properly account for situations where mass killings take the form of systematic annihilation of those parts of the population – most notably the elderly and children – who pose no security threat and could easily be deported rather than killed. In order to explain this type of behaviour, genocide scholars apply models that emphasize the role of ideology and how exclusionary practices may combine with utopian desires for rapid modernization to produce wholesale destruction of ethnic, religious or racial groups.11 The tendency is to view violence as led and organized by elites, who sometimes use media and other means of propaganda to manipulate populations into attacking ‘undesirables’. Moreover, while few would argue that desires to destroy are present from the onset of conflagrations, most agree that such decisions are taken at some point in time when other solutions to ‘ethnic homogenization’ have failed.12 However, while rationalist models suffer from the lack of a plausible explanation for the seemingly ‘irrational’ indiscriminate killing of civilians, ‘genocide theories’ often depart from a problematic assumption about a direct causal relationship between macro-level propaganda and the implementation of violence in local communities. While it is often tempting to infer a causal relationship between propaganda, ethnically related manifestations on the local level and attitudes, a body of literature exists which suggests a lack of firm empirical evidence in support of such claims.13 Conversely, there are those scholars who argue that ideology primarily aims to delineate and identify the ‘undesirables’, rather than to mobilize perpetrators.14 In so doing, it also signals to the in-group that one should not interfere with government policy. If rationalist models cannot explain systematic annihilation to any convincing degree and ‘genocide theories’ are based on largely untenable assumptions about the relationship between decision-making on the macro level and local violence, what can then explain large-scale genocidal violence? Much evidence suggests that a diversified approach that takes relations between the micro and macro into account provides the best overall explanation. By this is meant that elites may well nurture highly ideologized ideas about the need to forcibly remould societies in order to provide a better future for the in-group, while local populations do not even have to be aware of these ideas and instead act on the basis of local conflict dynamics. Different motivations may coincide in time and space, since the elite does not really bother about the precise reason why a perpetrator participates in violence as long as the killings are in conjunction with policy. The assumption also provides a plausible explanation as to why elites regularly focus on the stirring of fear rather than hatred when mobilizing prior to or during outbreaks of violence.15 This probably happens because leaders understand that agency is circumscribed by local contexts in which people live and behaviours have to be rationalized in plausible and justifiable terms.16 In other words, complex ideological messages simply do not work to mobilize large groups of people. This suggests that one needs to apply an actor-oriented approach that takes full account of agency and thus avoids falling into the trap of the ecological fallacy. Even more importantly, the three models provide a basis for the formulation of certain hypotheses relating to the magnitude of violence and the make-up of the victim 153

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group. Since it is the basic assumption of rationalist theories that violence happens due to information failure or other breakdowns, one is to expect that it will happen in contested areas, disproportionately affect military-aged men, elites and others holding the levers of power, and recede once the incumbent or attacking side has gained control over populations. Depending on the ultimate aim of the perpetrators, violence should then either transform into the selective killing of opponents due to an increase in access to information or, if one is embroiled in an ethnic conflict, transform into the expulsion of civilians. Genocides and other forms of ‘annihilatory’ violence should instead follow a different trajectory, since it is the aim of violence to destroy groups rather than to merely control them or the territory they inhabit. One should therefore expect that mass killings will first affect those individuals that may resist government policies, while actually intensifying and affecting all members that the perpetrator can reach once control is established over the victim group. In other words, one is to expect different outcomes in mass murder due to the fact that control has a different function depending on the ultimate political, military and ideological aims of the perpetrators.

Ustašas: Nationalist ideology and annihilatory practices The NDH provides an interesting environment in which to test these theoretical models empirically, as all of the above-mentioned types of violence were present on its territory. Within a fortnight of the establishment of the NDH, the Ustaša regime adopted racial laws that excluded the Jews and Roma from participation in society. The fact that the laws were only enacted against the Jewish and Roma17 communities is of considerable importance as it suggests differences in the coming policy as compared to the Serbs. In practical terms, it meant that while itinerant Roma and Jews were set up for complete destruction by the regime, Serbs could also ‘choose’ to convert to Catholicism if they belonged to the uneducated classes and thus (it was hoped) assimilate into the Croatian ‘national body’, or flee to German-occupied Serbia proper. While the speed by which the racial laws and other discriminatory decrees were implemented show that the persecution was carried out according to plan, the exact aim of the Ustašas is still subject to diverging interpretations. In much of ex-Yugoslav literature on the Second World War, scholars referred to the Ustaša mass murder of Serbs as nothing short of genocide. The crowning argument for this theory (which is also to be found in foreign literature) is that Eugen Kvaternik, the head of the Directorate for Security, at some point uttered the sentence that a third of the Serbs would be deported, a third converted to Catholicism and a third murdered. The first mention of this statement appears to come from an interview with a Serbian refugee in Switzerland, Branko ŠainMiletić, who in a report from 14 December 1941 to the Yugoslav embassy in Switzerland claimed that Minister of the Interior Andrija Artuković had said that ‘in three years the Serbs will vanish from Croatia, and that one-third will be killed, one-third deported and one third brought over to the Catholic faith’.18 However, other sources attribute the quote to a statement by Mile Budak in Gospić from 22 July 1941, although no verifiable source is given.19 The fact that the statement and its origins cannot be independently verified makes it difficult to use as corroboration of whether the aim of the Ustašas was actually to murder a third of the NDH Serbs or not. However, Ustaša officials made a plethora of incriminating statements as early as the month of May and the summer of 1941, which provide a clear indication as to the 154

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intent to render the NDH state territory ethnically homogenous. Although the Serbs were not formally excluded on racial–biological grounds but mainly on account of their purportedly inferior ‘byzantine’ or ‘eastern’ culture, there were also tendencies to view Serbs as racially inferior in the sense that their genes had ‘degenerated’ due to ‘eastern’ influences. It was moreover argued that they had somehow become ‘tainted’ by nonAryan blood, since they had ‘accepted a considerable proportion of Gypsy, nomadic and semitic blood, because of which they are shrewd, deceitful, treacherous and selfish’.20 It is also noteworthy that some proponents of terror spoke rather openly about the situation for the Serbian minority. Among the most important of such officials was Viktor Gutić, a close associate of Pavelić who was given the task to ‘liquidate’ the Serbian-dominated Vrbaska Banovina (county) in the summer of 1941. According to a Serbian priest who had a meeting with him on 27 April 1941, Gutić spoke on the matter in a surprisingly succinct and open manner: It is our as well as your misfortune that you Serbs constitute an absolute majority right in the heart of Croatia – in the Croatian Krajina. And when the heart is ill, the entire organism suffers. It is our duty to treat and heal the heart. It would have been best if we had separated nicely a long time ago. . . . Now, all that will be much harder and more painful for you.21 The fact that Gutić indeed had been given the task to ethnically homogenize the Vrbaska Banovina is corroborated in subsequent official statements. In late May, when the Yugoslav army had been routed and the Ustaša authorities largely controlled the area, Gutić referred to ‘instructions’ that he had been given during a visit to Zagreb in recent days to make the Krajina region ‘Croatian’ again in a most radical way.22 Two days earlier, he said in the local newspaper that ‘soon . . . the Serbs will be no more’ since he had ‘ordered drastic measures for their complete economic destruction and new [orders] are following for their complete annihilation’.23 While numerous Ustaša officers gave highly inflammatory speeches in subsequent months,24 Gutić’s statement is particularly interesting because of its timing. While it was delivered well before the insurrection, it also presaged the preparations for a deportation agreement with Nazi Germany that was initiated in mid-May by German Ambassador Siegfried Kasche and signed on 4 June. The agreement stipulated that some 170,000 Serbs out of 1.9 million would be ‘resettled’ in German-occupied Serbia.25 Moreover, the fact that such arguments were part and parcel of policy rather than attributable to local processes was made clear also in numerous German reports relating to conversations with high-ranking Ustaša officials. In late 1942, for instance, Glaises von Horstenau related a conversation, during which Eugen ‘Dido’ Kvaternik, the head of the NDH security services and ultimately responsible for the persecutions, said to a friend that ‘in a certain period of time he would kill the remaining one and a half million Serbs, including women and children’.26 According to Abwehr officer Arthur Häffner, Pavelić was fully aware of the killings, although he always tried to play the innocent: The Poglavnik has always . . . claimed to be ‘uninformed’ and played the role of a Pilate, although the fiercest bloodhounds such as Kvaternik and . . . Luburić . . . still have free access to the Poglavnik and stood in his personal favour, which means that there cannot be any question of him being uninformed. The Poglavnik has already clearly stated his position in regards to the 155

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Orthodox, who were previously designated as Serbs, when on August 5 [1941], just a few days after the amnesties for the Orthodox, he explained in front of Dr. Sunarić, Colonel Blašković and the current head of the Ustaša Militia, Jure Francetić: ‘All Serbs should be killed’.27 The terror against the Serbian population had reached its culmination by the time Kvaternik had his conversation with Glaises von Horstenau. However, the Ustaša strongman was soon stripped of his powers due to an internal struggle between him and his father, the commander of the armed forces Slavko Kvaternik, on the one hand, and Pavelić and the Germans on the other.28 The end of the ‘Kvaternik era’ also spelled the end to the most extreme period of genocide and mass killing in the NDH. A particular characteristic of this period is that the victims were often murdered in root-and-branch massacres, carried out in the countryside by regular units of the Ustaša Corps or locally mobilized ‘wild Ustaša’ units. However, the killings were not an expression of ‘Balkan’ culture, but formed part of a system that included the creation of various institutions that had the aim to organize and administer the ethnic homogenization of NDH territories in ways that were much more well-organized than Western scholars have understood until fairly recently. Among the most important indicators of the governmental planning and organization of the mass violence and deportation can for instance be found in the establishment of government bodies that had the specific task of registering Serbian and Jewish assets, organizing the transportation of victims to collection centres and seeing them off to Serbia or concentration camps.29

The armed forces: Population control and violence While the Ustaša regime had its specific and ideologically driven motives for violence that precluded the possibility of accommodation with the victim group, their German and Domobranstvo counterparts as a rule had an altogether different policy regarding mass violence, which affected the region throughout the war.30 Already in April 1941, the Wehrmacht began implementing draconic reprisal measures that became formalized by Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel on 16 September. According to Keitel’s instructions, the partisan rebellions that had begun in the wake of the war motivated the implementation of reprisal shootings, which meant that one should kill 50–100 civilians for each dead German soldier.31 On 4 October, Field Marshal Franz List of the Southeast issued a specific order pertaining to activities insofar as the civilians in Serbia were concerned. It was declared that all those who had participated in combat should be placed before a court-martial (which spelled death). Those that were suspected of aiding the partisans should instead be placed in concentration camps and, in the case of an attack in the vicinity against the Wehrmacht, they should be shot in retaliation. The order also stipulated that the severest punitive measures will be undertaken against the places, and in particular against the male population of those villages where, or in whose vicinity, bands appear, if they help the bands, carry out surprise attacks, sabotage acts or undertake any activity against the German armed forces.32 Even though Wehrmacht atrocities certainly took many lives and the restrictive regulations were often not adhered to, the military attacks on Serbian civilians were distinct 156

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from Ustaša killings in the retributive and (in the case of hostage-taking) pre-emptive nature. By this is meant that the violence, while affecting civilians, had the aim of signalling to the population that resistance or help to the partisans would carry a tremendous cost for involved villages. By acting in this way, the Germans sought to achieve control over population and space rather than achieving the complete remoulding of society pursued by the Ustašas. Jonathan Gumz has summarized these different attitudes in an interesting way, noting that in contrast to their views about the Jews, the Wehrmacht officers ‘considered Serbs an inferior people to be treated with contempt, but their mere existence within the NDH posed no inherent threat to the Reich and thus did not require a strategy that deliberately targeted them’.33 Another important consequence of identifying the specific logic behind the German counter-insurgency measures is that one needs to understand the German attitude towards Ustaša violence not as politicking from a belligerent seeking to further his own interests in the internal power-struggle. In fact, Adolf Hitler was rather uninterested in the region from the point of view of Lebensraum, which actually meant that NDH officials could use Berlin as an ally in the effort to fend-off too far reaching territorial claims made by Italy at the time when Yugoslavia was carved-up in 1941.34 The German policy of atonement (Sühnemassnahmen) had its equivalent in the NDH territory, where the regular Croatian army, the Domobranstvo, carried out summary executions of insurgents, while frequently resorting to hostage-taking and reprisal shootings. These were carried out in accordance with regulations adopted by the Ministry of the Domobranstvo and implemented in various localities alongside the highly ideologized Ustaša killings. As with the Germans, however, some Croatian officers began already in June 1941 to criticize the Ustaša violence, which was seen as counterproductive as it increased rather than defused conflict. Among the most important such early reactions were those from a local Domobranstvo unit in the small town of Avtovac, where Ustašas had incarcerated Serbs and subjected them to severe torture (a Serbian Orthodox priest was, for instance, found with a horseshoe nailed to his chest). In a subsequent report, the local district head wrote to his superiors that the sight had infuriated members of the regular army, who had been left to handle an uprising among the Serbs provoked by Ustaša killings. Relations were apparently so bad that he had found it difficult to prevent the Domobrani from themselves punishing the Ustašas.35 The conclusion that can be drawn from these examples is of crucial importance for understanding the logic behind the violence. Many officers were schooled in precisely the type of security-oriented mode of thinking that informed Wehrmacht operations in the region. Added to this is the fact that high-ranking officers understood very early on that while the reprisals in Serbia could be seen as admissible, they would become completely counter-productive in the context of the multi-ethnic NDH. As early as June 1941, a German Abwehr officer in Zagreb, Arthur Häffner, debunked the view put forward by Ustaša that the reprisals and violence should actually be attributed to the communist rebellion and not to any actions on the part of the Ustašas. In a rather dismissive account, he argued that there was no reason why the Serbs should be more prone to communism than the Croats, and he alluded to the treatment of Serbs as the true cause of the rebellion.36 Even more interestingly, Glaises von Horstenau, the German Plenipotentiary General in Zagreb, warned that the reprisal policy would fail completely in the NDH on account of the fact that the Serbs rebelled against the persecution.37 157

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The pressure that mounted also created considerable political problems for Pavelić, who occasionally issued orders that any ‘illegal’ acts of persecution should be discontinued. His motive for doing so was political and attributable on the one hand to German pressure and on the other to fears that the Italians might take advantage of a chaotic situation in the NDH to further their claims on the Croatian littoral. In late June – at the time of the Serbian St Vitus Day holiday – he issued a rather interesting public statement that illustrates how the leadership had understood that it could use the situation to their advantage by blaming the insurrection on the antisemitic stereotype of ‘Jewish’ warmongering, which the Germans could certainly not object to: Regarding the rumours that on the 28 of this month there would be alleged persecutions of one part of the population in Croatia, I order that everyone who spreads such rumours be placed before a court-martial. At the same time, everyone will be placed before a court-martial, who carries out any kind of violent acts against the lives or property of any citizen or subject of the Independent State of Croatia. . . . Since the Jews are spreading false news in order to spread unease among the population and by their own speculative methods interfere and make more difficult the supplying of the population [with foodstuffs], for which they are held collectively responsible, measures will be undertaken against them and they will be prepared for collection centres in accordance with their penal responsibility.38 It is rather evident from this statement, policies undertaken at the same time and the subsequent terror wave in the second half of July and August, that Pavelić considered his order to be little more than a temporary retreat from the overall strategic plan of creating an ethnically homogenous state, while in the process using the ‘rumours’ of violence against Serbs as a pretext to facilitate the incarceration and subsequent destruction of the Jewish population. Nevertheless, he subsequently also criticized some of the local officials for not recognizing that the deportations and associated policies had to be carried out according to plan and a system, lest chaos break out.39 In that sense, men like Pavelić and Gutić represent Bauman’s modernist ‘social engineers’, which were quite distinct from the popular notion of Ustašas as mad, bloodthirsty and pathological cut-throats. However, Pavelić nevertheless gave in temporarily to pressure and even sent General Vladimir Laxa, a ranking Domobranstvo officer, to investigate the ‘alleged mistreatment’ of ‘greek-easterners’ (the term ‘Serbs’ was no longer in official use). Laxa’s subsequent report is extremely interesting as an illustration of the different logics that drove the perpetrators of war crimes in the NDH. While on the one hand lambasting ‘rogue elements’ and various Ustašas for taking the law into their own hands (which was often used as an argument to avoid pointing the finger at the NDH leadership), he confirmed Häffner’s argument that the insurrection and massacres perpetrated by the Serbs were ‘revenge’ for previous Ustaša misdeeds. Much like the Germans, he therefore thought the violence perpetrated by the Ustašas was counterproductive as it provoked rebellion and therefore actually reduced the state’s ability to control populations and territory.40 However, while making a largely correct assessment of the situation on the ground, he at the same time shared the German view that retributive indiscriminate violence might be not only permissible, but even advisable.41 The idea behind the logic was that such forms of violence, when implemented in the 158

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immediate context of previous attacks directed against the Domobranstvo, would have an instructive effect on an unruly population that certainly was not to be trusted. This, in essence, illustrates the differences in logic between retributive violence and preventive hostage-taking of military-aged men, and genocidal violence.

The victims of terror As explained above, the actors in the Yugoslav war drama had different motives for perpetrating war crimes, with a division between those who killed for the reason of a totalitarian remoulding of Yugoslav society in accordance with ideologically informed notions about the need to create an ethnically homogenized state, and those who used violence as a means of population control. Considering that Jews and Roma were to be destroyed completely, one therefore should expect a much higher death toll among these groups than among Serbs or other communities. As argued in the introduction, one should also expect a high level of female, elderly and young victims within the group, due to the fact that highly ideologized Ustaša perpetrators sought to destroy these categories completely or in substantial part. Conversely, the Croatian and Muslim victim group should be more gendered, since the perpetrators sought to identify and kill opponents of the regime, who at that time were mostly men. There is much statistical evidence at hand that could provide empirical evidence to test these hypotheses, which of course cannot be explored in any great detail in this analysis. Among the most important are actually the results of the killings perpetrated in the Jasenovac Concentration Camp, which was established in August 1941 and liberated at the very end of the war. The reason for this is that the killings cannot be classified as accidental, but as intentional mass murder perpetrated by the regime against four major categories of people. First, there were the Jews and Roma, who were excluded on the basis of race and therefore were to be completely annihilated physically. Second, there were the Serbs, who were to be killed, but also could convert to Catholicism or – if they were lucky – be deported to German-occupied Serbia. Third, there were thousands of others who were not excluded on the basis of race, but were sent to Jasenovac in their capacity as opponents of the regime (either as communists or others). The data above has been taken from the Memorial Museum of the Jasenovac Remembrance Authority, which thus far has gathered data on 83,145 victims of the war. Apart from the fact that the aggregate death toll provides enough evidence of Table 11.1 Victims in the Jasenovac Concentration Camp according to ethnicity, age and gender Ethnicity

Men

%

Children

%

Women

%

Total

Serbs Roma Jews Croats Muslims Others Total

21738 5688 7762 2866 897 249 39570

45.6 35.2 58.9 67.3 79.5 70.9 47.6

12683 5608 1601 140 52 19 20101

26.6 34.7 12.2 4.9 4.6 5.4 24.2

13206 4877 3753 1249 179 83 23474

27.8 30.1 28.6 29.3 15.9 23.6 28.2

47627 16173 13116 4255 1128 351 83145

Source: Memorijalni muzej spomen-područja Jasenovac.

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Gender Female

81 75 72 69 66 63 60 57 54 51 48 45 42 39 36 33 30 27 24 21 18 15 12 9 6 3 0

81 75 72 69 66 63 60 57 54 51 48 45 42 39 36 33 30 27 24 21 18 15 12 9 6 3 0 80

60

40

20

0

Count

20

40

60

Age

Age

Male

80

Count

Figure 11.1 Croatian victims in Jasenovac Concentration Camp.

differences in motives, the killing of children stands out as particularly important as an indicator of how the differences in motives may produce different magnitudes of destruction on the same locality when the perpetrators enjoy complete control over the victim group. The fact that some 20,000 children (people below 15 years of age) were killed in Jasenovac is in itself a tragedy, but the fact that there were nine times as many Roma children killed in percentage terms as Croatian children is highly illustrative of the point made here.42 The argument is further strengthened by a comparison of population pyramids, which is based on a geo-referenced dataset on 77,000 individual victims, collected and systematized at the Hugo Valentin Centre. Figure 11.1 is a pyramid of the ethnic Croat distribution of victims across age and gender, which shows two centrally important things. The fact that virtually all of these victims were sent to Jasenovac on account of their political affiliation as partisans or other opponents of fascism is well illustrated by the fact that a clear majority of the victims were military-aged men (and to a degree women in their prime). It is also noteworthy that very few of the Croatian children who died were below ten years of age, which also illustrates that these killings targeted real or potential security threats. Turning to members of the Roma community (Figure 11.2), we find a group of people that was extremely disenfranchised in Yugoslav society and had virtually no 160

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Gender Female

90 81 76 72 68 64 60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0

90 81 76 72 68 64 60 56 52 48 44 40 36 32 28 24 20 16 12 8 4 0 250

200

150

100

50

0

50

100

Count

150

200

Age

Age

Male

250

Count

Figure 11.2 Roma victims in Jasenovac Concentration Camp.

means at their disposal by which to self-organize into units for military and political resistance. The Roma therefore lacked the capability to pose a security threat even after the initiation of terror, which sets them apart at least from the vastly more numerous Serbian community and the better organized Jewish one. This lack of agency also resulted in the Roma community being almost completely destroyed during a few months in the summer of 1942, after which a Croatian émigré in Switzerland could simply report that the community no longer existed.43 What is particularly interesting concerning this group is that a very large proportion of the victims were children, while the population pyramid displays an almost perfect balance between males and females.

Summary Summarizing the argument of this analysis, one may conclude that the different actors in the Yugoslav war drama had differing aims when it came to population control. The fact that plans to deport and kill were set in motion well before there was any serious challenge to Ustaša control is important, since it refutes the ethnic security dilemma 161

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theory as the primary mode of explanation for the terror wave in the summer of 1941, directed against the ‘undesirables’ of the NDH. As mentioned in the theoretical overview, the model departs from the assumption that ‘ethnic cleansing’ and violence happens as a result of ‘strategic interaction’ and bargaining between defensively oriented organized actors. In early May, there were no such actors on the ground to oppose the Ustaša regime, as the communists had not even begun their operations and the Serbian nationalist Četniks consisted of a handful of men on Mount Ravna Gora in Serbia.44 Neither can the regime be regarded as having no malign intent, considering the ferocity of the persecution inflicted on Serbs, Jews and Roma immediately following the establishment of the NDH. What the documents show is instead that the insurrection that followed in June and July was a direct consequence of terror and not the other way around. The logic that guided the Wehrmacht and Domobranstvo violence, on the other hand, followed quite well the patterns identified by Kalyvas and others. Even though these organizations killed tens of thousands of innocent civilians, these were mainly men of military age, and a smaller number of women (the partisans had quite a few women in their ranks) and elderly. Moreover, the regular armies at least sought to present the violence as legal and retributive in nature, thus seeking to achieve a pedagogical effect on what was considered necessary and rational in order to achieve a pacification of the population. Finally, it was also shown that these differences in motives for mass killing had a profound effect on the victim groups themselves. While Croatian opponents of the regime displayed a population pyramid with mainly military-aged men and virtually no children as victims, the more even population pyramid for Roma looked decidedly different. This, it is argued, should be understood as an illustration of the genocidal nature of Ustaša violence.

Notes 1 The Ustašas were often also seen as modern-day ‘crusaders’, fighting for the spread of Catholicism eastward; see Viktor Novak, Magnum Crimen: Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj (Beograd: Nova knjiga, 1986). 2 Veselin Đuretić’s two-volume study on the relationship between the Allies and Yugoslavia was probably the most important works of this new literature; see Veselin Đuretić, Saveznici i jugoslovenska ratna drama, 2 vols., Vol. 1, Posebna izdanja (Beograd: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1985). 3 Vasilije Krestić, Genocidom do velike Hrvatske (Novi Sad: Mozaik, 1998). 4 For some of the more recent studies, see Alexander Korb, ‘Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma’ (PhD, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2010); Harald R. Dinu, ‘Faschismus, Religion und Gewalt in Südosteuropa: Die Ustaša und die Legion Erzengel Michael im historischen Vergleich’ (PhD, Erfurt, 2012); Ivo Goldstein, Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001). 5 B. Valentino, P. Huth, and D. Balch-Lindsay, ‘“Draining the sea”: mass killing and guerrilla warfare’, International Organization 58, No. 2, 2004. 6 Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 151; Jason Lyall, ‘Does indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? evidence from Chechnya’, Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, No. 3, 2009, pp. 330–31. 7 Kalyvas, The Logic of Violence in Civil War, p. 171. 8 Ibid, p. 165. 9 Barry R. Posen, ‘The security dilemma and ethnic conflict’, in Genocide, (ed.) Dirk A. Moses, Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2010). 10 For more details, see Paul Roe, Ethnic Violence and the Societal Security Dilemma, Routledge Studies in Nationalism and Ethnicity (London; New York: Routledge, 2005); Barry Buzan,

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11 12 13 14 15

16

17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25 26 27 28

29

People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-cold War Era, 2nd edn (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). See Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). For an overview, see Donald P. Green and Rachel L. Seher, ‘What Role Does Prejudice Play in Ethnic Conflict,’ Annual Review of Political Science 6, No. 1, 2003. Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 148–9. Such rhetoric is sometimes misunderstood as evidence of the existence of a security dilemmalike situation, which is incorrect. The security dilemma theory presupposes the existence of ‘strategic interaction’ between organized and armed actors, which for instance was absent during the Holocaust. This for instance happens when one group acts in ways that seem to symbolically ‘confirm’ fears nurtured by the other; see Rui J. P. de Figueiredo and Barry R. Weingast, ‘The Rationality of Fear: Political Opportunism and Ethnic Violence’, in Civil Wars, Insecurity and Intervention, (ed.) J. Snyder and B. F Walters (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 264. The issue of Roma became complicated in the summer of 1941 due to the fact that many Roma had integrated with the Muslim community in Bosnia and Herzegovina. As a result, persecution of Roma sparked protests among Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Muslim population because it was difficult for locals to grasp why the regime on the one hand spoke of Muslims in benevolent terms, while on the other targeting Muslims that seemed indistinguishable from the religious community to which they belonged. As a result, the government in August 1941 decided formally to exempt settled or ‘gurbeti’ Roma from persecution, while the deportation should only affect itinerant or ‘čergaši’ Roma. Even though Čergaši Roma were also killed in Croatia proper, these legislative changes meant that the Ustašas did not seek to destroy the entire Roma community. Arhiv Jugoslavije, fond 103, fasc. br. 27, Emigrantska vlada u Londonu, Izveštaj Branka ŠainMiletića, p. 3. Milan Bulajić referred to the official newspaper Hrvatski Narod, No. 166, where the present author has found no such statement; Milan Bulajić, Ustaški zločini genocida i suđenje Andriji Artukoviću 1986 godine, Vol. 1 (Beograd: Rad, 1988), p. 210. Spremnost, 15 March 1942, quoted in Nevenko Bartulin, ‘Ideologija nacije i rase: ustaški režim i politika prema Srbima u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj 1941–1945,’ Radovi 39, 2007. Arhiv Srbije, fond G-2, Komesarijat za izbeglice vlade Milana Nedića. Hrvatska Krajina, No. 18, 28 May 1941, transcribed in Arhiv Jugoslavije [henceforth: AJ], fond 110, kut 276, fol. 242, dos br. 1466. Hrvatska Krajina, no 18, 30 May 1941, transcribed in AJ, fond 110, kut 276, fol. 241, dos br. 1466. For an overview, see Fadil Ademović, Novinstvo i ustaška propaganda u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj: štampa i radio u Bosni i Hercegovini (1941–1945) (Sarajevo: Media centar and Nezavisna unija profesionalnih novinara Bosne i Hercegovine, 2000); Tomislav Dulić, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941-42, Studia historica Upsaliensia, 218 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005), diss. Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodnooslobodilačkom ratu naroda Jugoslavije, Vol. 1, Dokumenti nemačkog Rajha (Beograd: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1973), doc. no. 58. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington (henceforth: NAW), Record Group T-501, roll 264, fr. 968. NAW, Record Group T-501, roll 264, fr. 226. While Kvaternik the elder was removed for incompetence, the Germans sought to rid themselves of his son because they viewed him as primarily responsible for the mass murders, which in their view had been a major cause of the rebellions and insurrection in the country; see Jozo Tomasevich, War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 440. For more on the deportations and how they were organized, see Miloš Hamović, Izbjeglištvo u Bosni i Hercegovini 1941–1945 (Beograd: Filip Višnjić, 1994); Fikreta Jelić-Butić, Ustaše i NDH (Zagreb: SN Liber Školska knjiga, 1977), pp. 168–72.

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30 For more on the anti-partisan warfare in the southeast, see Mark Mazower, ‘Militärische Gewalt und nationalsozialistische Werte: Die Wehrmacht in Griechenland 1941 bis 1944’, in Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944, (ed.) Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (Hamburger Edition, 1995); Walter Manoschek, ‘Partisanenkrieg un Genozid: Die Wehrmacht in Serbien 1941’, in Die Wehrmacht im Rassenkrieg, (ed.) Walter Manoschek (Wien: Picus Verlag, 1996). 31 Zbornik DNOR, Vol. I, Borbe u Srbiji 1941. god (Beograd: Vojnoistorijski institut jugoslovenske armije, 1949), doc. no. 159. 32 Zbornik DNOR, ser. XII, Vol. 1, 1, doc. no. 179, pp. 232–3. On 16 September, List received a direct order from Adolf Hitler to secure communication lines in the region and with ‘the severest measures’ make sure to establish control over the Southeast; see Zbornik DNOR, Vol. I, doc. no. 158. 33 Jonathan E. Gumz, ‘Wehrmacht perceptions of mass violence in Croatia, 1941–1942,’ The Historical Journal 44, No. 4, 2001, p. 1027. 34 Vjekoslav Vrančić, Urota protiv Hrvatske (Zagreb: Nakladna knjižara Velebit, 1943). 35 Military Archives, Belgrade, Archive of the Independent State of Croatia (Vojni Arhiv, Arhiva NDH), henceforth: VA, ANDH, box. 84, reg. no. 21/3. 36 Zbornik DNOR, ser. XII, Vol. 1, doc. no. 123, p. 329. 37 NAW, Record Group T-501, roll 267, fr. 636; Ibid, roll 264, fr. 1192–94. 38 Zločini Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, 1941–45 (Beograd: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1993), doc. no. 84. 39 See for instance Pavelić’s speech to the county heads of the NDH concerning the appropriation of Jewish property and the resettlement policy; Ante Pavelić, Poglavnik govori (Zagreb: Naklada Glavnog ustaškog stana, 1941), 42, pp. 44–45. 40 VA, ANDH, box. 84, reg. no. 21/3. 41 Ibid. 42 It is also noteworthy that the Jewish group displayed a considerably smaller proportion of young deaths as Serbs and Roma. While this should be further investigated, there are probably two major explanations for the composition of the victim group. One is that men were were overrepresented in the first deportation waves in 1941 and early 1942; another that the Jewish community in Croatia tried to save as many children as possible from death; and, finally, that the remaining victims who were sent to Auschwitz in 1942 probably contained a disproportionately high number of the remaining children; for more, see Goldstein, Holokaust, pp. 405–44. 43 Ljubo Boban (ed.), Hrvatska u arhivima izbjeglicke vlade 1941–1943: izvjestaji informatora o prilikama u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Globus, 1985), p. 221. 44 The Serbian nationalist Četnik movement was only beginning to form in Serbia in mid-May 1941 and initiated its first minor operations in eastern Bosnia in August, while the partisans did not receive their go-ahead to initiate an insurgency until after the invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941.

Further reading Ademović, Fadil. Novinstvo i ustaška propaganda u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj: štampa i radio u Bosni i Hercegovini (1941–1945) (Sarajevo: Media centar and Nezavisna unija profesionalnih novinara Bosne i Hercegovine, 2000). Bartulin, Nevenko. ‘Ideologija nacije i rase: ustaški režim i politika prema Srbima u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj 1941–1945’, Radovi 39, 2007. Boban, Ljubo (ed.), Hrvatska u arhivima izbjeglicke vlade 1941–1943: Izvjestaji informatora o prilikama u Hrvatskoj (Zagreb: Globus, 1985). Bulajić, Milan. Ustaški zločini genocida i suđenje Andriji Artukoviću 1986 godine. Vol. 1 (Belgrade: Rad, 1988). Buzan, Barry. People, States and Fear: An Agenda for International Security Studies in the Post-cold War Era. 2nd edn (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991). de Figueiredo, Rui J. P, and Barry R. Weingast. ‘The rationality of fear: political opportunism and ethnic violence’, in J. Snyder and B. F. Walters (eds), Civil Wars, Insecurity and Intervention (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).

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Dinu, Harald R. ‘Faschismus, Religion und Gewalt in Südosteuropa: Die Ustaša und die Legion Erzengel Michael im historischen Vergleich.’ PhD, Erfurt, 2012. Dulić, Tomislav. Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941–42. Studia historica Upsaliensia, 218 (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 2005), diss. Đuretić, Veselin. Saveznici i jugoslovenska ratna drama. Posebna izdanja. 2 vols. Vol. 1 (Belgrade: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1985). Goldstein, Ivo. Holokaust u Zagrebu (Zagreb: Novi liber, 2001). Gordon, Sarah. Hitler, Germans and the ‘Jewish Question’ (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Green, Donald P., and Rachel L. Seher. ‘What role does prejudice play in ethnic conflict?’, Annual Review of Political Science 6, No. 1, 2003, pp. 509–31. Gumz, Jonathan E. ‘Wehrmacht perceptions of mass violence in Croatia, 1941–1942’, The Historical Journal 44, No. 4, 2001, pp. 1015–38. Hamović, Miloš. Izbjeglištvo u Bosni i Hercegovini 1941–1945 (Belgrade: Filip Višnjić, 1994). Jelić-Butić, Fikreta. Ustaše i NDH (Zagreb: SN Liber Školska knjiga, 1977). Kalyvas, Stathis N. The Logic of Violence in Civil War. Cambridge Studies in Comparative Politics (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Korb, Alexander. ‘Im Schatten des Weltkriegs: Massengewalt der Ustaša gegen Serben, Juden und Roma.’ PhD, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 2010. Krestić, Vasilije. Genocidom do velike Hrvatske (Novi Sad: Mozaik, 1998). Lyall, Jason. ‘Does indiscriminate violence incite insurgent attacks? Evidence from Chechnya’ [in English], Journal of Conflict Resolution 53, No. 3, June 2009, pp. 331–62. Mann, Michael. The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Manoschek, Walter. ‘Partisanenkrieg un Genozid: Die Wehrmacht in Serbien 1941’, in Walter Manoschek (ed.), Die Wehrmacht im Rassenkrieg (Wien: Picus Verlag, 1996), pp. 142–67. Mazower, Mark. ‘Militärische Gewalt und nationalsozialistische Werte: Die Wehrmacht in Griechenland 1941 bis 1944’, in Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (eds), Vernichtungskrieg: Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburger Edition, 1995), pp. 157–90. Novak, Viktor. Magnum Crimen: Pola vijeka klerikalizma u Hrvatskoj (Belgrade: Nova knjiga, 1986), p. 1948. Pavelić, Ante. Poglavnik govori (Zagreb: Naklada Glavnog ustaškog stana, 1941). Posen, Barry R. ‘The security dilemma and ethnic conflict’, in Genocide, (ed.) Dirk A. Moses. Critical Concepts in Historical Studies (London and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 367–86. Roe, Paul. Ethnic Violence and the Societal Security Dilemma. Routledge Studies in Nationalism and Ethnicity (London; New York: Routledge, 2005). Tomasevich, Jozo. War and Revolution in Yugoslavia 1941–1945: Occupation and Collaboration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Valentino, B., P. Huth, and D. Balch-Lindsay. ‘“Draining the sea”: mass killing and guerrilla warfare’ [in English], International Organization 58, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 375–407. Vrančić, Vjekoslav. Urota protiv Hrvatske (Zagreb: Nakladna knjižara Velebit, 1943). Weitz, Eric D. A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodnooslobodilačkom ratu naroda Jugoslavije. Dokumenti nemačkog Rajha. Vol. 1 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1973). Zbornik dokumenata i podataka o narodnooslobodilačkom ratu naroda Jugoslavije. Vol. I, Borbe u Srbiji 1941. god. (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut jugoslovenske armije, 1949). Zločini Nezavisne Države Hrvatske, 1941–45 (Belgrade: Vojnoistorijski institut, 1993).

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12 GENOCI DE IN THE G R EA T LA K ES René Lemarchand

There is no parallel anywhere in the continent for the scale of violence recently experienced by the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Sometimes referred to the continent’s ‘inter-lacustrine’ zone, comprising Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and eastern Congo, each has witnessed horrendous brutality, but nowhere has the bloodshed been more appalling than in the last three. The death toll in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) in a decade of war (1998–2008) has been estimated by the International Rescue Committee (IRC) at roughly 5.4 million, although subsequent estimates by the Canada-based Human Security Report Project have downsized this figure by half. Still, when one adds the killings in Rwanda and Burundi since 1994, numbering, respectively, approximately one million and a half a million, the mind reels before the magnitude of the human losses. Though largely overshadowed in public attention by the Rwanda tragedy, the bloodbaths in Burundi and DRC have contributed in no small way to make the Great Lakes region the most violent in the continent: in Burundi in 1972 a localized Hutu-led rebellion was the pretext for a largely unremembered genocidal repression, resulting in the mass murder of anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 Hutu by the Tutsi-dominated army; in 1996 and 1997 in eastern Congo tens if not hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees from the Rwanda genocide were systematically murdered at the hands of the Rwandan army assisted by a Congolese rebel faction. For all their differences in terms of numbers, targets and circumstances, and pending further qualification about the appropriateness of the term, all three tragedies can be described as genocides.

Challenging dominant narratives Coming to grips with the events that led to such abominations is no easy task. Compounding the difficulties stemming from their inherent complexity are continuing discords and controversies among human rights activists, scholars, policy wonks and journalists as to what really happened and why. There are disagreements over almost every aspect of the events, from estimates of casualties to the role played by international actors, from the responsibility of the victims in bringing retribution onto themselves to the part played by individual decision-makers in precipitating the killings, from the nature of the polities that have emerged from the ashes of genocide to the fairness of the punishment meted out by domestic and international justice systems, including the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). This is not the place to deal at length with these issues. Nor do we propose to re-examine the much debated question of how best to define genocide as the central theme of 166

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this discussion. Nonetheless, though few would deny its appalling reality in specific instances, the cases at hand suggest some important qualifications to the 1948 UN Genocide Convention (UNGC): In none of the three states where genocide occurred is there sufficient evidence to prove the existence of a long-standing plan to exterminate a whole community,1 and once the infernal machine was set in motion nowhere were the victims limited to either Hutu or Tutsi. That massive crimes were committed by Kagame’s Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF) is by now well established, notwithstanding claims to the contrary: the Kibeho massacre, in 1995, resulting in the deliberate and systematic murder of some 5,000 Hutu refugees in central Rwanda is only one of the many human rights violations committed by the Tutsi ‘liberators’.2 Aside from the risks involved in drawing hard and fast generalizations about the collective identities of perpetrators and victims, the vagueness of the UNGC phrasing over numbers – ‘genocide means any of the following acts committed with intention to destroy in whole or in part’(my italics) – has been another source of controversy. How many Hutu were killed by other Hutu in Rwanda? How many Tutsi were killed by Hutu and Hutu by Tutsi in Burundi? Among the Hutu killed in eastern DRC, how many were interahamwe,3 how many civilians? How many were Hutu indigenous to DRC, how many were from Rwanda? Since there is no way to arrive at an accurate head count, the best we can do is to use numbers as an order of magnitude, bearing in mind that some estimates tend to be more credible than others.4 The same note of caution must be sounded with regard to the reliability of the media about the causes and circumstances of genocidal violence.5 Difficult as it is to generalize, few would deny that uncritical reporting has sometimes unduly influenced scholarly interpretations and, ultimately, how history is being written.6 Whether these caveats are a sufficient reason to banish the use of the G-word in this context is open to debate; suffice it to say that for our purpose its merits are inscribed in the scale of the bloodbaths, the collective identity of the majority of the victims, and the deliberate intent that led to their wholesale physical elimination. What follows calls into question many of the dominant narratives about genocidal violence in the Great Lakes region. There is, to begin with, the teleological bias that stems from reading the present into the past. Even though colonial rule was largely responsible for ‘racializing’ ethnic identities, any attempt to view genocidal killings in Rwanda and elsewhere through the prism of immemorial ethnic hatreds is a nonstarter. The point is not that ethnicity is of no significance as an explanatory factor but that its significance varies in time and space as does its capacity to generate mutual antagonisms. To the danger of reading the past backward must be added the urge to look for proof of a concerted genocidal conspiracy where none is to be found. Despite arguments to the contrary,7 the evidence in support of a long-standing plan to eliminate all Tutsi during the Rwanda genocide is extremely fragile, and the same is true of claims of genocidal intent during the 1972 carnage in Burundi, or for that matter of the 1996–7 bloodbath in eastern DRC. In each of these cases the genocide emerges as the outcome of a complex sequence of events where contingency appears as a key factor. The reductionist impulse to view Hutu–Tutsi polarities as the expression of a Manichean struggle between good and evil is no less objectionable. Ethnicity is of little help for discriminating between vice and virtue. Even in a context as seemingly unproblematic as Rwanda, the evidence is far from straightforward. In the light of the devastating testimonies offered by some of Kagame’s former advisors, to which must 167

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be added the painstaking revisionist investigations of individual scholars, his share of responsibility in creating the very conditions that led to the genocide is hard to deny;8 nor can one ignore the countless atrocities committed by the invading Rwandan army in the course of its military advance on Kigali.9 And while there is little question about the mass crimes committed by Kagame’s soldiers in eastern DRC, no serious observer would deny the vicious cross-border raids mounted by Hutu génocidaires against Rwanda’s borderland as the major factor leading to the 1996 invasion. Again, if there can be little doubt about the deliberate mass murder of Hutu committed by the Tutsi army in Burundi in 1972, it is equally in point to underscore the thousands of innocent Tutsi civilians killed by Hutu insurgents. In contrast to much of the conventional academic wisdom, which looks at the region’s catastrophes through the lens of country-specific antagonisms, rooted in primordial ethnic conflict, what follows is an attempt to bring out the interconnecting threads among them. Special attention is paid to how collective identities have undergone drastic changes over time, and, through incessant refugee flows, propelled violence across national boundaries. We begin with a brief look at the geopolitics of ethnic conflict, pointing to the contrasts and paradoxes that help illuminate the political landscape; we then move to a discussion of refugee flows across boundaries and their impact on the hardening of ethnic identities; the remainder of the discussion focuses on the root causes and structural characteristics of genocide in Burundi, Rwanda and eastern Congo, respectively labelled for the purpose of this discussion as selective, total and contested genocides. Each genocide is a sui generis phenomenon. Though all qualify as genocides, none are a carbon copy of the other. Yet they converge in one significant aspect: all three came about in response to perceived threats to the perpetrators and the communities with which they are generally identified. It is in this sense that they can be described, in Helen Fein’s terms, as ‘genocides by retribution’.10 This brings out another common characteristic: in all three cases genocide came about not as a bolt out of the blue but as the ultimate phase of a long and bloody confrontation. Genocide, in other words, is a process. To quote from Norman Naimark: ‘Genocide has a dynamic of its own. It is not an “event” in and of itself, but a process, one that grows and develops according to unwritten rules of historical behavior.’11

The regional context Despite the impression of uniformity conveyed by the inter-lacustrine metaphor, the contrasts leap to the eye. The most obvious refers to the Lilliputian size of resourcepoor Rwanda and Burundi compared to the DRC, the largest and potentially wealthiest state in the continent (905,000 sq miles). Whether looked at in terms of size, mineral wealth, ethnic configuration or social structure, Rwanda and Burundi are as different from their neighbor to the west as any other states in the continent. ‘A geological scandal’ is how the early Belgian colonizers described eastern Congo’s large deposits of copper, cobalt, diamonds and gold, a situation in stark contrast with Rwanda and Burundi, where cash crops (tea and coffee) are the principal source of foreign exchange. Small wonder if the DRC’s mineral wealth served as a magnet for attracting the predatory activities of its neighbors, including Rwanda. As the example par excellence of a failed state, its wealth was all the more attractive as it was easily accessible. Although Rwanda was able to reap the lion’s share of this wealth during the 168

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first and second Congo wars (1996–7; 1998–2003), the main driver behind the slaughter of Hutu refugees and interahamwe was political, not economic. Yet an argument can be made that Rwanda’s military capabilities, including its capacity to wipe out tens of thousands of Hutu refugees across a huge swath of territory, was greatly facilitated by its access to the Congo’s treasure trove. Rwanda and Burundi have a great deal more in common than their dearth of significant economic resources. Their ethnic maps and modes of social organization are remarkably similar. Both are inhabited by Hutu and Tutsi, the former representing some 75% of the population, the latter 14%, to which must be added a small percentage of Pygmoid Twa. Both were highly stratified kingdoms prior to the advent of German colonial rule, which lasted from the mid-1890s to the end of the First World War, when they became Mandates under the League of Nations and ultimately UN Trusteeship Territories under Belgian administration. To put it in simplified terms, in each polity power gravitated in the hands of a ruling oligarchy, with the king (mwami) standing at the top of a social pyramid whose base consisted of Hutu agriculturalists while the top echelons were occupied by Tutsi cattle herders. To describe them as tribes is misleading. They can best be seen as rank-ordered societies, where communities stand in a hierarchical order, with one group subordinate to the other. Speaking of ‘ranked ethnic systems’, Donald Horowitz notes both their cohesiveness and fragility: ‘They may possess more social cement than unranked (systems) at some stages of their development ( . . . ) But when the cement cracks in a ranked system, the edifice usually collapses: when ethnic hierarchies are undermined, they may undergo fundamental transformations.’12 This is where a striking paradox comes into view: for all their common features, only in Rwanda did the social cement crack before independence (1962), bringing down the monarchy and substituting a Hutu-dominated Republic for the Tutsi-dominated political kingdom. That regime change occurred while Rwanda was still under the tutelage of the trusteeship authorities speaks volumes for the role played by Belgium as the midwife of the 1959 Hutu revolt that led to the fall of the monarchy in 1961 and the exile of tens of thousands of Tutsi families. Thus whereas Burundi crossed the threshold of independence as a constitutional monarchy under a mixed government of Hutu and Tutsi, Rwanda did so as a Hutu-dominated republic, whose existence was repeatedly threatened by the numerous cross-border raids launched by Tutsi exiles. The last and most spectacularly successful such raid was launched from Uganda on 1 October 1990, by the offspring of Tutsi refugees who had been forced into exile in the early 1960s. This game-changing event must be seen as one of the key underlying factors behind the 1994 genocide. The key to the paradox lies in the more complex, and hence more flexible, organization of Burundi society.13 Until independence, and for some time thereafter, ethnic polarization was conspicuously absent from the political landscape. In part because of significant intra-Tutsi status differences, in part because of the presence of a ruling oligarchy drawn from the princes of the blood (ganwa), and perceived as distinct from Tutsi and Hutu, Burundi never experienced the sharp Hutu–Tutsi enmities that so profoundly marked the Rwandan scene in the years immediately preceding independence. Nor was the impact of colonial rule as potentially disruptive as in Rwanda. While Rwanda was going through an extremely bloody ethnic revolt from 1959 to 1962 – known, misleadingly, as la révolution sociale – Burundi was surprisingly free of ethnic tensions. Rivalries between princely factions – the so-called Bezi and Batare – were the dominant trait of Burundi politics. Not until after independence, and largely 169

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as a result of the large inflow of Rwandan Tutsi fleeing the violence of their homeland, would Burundi move inexorably towards ethnic polarization. The presence of Kinyarwanda-speaking elements, Hutu and Tutsi, is by no means limited to Rwanda and Burundi. They are found in large numbers in Uganda, Tanzania and, most importantly in eastern DRC. Tempting though it is to describe them as being all one culturally, closer inspection reveals a variety of sub-cultural identities. While tracing their origins to Rwanda, the so called ‘Banyamulenge’ (‘the people of Mulenge’), though culturally related to Rwandan Tutsi, form a distinctive group of people, having migrated into the high-lying grasslands of South Kivu a century or so before the advent of colonial rule. Their numbers were estimated at some 800,000 in 1987.14 They see themselves as culturally separate from both the Banyarwanda (Hutu and Tutsi) indigenous to North Kivu, and from those Tutsi who came into the Congo as refugees following the 1959 Hutu revolution (hence their designation as ‘fifty niners’). The distinction between long-established communities and recent émigrés also applies to Hutu populations: in some localities their origins are traceable to pre-colonial times (as in the Bwisha region of North Kivu); others came in as plantation workers during the colonial period, and stayed on, encroaching on the land owned by Congolese communities (most notably the Hunde). More recently, and with dramatic consequences, over a million Hutu poured into eastern DRC in the weeks immediately following the Rwanda genocide, fleeing the avenging arm of Kagame’s army. Each of these refugee communities played a crucially important role in diffusing cross-border violence. The social landscape of eastern DRC could not be but profoundly affected by Rwanda’s genocidal convulsions. One of the most dramatic side-effects has been the swift dissolution of the cross-ethnic solidarities that once caused the Hutu and Tutsi of eastern DRC to describe themselves as belonging to the same linguistic community as Banyarwanda. Predictably, while ethnic Tutsi, including the Banyamulenge, identified with the victims of the genocide, the Hutu tended to make common cause with the génocidaires. In short, the net impact of the Rwanda genocide on Congo-based Kinyarwanda-speaking communities has been to drastically redefine identities. The overarching Banyarwanda frame of reference suddenly gave way to a far more simplified and potentially dangerous binary split. The Great Lakes region encapsulates many of the characteristics of a ‘borderland’ area, to borrow a phrase coined by Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz. ‘Borderlands’, they write, ‘are places of interaction. They are regions intersected by frontiers that separate states ( . . . ) but borderlands are frontiers in another sense as well. They are spaces-in-between, where identities are often malleable and control of the territory and population is subject to dispute’. Even more to the point, borderlands, they add, are ‘constructs of the political imaginary and products of ideological fantasies ( . . . ) Living side-by-side, diverse populations learn how to live with one another, but they may also come to perceive the other as essentially different and naturally hostile. In the borderlands groups become both objects and generators of intense violence.’15 In such ‘spaces-in-between’ refugee populations were both the tragic expression of genocidal violence and the vehicle of further bloodshed.

Refugee flows as vectors of conflict Summed up in a nutshell, the dynamics of violence in the Great Lakes is reducible to a simple proposition: oppression eventually leads to insurgencies, insurgencies to 170

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repression, repression to refugee flows which in turn become the source of further violence. To put it even more tersely: ‘Conflicts create refugees, but refugees also create conflicts.’16 Which brings into focus one of the great tragedies of inter-state and civil wars – the forced flight of millions of refugees from their homelands to neighboring states. The first massive exodus of refugees occurred during Rwanda’s Hutu revolution, from 1959 to 1962. Of the 120,000 Tutsi who sought asylum in neighboring states, many were members of the Union Nationale Rwandaise (Unar), a pro-Tutsi party identified with the monarchy. To this must be added approximately 180,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), the vast majority of Tutsi origins, who, despite the risks, stayed on. Many would subsequently pay with their lives for the Unaristes’ unsuccessful attempts to fight their way back into the country. While Burundi was particularly attractive to the tens of thousands of Tutsi asylum-seekers, their presence in the host country would soon act as a major irritant in Hutu–Tutsi relations. What I have described elsewhere as a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ must be seen as a key element in the circumstances leading to the 1972 genocide.17 In viewing the Burundi situation as a facsimile of their homeland, and therefore rife with potential conflict, the refugees, most of them with tales of horror on their lips, communicated their own anxieties to their kinsmen, which in time made their originally false imputations true. The crisis point was reached in April 1972, when a Hutu uprising in southern Burundi became the precipitating factor behind the first genocide recorded in independent Africa. Long before then, however, the cross-border raids launched by Tutsi refugees – the famous ‘cockroaches’ (inyenzi) – from Uganda and eastern Zaire (now DRC), would bring about dramatic changes inside Rwanda. Though they all ultimately failed, some nearly succeeded, ushering in a dangerous radicalization of the regime under the presidency of Grégoire Kayibanda. The most consequential of such raids occurred in December 1963, when hundreds of inyenzi invaded Rwanda from Burundi, and nearly captured Kigali before being routed by the National Guard with the help of Belgian officers. In what became an ominous rehearsal of the 1994 bloodbath, all Tutsi moderates were hunted down and killed while thousands of innocent civilians were murdered in and around Gikongoro. This in turn caused yet another huge outflow of Tutsi to neighboring states. Meanwhile the newly born republic took on the characteristics of an increasingly racist, Hutu-dominated polity. As Burundi became host to an ever-larger number of Tutsi refugees, the ethnic temperature rose accordingly, to reach its climax in April 1972, when a deadly uprising of Hutu peasants suddenly broke out in the south. As we shall see, a brutal repression was swiftly organized by the Tutsi-dominated army that soon morphed into a veritable genocide. Just as anti-Tutsi massacres in pre-independence Rwanda generated huge flows of Tutsi refugees into Burundi, anti-Hutu violence in Burundi sent tens of thousands of panic-stricken Hutu refugees into southern Rwanda. In both instances ethnic refugees became a significant political tool in domestic and interstate conflict. Anti-Tutsi pogroms again broke out in northern Burundi in 1988, in the communes of Ntega and Marangara, prompting the army to engage in a brutal repression, at the cost of thousands of Hutu lives and another exodus to Rwanda. With such a legacy of seething hatreds it is hardly surprising if many of the Burundi refugees in southern Rwanda became ‘willing executioners’ of Tutsi during the 1994 genocide. Many of the 5,000 or so ‘refugee warriors’ who fought their way back into Rwanda on 1 October 1990 were the offspring of the Unaristes of the early 1960s. Now 171

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marching under the banner of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF), the majority came from Uganda, but hundreds also joined in from Zaire and Burundi.18 Unlike their predecessors they were well organized, better equipped and enjoyed the full backing of the Ugandan army. In their effort to accomplish regime change in their country of origin they hoped to capitalize upon the growing disaffection of many Rwandans with their government. Little did they suspect that they were about to trigger a long drawnout, vicious civil war culminating in one of the biggest genocides of the last century, and ultimately causing the largest outflow of refugees recorded in the history of the region. Nor did they anticipate the psychological fallout of the mass murder of Hutu civilians committed some 20 years earlier in Burundi.

Burundi 1972: A selective genocide Between April and October 1972 anywhere from 200,000 to 300,000 Hutu were massacred in cold blood by the Burundi army, largely dominated by Tutsi elements. The bloodbath came about in response to a local Hutu insurgency that may have caused between 1,000 and 3,000 deaths, mainly among Tutsi. Although the exact numbers will never be known, the magnitude of the human losses among Hutu is far beyond those suffered by Tutsi civilians. Despite the efforts of some analysts to suggest an equivalence between the two,19 the evidence tells a very different story. Where the Burundi tragedy takes on a distinctive characteristic is in the selectivity of the groups targeted for physical elimination. By and large the army declared open season on all educated and semi-educated Hutu males (government employees, teachers, communal councillors, taxi-drivers, traders, clerks, and so forth) as well as on university and secondary school students. The aim, in short, was to eliminate all Hutu elites and potential elites. As one Tutsi leader, Artémon Simbananiye, declared, this was the price to be paid to guarantee peace and tranquility for the next 30 years. In Burundi, as in the case of the other genocides, fear was the irreducible common denominator behind the killings. The nightmare scenario of a massive peasant uprising, possibly with the support of the anti-government Tutsi/Banyaruguru faction, and the ominous possibility that the deposed king might re-enter the country and use the symbols of mwamiship to cast his lot in with the rebels – all of these were instrumental in propelling the repression towards a systematic bloodbath. The genocide of Hutu can best be seen as the terminal phase of a long process of ethnic confrontation.20 Signs of ethnic fissures could be detected as early as 1962, as the knock-on effect of the revolution in Rwanda, but the turning point came in the weeks following the legislative elections of May 1965, when the Hutu emerged triumphant with 23 seats out of a total of 33, only to see themselves robbed of their victory by the intervention of the Crown. Turning a deaf ear to their demand that a Hutu be appointed prime minister, King Mwambutsa instead turned to Leopold Biha, a famous ganwa and long-time protégé of the Court. By making a parody of the elections, the king bears much of the onus of responsibility for the abortive, Hutu-instigated coup of 19 October 1965. Although the coup-makers were defeated, they succeeded in scaring the weak-kneed mwami out of the country, thus paving the way for the transfer of power to Mwambutsa’s son, King Ntare. The new king’s reign, the shortest recorded in the annals of the kingdom, came to an end with the seizure of power by the Tutsidominated army on 28 November 1966 and the proclamation of the First Republic. From then on the monopoly of power became largely a Tutsi prerogative. 172

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The virtual exclusion of Hutu elements from all positions of authority made recourse to force increasingly attractive to those few Hutu exiles who saw Rwanda as the model polity for Burundi. Such was indeed the principal motive of the organizers of the insurrection that broke out on 29 April 1972 in the lakeside towns of Rumonge and Nyanza Lac. In a matter of hours terror was unleashed by Hutu upon Tutsi. In an attempt to build a political base some of the insurgents retreated to Vyanda, and proclaimed a mysterious ‘République de Martyazo’. A week later government troops brought the experiment to an end. Although their numbers are a matter of speculation, there could not have been more than 2,000 to 3,000 insurgents. A French pilot who flew helicopter missions on behalf of the Burundi army put their number at 1,000. What is beyond question is that they were joined by a fair number of Zairians, generally described as ‘Mulelistes’ after the name of the leader who gave his name to the 1964–5 rebellion in eastern DRC (Pierre Mulele). As the army moved against the insurgents, the ruling party’s youth group, the Jeunesses Révolutionnaires Rwagasore (JRR), headed by Emile Mworoha, played a crucial role in identifying suspects and surrendering them to the army. The men in charge of military operations were all highranking army officers, notably chief of staff Thomas Ndabemeye, along with Albert Shibura, André Yanda and Joseph Rwuri, but the central figure behind the killing machine was the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Artémon Simbananiye (later to resurface in Burundi as a born-again Christian). The repression in the countryside went hand in hand with the search for potential rebels in the capital city. Scores were arrested and never seen again. Some of the most gruesome scenes took place on the campus of the University of Bujumbura, and in secondary and technical schools. Nor was the Church spared. By early June, as reported by an American journalist, twelve Hutu priests had been killed, as had thousands of Protestant pastors, school directors, and teachers. No sector of society was left untouched, least of all the army. An estimated 500 Hutu troops were reported killed by their Tutsi commanders in the weeks immediately following the insurrection. By early June the repression had metamorphosed into a full-fledged genocide. As 1972 drew to an end most educated Hutu elites were either dead or in exile. That so little of this ghastly episode filtered into the media21 – as compared with Rwanda – is one of the most perplexing features of the Burundi bloodbath. The principal reason is that, in contrast with what happened in Rwanda, in Burundi the perpetrators won the day. The strict control exercised by the Burundi authorities on travel within the country and over the media helps explain why, to this day, many details of the atrocities committed in 1972 have been ‘airbrushed out of history’, to use Milan Kundera’s phrase. It also explains yet another major difference with Rwanda – the silence of the international community. The unwillingness of the UN, the Organization of African Unity – now the African Union (AU) – and Western embassies to see through the humbug of official media is little short of astonishing. Though largely unremembered, except by survivors and their descendants, in recent times the events of 1972 have re-entered the Burundi arena with a vengeance – in the form of a radical, Hutu-dominated party born in a Tanzanian refugee camp (Mishamo) in 1980, the Parti pour la libération du peuple Hutu (Palipehutu). Later identified with Agathon Rwasa’s Palipehutu-Forces Nationales de Libération (FNL), its anti-Tutsi ideology remains undiminished. Nor does it show any sign of abandoning its commitment to violence. Today, however, its immediate target is President Pierre Nkurunziza’s Hutu-dominated ruling party, the Conseil National pour la défense de 173

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la démocratie-Forces pour la défense de la démocratie (CNDD-FDD), which, ironically, came into being as the most vocal opponent of Tutsi rule in the days following the murder of Burundi’s first popularly elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, on 21 October 1993. This game-changing event, as we shall see, is directly relevant to an understanding of the Rwanda genocide.

Rwanda: A total genocide No serious observer can deny the monstrous blood-letting that made Rwanda a household word. Anywhere from 600,000 to a million were killed in 100 days between April and July 1994, with Tutsi civilians representing the vast majority. Not all Hutu were participants in the carnage. As Scott Straus’s recent research conclusively shows, between 14 and 17% of the adult male Hutu population took part in the killings.22 Where basic disagreements emerge is about whether or not the killings were planned, who bears the onus of responsibility for the crash of President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane, and the role played by local actors. For if the génocidaires were overwhelmingly Hutu and the victims predominantly Tutsi, the question of the part played by leaders in each camp in bringing about such murderous madness is by no means free of ambiguity. The conventional narrative points to the existence of a long-standing Hutu-instigated plan to annihilate all Tutsi; it further argues that while most would agree that the precipitating factor behind the killing spree was the shooting down of the plane carrying Habyarimana and his Burundi counterpart, President Cyprien Ntaryamira, on 6 April 1994, there is reason to believe that the crash was the work of the president’s immediate entourage (the so-called akazu); moreover, the determining role in the extermination process is assigned to a single, all-powerful individual, the notorious Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who served at the time as chef de cabinet to the minister of defense; ultimately, Rwanda’s ‘strong state’ syndrome is viewed as a major enabling element behind the scale and swiftness of the carnage. On each count the evidence calls for the strongest qualifications. Let us begin with the overall political context preceding the genocide.23 The central element behind the civil war was the invasion of Rwanda by the RPF on 1 October 1990. Besides generating a huge flow of IDPs, reaching an estimated one million by 1994, the invasion was widely seen by the Hutu populace as a major threat to what was referred to at the time as les acquis de la révolution, i.e. to everything that had been achieved since the Hutu revolution of 1959–62, most notably the redistribution of land. Because of their revolutionary past the Hutu came to define themselves as ‘the authentic political community’,24 whose fate was now endangered by Tutsi counterrevolutionaries. Hence the tendency of many Hutu actors to identify Tutsi ethnicity with treason: from then on every Tutsi in sight was a potential enemy of the revolution. Anti-Tutsi sentiment received a major impetus from the assassination of Burundi’s first popular Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, on 21 October 1993, an event wildly celebrated by some of Rwanda’s Tutsi residents. If the rise of Hutu radicalism embodied in the Hutu Power movement is closely linked to Ndadaye’s assassination, the critical event was the shooting down of Habyarimana’s plane on 6 April 1994. As one Hutu observer remarked to this writer, the crash of the presidential plane meant that in six months three Hutu heads of state had been killed at the hands of Tutsi elements. It has now become transparently clear that much of the evidence offered by the Rwanda authorities to demonstrate the responsibility of the akazu, notably through 174

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the publication of the so-called Mutsinzi report,25 has been fabricated; and while there is no ‘smoking gun’ to suggest otherwise, there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence pointing to the involvement of President Kagame in the plot to bring down Habyarimana’s plane.26 Particularly damning is the testimony offered by Kagame’s former chief of staff and secretary general of the RPF, Théogène Rudasingwa: The truth must now be told. Paul Kagame, then overall commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA), the RPF’s armed wing, was personally responsible for the shooting down of the plane. In July 1994 Paul Kagame himself, with characteristic callousness and much glee, told me that he was responsible for shooting down the plane . . . This created a powerful trigger, escalating to a tipping point towards resumption of the civil war, genocide, and the regionwide destabilization that has devastated the Great Lake region since then.27 If this is true, much of the history of the genocide needs to be re-written. Although the massacres began hours after the crash, to infer a spontaneous, uncontrollable killing spree is a gross oversimplification. Nor is the notion of a planned genocide convincing. As shown by André Guichaoua in his thoroughly researched revisionist inquest,28 the genocide came into effect in stages. First came the killings of all opposition politicians and suspected pro-Tutsi sympathizers, a move engineered by the akazu with the help of the presidential guard, resulting in the physical elimination of virtually every member of the government, Hutu and Tutsi, including Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana, a leading Hutu personality of the opposition party Mouvement Démocratique Républicain (MDR). The next stage involved a prolonged and bitter dispute over whether to stop the killings or expand the bloodbath. Against the efforts of the newly appointed interim government to launch a pacification program stood the determined opposition of the notorious trio of hardliners, Joseph Nzirorera, Mathieu Ngirumpatse and Théoneste Bagosora, respectively Secretary General and President of the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour le Développement (MRND) and Chef de Cabinet of the Ministry of Defence. After the defeat of the pro-pacification elements came the final push towards a total genocide – the expansion of the bloodbath to the southern provinces, which until then had been relatively untouched by violence. Not only is there scant evidence of a long-standing plan to exterminate the Tutsi, but the materials gathered by Guichaoua conclusively demonstrate how, behind the passage from incipient massacres to total genocide, lies a complex unfolding of bitter personal rivalries, discords and disagreements among the leading actors, in which control of the interahamwe lay at the heart of the decision to unleash the genocidal apparatus. Further evidence strongly suggests that the political assassinations of moderate Hutu politicians generally attributed to hardliners associated with the extremist Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR) were in fact the work of the FPR, whose efforts at infiltrating the militias proved remarkably successful. Not only did they eliminate some of the most respected voices of moderation, most notably Félicien Gatabazi, of the Parti social démocrate (PSD), but in so doing they were able to orchestrate some extremely brutal settling of scores within the Hutu camp, playing one group off against another. The work of the infiltrés (ibyitso) thus contributed in no small way to the rise of intra-Hutu violence on the eve of the genocide. Rivalries between radicals and moderates had an impact far beyond the confines of the capital city. As Scott Straus has shown in his magisterial contribution,29 the logic 175

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of genocide did not stem from ideological factors, let alone from a paroxysm of preexisting ethnic hatreds, but from a trial of strength between hardliners and moderates in a context of growing insecurity. In each of the five communes he investigated (save one) the key drivers of the genocide were ‘war – and its attendant dynamics of fear, insecurity, rage, revenge and self-defense . . . race – and its attendant dynamic of collective categorization . . . and power – that is the hardliners’ ability to control a plurality of force in government-controlled Rwanda and to issue instructions to fight the Tutsi enemy’.30 The pattern which repeats itself again and again is one in which hardliners gain the upper hand against moderates, eliminate their domestic opponents and end up with a quasi-monopoly of the resources of the state, including the militias, the presidential guard, the army and the media, to achieve their genocidal objective. In this process, contingency and randomness played a major role. But so did the inherited centralized state apparatus. As Straus argues, the state served as the overarching legitimizing symbol and source of authority that helped implement the genocide. The history of pre-colonial Rwanda shows that a strong state tradition is by no means incompatible with the presence of bitter internal rivalries; similarly, in recent times, factional strife did not rule out the centrality of the state. If anything, competition over access to state resources is what intensified the struggle between hardliners and moderates. The continuity between past and present is nowhere more evident than in Kagame’s Rwanda, where control over the state has re-emerged as the linchpin of the new regime. Despite notable exceptions, ethnicity is again a major stake in the ongoing competition among incumbent elites and their opponents, except that the hardliners are now Tutsi, and most of their opponents Hutu. Summing up his argument, Straus writes that ‘genocide happened because Hutu hardliners decided to foment violence against Tutsi and because the hardliners had control of the state’.31 Reversing ethnic labels, the statement provides a convenient point of entry into the next genocide on our list: in eastern DRC genocide happened because Tutsi hardliners decided to foment violence against Hutu – not because the hardliners had control of the state but because the state had ceased to exist in much of eastern Congo.

Eastern DRC: A contested genocide How Rwanda’s military intervention in eastern DRC mutated into a genocidal massacre of Hutu civilians is one of the most tragic unintended consequences of the 1994 butchery. Between October 1996 and September 1997 tens of thousands of Hutu civilians were systematically slaughtered by Kagame’s armed forces in what a UN panel described as a possible genocide. In an interview with the news agency Congopolis former US Assistant Secretary Affairs for Africa, Herman Cohen, evaluated at 350,000 the number of Hutu refugees killed by the RPA. Steven Smith, a seasoned observer of the Great Lakes region, offered a ‘guesstimate’ of ‘some 200,000 Hutu killed by Rwandan troops during Laurent Kabila’s march to power’.32 That such massive bloodshed should have made so little impact on Western consciousness is due in no small part to Kagame’s sustained campaign of disinformation, with which he received considerable help from the US Embassy in Kigali.33 Only in 2010, with the publication of the UN Mapping Report, did the hideous reality of mass murder come to full light.34 In page after page of graphic description the report paints a horrifying picture of how Hutu refugee populations, including 176

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women and children, were systematically wiped out by RPA units assisted by elements of Kabila’s Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la libération du Congo/Zaire (AFDL). Here again the roots of disaster lie in the security threats posed to the perpetrators’ regime. By early 1996 the refugee camps in eastern DRC were host to over a million refugees, many of whom were former interahamwe and ex-FAR elements. As much as the camps’ strategic location, the repeated cross-border raids launched into Rwanda by Hutu extremists made the Kagame government acutely conscious of the mortal danger looming across the border. Nor could the new Rwandan authorities remain indifferent to the murderous attacks and repeated threats of expulsion directed against the Kinyarwandaspeaking communities of North and South Kivu.35 The Banyamulenge of South Kivu were a major target of anti-Tutsi violence on the part of both Hutu refugees and local Congolese authorities. A number of Tutsi were killed in Bukavu during a ‘march of anger’ on September 18; dozens were arrested in Uvira; ethnic tensions reached their peak after the governor of South Kivu publicly called for ‘all Banyamulenge to leave the Congo within a week’, adding that ‘those remaining would be considered as rebels and treated as such’.36 It is hardly surprising in these conditions that many later joined the AFDL, a broad-based coalition of anti-Mobutist forces stitched together through the joint efforts of Kagame and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda. Between 24 and 30 October the AFDL, assisted by RPA units, launched a series of attacks against the main towns of North and South Kivu, quickly followed by a systematic cleaning up of the refugee camps. Mugunga, the largest of some 20 campsites strung along the border, home to some 200,000 refugees, was attacked on 14 November, causing a huge outflow of civilians running for their lives. They were joined by tens of thousands of others in the following weeks. Despite frantic efforts by the UNHCR, with the support of France and Canada, to open up safe corridors, little was done to provide relief aid and safety to the refugees. While some 400,000 walked back to Rwanda, the vast majority fled into the countryside, as far west as Kisangani and Mbandaka, where hundreds were reported massacred by the RPA. What began as a ‘prophylactic’ operation designed to neutralize the nests of interahamwe and ex-FAR now metamorphosed into a systematic manhunt aimed at the physical elimination of an entire community. The following quotes from the UN Mapping Report convey a sense of the unmitigated disaster now unleashed upon Hutu civilians: In this region (Walikale) massacres were staged on the basis of an almost identical plan, designed to kill as many victims as possible. Every time they spotted a large group of refugees, the AFDL/APR soldiers fired indiscriminately at them with light and heavy weapons. They would then promise to help the survivors return to Rwanda. After herding them up under a variety of pretexts they most often killed them with hammers or hoes. Those who tried to escape were shot dead . . . From December 9 AFDL/APR soldiers shot dead several hundred refugees, including a large number of women and children at the Hombo bridge. Over the course of the following days they burned alive an unknown number of refugees along the road . . . Around 17 December AFDL soldiers surrounded the makeshift camps at Biriko and killed hundreds of refugees, including women and children . . . In December AFDL/APR soldiers killed several hundred refugees around the town of Kifuruka, ten kilometers from Biriko.37 177

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To go on with this litany of horrors would be tedious. Although the extent of AFDL participation is impossible to establish, it is widely assumed that the APR bears the heaviest responsibility in carrying out the killings. What is beyond doubt is that the principal obstacle faced by the UN commission as it set out to investigate ‘allegations of grave and massive violations of human rights, including the right to life’ came from President Laurent Kabila, who, in response to pressures from his Rwandan patron, did everything he could to prevent the mission from discharging its mandate.38 To this day the UN Mapping Report is seen by the Rwandan government as a baseless provocation. Though virtually all genocides have been contested, including the least contestable (Rwanda), there are few precedents for the systematic refutation of its arguments issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the days following its publication. ‘Rwanda’s concerns’, we are told, ‘relate to the entire report, and are not limited to narrow definitional issues or specific allegations.’ The most serious of such concerns include: the manipulation of UN processes by organization and individuals . . . for purposes of rewriting history, improperly apportioning blame, and reignite the conflict in Rwanda and the region; the omission of historical context, especially the immediate and serious threat posed by armed and ideologically charged refugees . . . ; the flawed methodology and application of the lowest imaginable evidentiary standard; the overreliance on the use of anonymous sources, hearsay assertions, unnamed, un-vetted and unidentified investigators and witnesses, who lack credibility; and allegation of the existence of victims with uncertain identity.39 After fully elaborating each of these points, the statement concludes ‘the double genocide theory must be rejected’. Contrary to what the foregoing might imply, the Mapping Report refrains from using the G-word to describe such human rights violations, stating that the decision to determine whether genocide has been committed must be deferred to ‘a competent court’. Much the same ambiguity can be detected in the report submitted to the Security Council on 29 June 1998, in which the UN investigators concluded that the RPA had committed large-scale crimes and crimes against humanity, yet went on to say that while genocide cannot be ruled out, further investigation was required. Again, while hedging around the issue, the Mapping Report nonetheless admits that ‘the systematic and widespread attacks described in this report reveal a number of damning elements that, if proven before a competent court, could be classified as crimes of genocide’.40

The victor’s justice It is a sad irony that the region of the continent most urgently in need of healing and reconciliation is utterly bereft of judicial instruments to promote such goals. Transitional justice is central to the healing process: seeking the truth about past human rights violations, establishing responsibility, prosecuting abusers and meting out punishment, are all part of the judicial process through which a measure of normality can be restored to societies torn asunder by past conflict. Yet in none of the three states under consideration has justice been done. What has emerged instead is, in one form or another, a victor’s justice.41 178

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Rwanda is where this form of justice had the most negative consequences on the prospects for national reconciliation. Neither the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) nor domestic tribunals have been willing to consider the crimes committed by the FPR otherwise than in the most perfunctory manner, this in spite of the crushing body of evidence available. One of the most shocking examples of mass murder committed by the Rwandan army occurred in April 1995 in the IDP camp in Kibeho, in central Rwanda: as Terry Pickard, an Australian medic present at the scene, recalled in his wrenching memoir, the FPR ( . . . ) murdered thousands of unarmed, starving, thirsty and helpless men, women and children. Even babies had not been spared. Some of those who had survived the lethal onslaught of 50 caliber machineguns, AK 47 rifled, rocket propelled grenade and mortars were ruthlessly hunted down and bayoneted to death where they lay injured. We had just witnessed what came to be known as the ‘Kibeho massacre’.42 Not one single individual among those responsible for or complicit in the murder of the tens of thousands of Hutu civilians at the hand of the Rwandan army has been brought to trial before the ICTR. Among the dozen or so tried before Rwandan courts most were exonerated or handed exceedingly light sentences. As for the prosecution of Hutu suspects of participation in the genocide, the record shows shocking evidence of miscarriage of justice and human rights violations. Among the 130,000 prisoners held in Rwandan jails and lockups in 1998, thousands died in detention because of inhumane treatment, including extreme overcrowding and deliberate neglect.43 Attesting to the thorough politicization of the judicial system, a number of Hutu magistrates who were in office before 1994 were forced to resign; others were arrested or reported to have ‘disappeared’.44 But perhaps the most blatant example of how justice can be manipulated to serve the ends of the regime is the much-touted gacaca experiment. Under the guise of a traditional system of dispute resolution, the gacaca courts were expected to bring about reconciliation through a people’s justice, rooted in the consensus of local communities. The result has been little short of disastrous. In the words of a well-informed observer, ‘far from serving to resolve conflict and promote reconciliation, as their advocates claimed, trials have allowed an authoritarian government to consolidate its power, created insecurity in the population, and heightened ethnic tensions’.45 In its effort to work out a viable transition from genocide to peace Rwanda has been remarkably adept at manipulating domestic and international justice systems; whether, in doing so, it has come any closer to effectively dealing with its past is very doubtful. The same might be said of Burundi, except that in Burundi the genocidal past is not quite as recent or as bloody and deeply embedded in public consciousness as in Rwanda. Furthermore, the judicial tools contemplated for this task are of a different nature. At the core of the 2000 Arusha Peace and Reconciliation Agreement (APRA) was the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), intended to provide a full account of past human rights violations.46 Not until twelve years later, however, was the first significant step taken to bring intention in line with reality, when on 1 January 2012 President Pierre Nkurunziza formally stated his decision to create a TRC. To this day, however, the project is in limbo. Should it ever materialize, the Nkurunziza regime will face a dilemma – whether to decline responsibility for its past 179

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misdeeds, at the price of a huge loss of face and legitimacy, or to accept such responsibility, on par with other human rights violators, and pay an even heavier price. Given that virtually every party has blood on its hands, the probability of the TRC emerging as an effective instrument for investigating and sanctioning past abuses is most unlikely. The case of the DRC appears even more problematic when one considers the appalling dysfunctions of the justice system, the scale of human rights violations and the involvement of a variety of foreign actors besides Rwanda. Confronted with this situation the Mapping Report explores the following options: the creation of a hybrid court system, the establishment of a truth and reconciliation commission and recourse to the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although it will be up to the Congolese government to choose its preferred option, there is no indication that it will do so in the foreseeable future.47 Coming to terms with the horrors of the past goes beyond transitional justice mechanisms. Besides the acknowledgement of truth as the central precondition of a lasting peace, it requires at a minimum a transformation of the normative underpinnings of the culture of violence into a culture of peace and tolerance, a sharing of memories between victims and perpetrators, and a recognition that only through forgiveness of the other’s crimes, no matter how painful, can reconciliation begin to enter the realm of the possible. Depressing as it sounds, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that on none of these counts has much progress been made in any of the three states that have been the scene of such appalling human rights violations.

Notes 1 For a powerful argument against describing the Rwanda carnage as a genocide see Barrie Collins, Rwanda 1994: The Myth of the Akazu Genocide Conspiracy and its Consequences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Although I am in disagreement with the author on this point, I have drawn much profit from his effort to call into question a wide array of assumptions set forth in the dominant narrative about Rwanda. 2 See Terry Pickard, Combat Medic: An Australian’s eyewitness account of the Kibeho massacre (Wavell Heights: Big Sky Publishing, 2008). 3 The term means ‘those who fight together’ and refers to the ruling party’s youth group created in 1991 around a core group of Kigali-based soccer players; as a result of their heavy involvement in the killings of Tutsi the term became largely synonymous with perpetrators or génocidaires. 4 The aleatoriness of the ‘numbers game’ is convincingly argued by Jan Vansina in ‘The Politics of History and the Crisis in the Great Lakes’, Africa Today, Vol. 45, No. 1, 1998, pp. 38–39. 5 A notorious example is Colette Braeckman’s (in)famous scoop to the effect that French soldiers, in connivance with an extremist Hutu faction, deliberately brought down President Habyarimana’s plane on 6 April in order to trigger the genocide. This extraordinary story, which first appeared in La Libre Belgique, can also be found in her book, Rwanda: Histoire d’un génocide (Paris: Fayard, 1994), pp. 188–9. For an outstanding critical commentary on the lack of professionalism displayed by most of the French media response to the publication of the so-called Trevedic report, which tends to dismiss the responsibility of the FPR in the crash of President Habyarimana’s plane, see Claudine Vidal, ‘Sur un emballement médiatique. L’attentat du 6 avril 1994 contre le président Habyarimana: Comment la presse francaise a fait dire à un rapport d’expertise ce qu’il ne disait pas’, in S. Marysse et al. (eds), L’Afrique des Grands Lacs, Annuaire 2011–2012 (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012). 6 The name that springs to mind is that of Philip Gourevitch, whose best seller, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux,

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7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

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1998), for all its literary qualities, conveys a highly misleading image of the Rwanda genocide, where the Hutu are globally depicted as bad guys and the Tutsi as the good guys, with heavy hints of a tropical version of the Holocaust. Many would agree with Felix Holmgren, a Swedish journalist, that Gourevitch’s take on the genocide, ‘(though) clouded by oversimplifications and a glorified view of the Kagame government . . . has perhaps more than anyone else’s influenced the way the conflict is viewed in Europe and the US’. http://www. eurozine.com/articles/2010-o1-15-holmgren-en.html. To cite but one example, Helen Fein’s assertion – in her otherwise excellent volume on Human Rights and Wrongs: Slavery, Terror, Genocide (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2007) – that the genocide in Rwanda was ‘planned months in advance’ does not withstand critical examination. For a counter-argument, see Collins, Rwanda 1994; Bernard Lugan, Rwanda: Contre-enquete sur le génocide (Toulouse: Editions Privat, 2007); Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power and War in Rwanda (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), p. 226. See the extraordinary account of the late Lieutenant Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, a defector from the RPF, in Rwanda: L’histoire secrète (Paris: Editions du Panama, 2008). For a revealing testimony, see Peter Verlinden’s extensive interview with a Belgian eyewitness, Marcel Guérin, in his documentary on ‘Rwanda: The Killing Fields’. Web.me.com/ bernarddesgagne/Rwanda/Massacre du FPR.html. Helen Fein, ‘Genocide: A Sociological Perspective’, Sociology, International Sociological Association 38, No. 1, Spring 1990, p. 30. ¨ oçek and Norman Naimark Naimark, Norman, ‘Preface’, in Ronald Grigor, Fatma Müge G (eds), A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. xvii. See also Sheri Rosenberg, ‘Genocide is a process, not an event’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol. 7, No. 1, April 2012, pp. 16–23. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985), p. 29. See Lemarchand, Burundi: Ethnic Conflict and Genocide (Washington and New York: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press: 1996), pp. 1–16. See Conflits au Kivu: Antécédents et Enjeux, F. Reyntjens and S. Marysse (eds) (Antwerp: University of Antwerp, 1996), p. 7. The same source estimates at some 725,000 in 1957 the number of Hutu who migrated to eastern DRC under the auspices of the colonial state, and at 1.8 to 2.1 million the total number of Banyarwanda living in North and South Kivu in 1994 before the genocide. Omer Bartov and Eric D. Weitz, ‘Introduction’, Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian and Ottoman Borderlands (forthcoming). Myron Weiner, The Global Migration Crisis: Challenge to States and Human Rights (New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 137. Lemarchand, Rwanda and Burundi (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 344. Among the 441, 367 Rwandan refugees living in neighboring states registered by the UN High Commission for Refugees in October 1990, 276,455 were in Burundi; 75,294 in Zaire; 74,372 in Uganda; 22,300 in Tanzania; and 1,666 in Kenya. Of these the vast majority were Tutsi. See Deirdre LaPin, Democratic Initiatives and Governance: Rwanda, Social Soundness Analysis, Annex K, July 31, 1992 (Typescript). Notably Jean-Pierre Chrétien and Jean-Francois Dupaquier: nothing is more telling than the title of their book, Burundi 1972: Au bords des génocides (Paris: Karthala, 2007) – which can be loosely translated as ‘Burundi on the cusp of genocides’; for a critical commentary see my chapter on Burundi in Lemarchand (ed.), Forgotten Genocides: Oblivion, Denial and Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 45 ff. For a fuller discussion, see Lemarchand, ‘The Burundi Genocide’, in Samuel Totten and William S. Parsons (eds), Century of Genocide: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 323–37. Exceptions include some outstanding reports in the Belgian press, notably ‘Les massacres du Burundi’, and ‘Des récits effroyables sur les massacres au Burundi’, Le Soir, May 24, 25, 1972. Straus, The Order of Genocide, p. 118. For a detailed discussion, see Alison Des Forges et al., Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York and Paris: Human Rights Watch and International Federation of Human Rights, 1999).

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24 Of special relevance here is Robert Melson’s discussion of the importance of revolution in fostering genocidal violence Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 17–19. 25 The basic flaws in the report have been convincingly demonstrated by Filip Reyntjens in ‘Une enquete faussée sur un évènement majeur: Analyse ru rapport Mutsinzi sur l’attentat du 6 avril 1994 contre l’avion présidentiel rwandais’, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs, Annuaire 2009-2010, S. Marysse et al. (eds) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), pp. 299–326. 26 Lugan 2007, p. 13, citing the testimonies of three former RPF officers: Jean-Pierre Mugabe, Aloys Ruyenzi and Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza, and André Guichaoua, Rwanda: De la guerre au génocide. Les politiques criminelles au Rwanda (1990-1994) (Paris: La Découverte, 2010), p. 241 ff. For a radically different interpretation, see Linda Melvern, A People Betrayed: The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide (London: Zed Books, 2009), Chapter 6. 27 Jennifer Feirberg, MSW, ‘Breaking News: Dr. Théogène Rudasingwa Testifies in front of Judge Trevedic’, April 12, 2012, available from [email protected]. 28 Guichaoua, p. 433 ff. 29 Straus, The Order of Genocide, pp. 226–46. 30 Ibid, pp. 173–4. 31 Ibid, p. 224. 32 See Filip Reyntjens and Lemarchand, ‘Mass Murder in Eastern Congo, 1996–1997’, in Lemarchand (ed.), Forgotten Genocides, p. 21. 33 Ibid. 34 United Nations, Report of the Mapping Exercise documenting the most serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed within the territory of the DRC between March 1993 and June 2003 (New York, June 2010). Hereafter cited as UN Mapping Report. 35 For eyewitness accounts of the widespread violence suffered by the Tutsi communities of North Kivu, notably in Masisi, see the outstanding collection of articles in ‘La guerre de Masisi’, special issue of Dialogue, No. 192, August–September 1996. 36 Reyntjens and Lemarchand, ‘Mass Murder in Eastern Congo, 1996–1997’, p. 23. 37 UN Mapping report, pp. 98, 99. 38 Reyntjens and Lemarchand, ‘Mass Murder in Eastern Congo, 1996–1997’, p. 33. 39 See Republic of Rwanda. Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation. Rwanda’s Comments on the Draft UN Mapping Report on the DRC (Kigali, n.d.). 40 Mapping Report, p. 14. 41 The phrase is borrowed from Victor Peskin, ‘Victor’s Justice Revisited: Rwandan Patriotic Front Crimes and the Prosecutorial Endgame at the ICRT’, in Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (eds), Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), pp. 173–83. For a vehement denial that any such form of justice prevailed in post-genocide Rwanda, see Jean-Pierre Chrétien’s highly tendentious account, Le défi de l’ethnisme. Rwanda et Burundi 1990-1996 (Paris: Karthala, 1997), Chapter 13. 42 Terry Pickard, Combat Medic, p. 11. 43 See Carina Tertsakian, ‘“All Rwandans Are Afraid of Being Arrested One Day”: Prisoners Past, Present and Future’, in Straus and Waldorf, Remaking Rwanda, pp. 210–19. 44 Filip Reyntjens, Ruling Under a Volcano: Political Governance in Post-Genocide Rwanda (Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 143. 45 Timothy Longman, ‘Trying Times for Rwanda. Re-evaluating Gacaca Courts in Post-Genocide Reconciliation’, Harvard International Review, Vol. 32, No. 2, 2010, cited in Reyntjens, Ruling Under a Volcano, p. 155. 46 Much of the information in this paragraph is borrowed from Stef Vandeginste’s excellent analysis, ‘Burundi’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission: How to Shed Light on the Past while Standing in the Dark Shadow of Politics?’, International Journal of Transitional Justice, Vol. 11, No. 1, 2012, pp. 1–11. 47 See Stefaan Smis, ‘The UN Mapping Report on International Crimes Committed in the DRC Between 1993 and 2003’, L’Afrique des Grands Lacs, Annuaire 2010-2011, pp. 105–25.

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13 GE NOCI DE , MEM O R Y , A ND ME MORIAL I S A T I O N Rebecca Jinks

Introduction From the exhortation to ‘Never forget!’, to the thousands of memorials to genocide which dot the globe, to the almost complete silence about the genocide and forced population movements upon which the modern state of Turkey is built, it is clear that, in the aftermath of genocide, the meaning of the past can be a force for mobilisation as much as remembrance. Genocide memorials are, of course, bound up with the mourning process, but they are also part of contemporary struggles over identity and narratives about the past – struggles which are present in any society but which have higher stakes in the aftermath of genocide, since the deep structures of violence which provided the crucible for genocide in the first place rarely disappear entirely in the aftermath, and the threat of renewed violence can be very real. This chapter takes as its point of departure Dan Stone’s observation that ‘memory is, in fine, one of the more dangerous tools of identity politics . . . the perpetration of genocide requires the mobilisation of collective memories, as does the commemoration of it’1 – in order to explore how, and to what ends, memory is mobilised in the aftermath of genocide. Increasingly, memory and memorialisation are being seen as a vital part of the ‘transitional justice tool kit’,2 involving the argument that the proper recognition of pain and admission of guilt works as a democratic force for social reconciliation and healing – undoubtedly the reasoning inherent in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.3 Certainly remembrance can work in this way – and indeed, achieving recognition is what mobilises victim groups whose tragedies have not been acknowledged – but in its focus on (and celebration of) the diffusion of human rights norms and ‘positive’ memorialisation, this perspective often neglects the full spectrum of memories and narratives circulating in the public or private sphere, some of which may be far less salubrious. As Alexander Hinton and Kevin Lewis O’Neill rightly note, in the aftermath of genocide, individuals, governments and interest groups ‘vie to map out a narrative of the past that legitimates their agendas or desire for justice, assert or reject the right to legal redress for and moral outrage about “the crime of all crimes”, and acknowledge or disavow memories, experiences, suffering, and losses’.4 It is this spectrum of competing interventions into the sphere of memory which is of interest here, not least because it illuminates how memory is linked with power5 – the power to determine a normative interpretation of the past, or positions of relative powerlessness in the social arena which can produce or inflect counternarratives or enforced silence; and as I will show, museums and memorials are also part of these relations of power. What this competing spectrum also highlights is what scholars of memory have 185

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long noted – that memories of the past are never homogeneously shared amongst a (national or any other) collective, and that there will be multiple readings of any memorial narrative or commemorative site, depending upon an individual’s personal experience and perspective.6 In this the memory politics of genocide are no different from the remembrance of any other past. This chapter explores these complex interactions through a wide range of case studies, from the most widely known, the Holocaust, through to those which have received less attention, such as Namibia and Bali. It alights on ‘moments’ in the histories of genocide remembrance which best demonstrate the interactions of memory with power, rather than attempting a holistic narrative of each case, or the contemporary state of memory politics. The first section explores dominant, ‘official’ memories of genocide – narratives which are by and large the creations of governments seeking to control the meaning of the national past, but which are also taken up and shared by (politically supportive) social constituencies who have a stake in this narrative, or feel it to be reflective of their experience. The second section considers a much wider range of memories – those of survivors, memory activists, perpetrators (and their heirs and supporters), and silenced memories – in order to explore how they interact with dominant memories, and with each other, in the public sphere. The final section broadens the perspective beyond the domestic to the international context, considering how other memory paradigms and practices and the ‘geopolitics of apology’ act on and influence memory and power in the domestic sphere.

Official narratives From Willy Brandt’s Kniefall and the Bitburg controversy to the contributions of public monuments and museums in provoking an engagement with its past, Germany’s process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms with the past) has long been a subject of academic and political scrutiny. Whilst one can still debate what ‘coming to terms with the past’ might really mean, and what narratives are provoked and invoked by Germany’s memorial landscape,7 from a broader perspective, Germany nevertheless is the exception which proves the rule; no other post-genocide state has committed as openly to such a national self-interrogation. Rather, official memories – or official amnesia – in the aftermath of genocide have tended to assert or derive state legitimacy not from the admission of guilt (if the state committed genocide or is the direct heir to one which did), or a full acknowledgement of the survivors’ devastation (if the state was involved in the overthrow of the génocidaires), but from glorious national narratives of the successful extirpation of internal enemies, or victory in the battle for national liberation. There will, of course, be a segment of society for whom these narratives confirm their own experiences of the violence and their place in the new society; others may tolerate, defy, counter, absorb, or be silenced by these narratives. Official memories thus work in a variety of ways in the service of state-building and the fashioning of a body politic, especially at times of transition and especially when that body politic has just been wrought asunder by genocide. Some of the starkest examples of the exercise of power over memory are those where a state which itself committed genocide, or its close heir, pursues a policy of ‘official amnesia’ or outright denial. The most infamous case, of course, is that of Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide (and indeed the contemporaneous massacres of other minorities) – which, were they to be acknowledged, would wholly undermine 186

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the founding narrative of the struggle for independence and national unity which established the Republic of Turkey in 1923.8 An exercise in state-building at the time, this violence – or rather the control over how, if at all, it is narrated – continues to cement Turkish identity and nationhood in the present. One could also refer to the various ‘genocide museums’ in Baltic cities which gloss over the Nazi genocide of the Jews in favour of emphasising oppression under the two Soviet occupations.9 But official amnesias or silences have also propped up other conveniently guilt-free national identities – Austria’s as ‘first victim of National Socialism’ and France’s as a ‘nation of resisters’ for many postwar decades, for example; in the case of Bali, silences were both part of the Suharto regime’s ban on public discussions of the 1965–66 killings which brought the regime to power (except for official commemorations of military victory over the alleged communist plot), and a pragmatic decision by many Balinese to project and perform a national image of a peaceful, premodern culture for the tourist industry upon which nearly 80% of Balinese depend.10 Thus, in different ways, these official silences provide a positive, untarnished national identity for the perpetrators, whilst also operating as a meaningful warning to the victims still living in their midst. The political circumstances of these denials and silences tend, of course, to produce wildly divergent official narratives either side of national borders – in Armenia and Turkey,11 West and East Germany, or in Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia, where one need only compare the narratives about the 1990s wars in the Historical Museum of Sarajevo, Belgrade’s Military Museum, and Zagreb’s History Museum – or indeed the constructions of ethnicity in each capital’s Ethnographic Museum. Other dynamics are at play with those states which define themselves in opposition to genocidal regimes – whether through overthrow and military victory, as in Rwanda and Cambodia, or through partition or decolonisation, as in Pakistan and Algeria; these new states tend to impose ‘an abrupt reorganisation of memory by ushering in a new value system’.12 This is perhaps especially clear in postcolonial and, indeed, post-partition states; Jonathan Greenberg has deployed Clifford Geertz’s discussion of ‘integrative revolutions’ in postcolonial states to describe how, in Palestine and Israel, Pakistan and India, the official narratives of ‘1947’ and ‘1948’ forcibly overwrote regional, caste-bound, or linguistic identities with a new, patriotic identity.13 And yet, as Greenberg suggests, these myths of sacrificial nation-building perhaps in part redeemed their new citizens’ traumatic memories of victimisation and suffering; ‘here the political needs of national leadership to promote a triumphant meaning of partition match[ed] the psychological needs of those who had suffered the most’.14 The ‘reorganisation’ of memory after decolonisation often involves unifying diverse cultural, ethnic, religious or political groups – some of whom may have fought against one another – under the banner of a patriotic resistance against the colonial occupier. In Namibia, the ruling party encourages an anti-colonial nationalism which ties groups in Namibian history through political resistance, rather than any shared cultural bond; militarised commemorations and memorials reinforce the narrative of unity in resistance.15 In Algeria, the state’s legitimacy, ‘ratified neither by universal suffrage nor by tradition, remain[s] inseparable from its mythologized, “legendary and populist” origin in resistance and revolution’;16 an official memory of oppression and national unity silences the memories of internal struggles and divisions during the war for independence. Indeed, this memory is a ‘crucial political resource’, writes Raphaëlle Branche, so much so that the decade of civil war in the 1990s ‘prompted the state to delve again into the past, the war for independence, in order to underscore 187

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its legitimacy’.17 Both the commemorative calendar and the list of official memorial sites were expanded during this time, and a new Law on Shohada and Mujahideen bestowed a virtual sacralisation on combatants and their immediate families. Thus, the Algerian past became a social as well as political resource: fraud is often committed to obtain a veteran’s certificate (along with the economic and social benefits it brings) – in a way that ties citizens in very closely to these narratives. These commemorations, then, are indeed ‘integrative’ in that they offer affirmatory, consensus-building memories in the aftermath of genocide. However, one can perceive a slightly different exercise of power over memory at other commemorative sites. For at least a decade after the Vietnamese ‘liberated’ Cambodia and installed the PRK as the new ruling party, the Khmer Rouge continued to exist as a political and military force on the country’s border with Thailand. At Tuol Sleng, the national genocide museum in Phnom Penh (opened in 1979), and each of the many local memorials (erected under state direction in the early 1980s), skulls are uniformly on display – in a country where Buddhist ritual demands cremation, lest the ghosts of the dead haunt the living.18 According to Judy Ledgerwood, ‘The central message of the government was . . . you must support us because to fail to do so will result in the return to power of the Khmer Rouge.’19 Much the same could be said for those memorials in Rwanda which display the bones of the dead – chiefly the six national genocide memorials, under the jurisdiction of the RPF, which has been ruling the country with an extremely authoritarian hand ever since it forced Hutu Power into DRC and ended the genocide;20 as Sara Guyer suggests, the bones ‘justify a repressive government by presenting a spectre of past violence as a permanent future possibility’.21 In both cases, state control over the form of memorialisation means that the display of the macabre is a display of power, since exhibiting the bones of the dead is extremely unsettling and controversial for most Rwandans and Cambodians, as well as an enforcement of cohesion – or the silencing of dissent – through fear of the alternative. Of course, it is axiomatic that most official narratives of national history, and the attached commemorations – monuments, museums, anniversary celebrations – aim to reinforce national unity and the state’s legitimacy. (Narratives which emphasise division in national history should perhaps be more worrisome.) The point here, though, is that the state is trying to create and narrate unity in societies which have recently been torn apart by communal violence, war, occupation, and mass killing. There is thus a certain political urgency to the ways in which personal experiences and memories are co-opted, redeemed, or silenced by official memories of genocide; more is at stake, too, for those who choose or are forced to opt in, or out, of these official memories.

Spheres of memory These official memories and commemorations may be more or less mainstream, more or less pervasive, even amongst the segments of society that consciously adopt these narratives because they bestow political or social power.22 As Branche notes, ‘combatants know that there are several registers in which to sing the war of liberation, either on the national level or on their own personal level’: Algerians know that the memory of the war that has been transmitted includes omissions, silences shared for local reasons, recollections whispered in the privacy of one’s home.23 Understanding the full spectrum of memories and commemorations in the aftermath of genocide, and the complex ways in which they interact, requires ‘keeping the varied cast of memory actors firmly in 188

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view’24 – including, perhaps especially, those which remain hidden. Most of this ‘varied cast’, though, operate in the public sphere as victims’ associations, other interest groups, artists, local communities, and individuals; their private memorials, websites, films and campaigns can be read as interventions into the public and/or private sphere of memory, seeking to counter, reframe, or supplement official narratives The majority of memory actors represent the interests of victims or local communities, and how they engage with official memories depends very much on the state of civil society and their own position of social power, as much as the changes they would like to see. Some seek to wholly redefine the mainstream public memory of their experiences – as did the members of the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’ who contributed to the 1997 report Bringing Them Home,25 which sought to call attention to, and have recognised as genocide, the experiences of half-Aborigines who had been removed from their parents and sent to orphanages or white families in order to ‘breed out the colour of both body and mind’.26 Some are more clearly local articulations or reappropriations of national narratives, as Reinhart Kössler has shown in his analysis of three very different community commemorations of the Herero and Nama genocide in Omaruru, Gibeon, and Valgras, Namibia: by rehearsing and asserting communal memories of the struggle for freedom a century ago, ‘these events complement as well as implicitly contest the official narrative of a national history centred above all on the military aspects of the liberation struggle during the last third of the 20th century’.27 Others are interventions which seek to mould or take ownership of official memorialisation, such as the Women of Srebrenica’s campaign to have the proposed cemetery and Memorial Centre located at the battery factory in Potočari where they last saw their husbands (now in Republika Srpska), rather than somewhere in Federation territory where most of them settled; they also amassed a huge collection of photographs of the missing men and boys as part of their campaign for the missing relatives’ return, and these photographs will in the future form part of the memorial centre’s exhibition.28 Other groups pinpoint deficiencies or evasions in official memories and memorialisation, as in Chile, where criticisms of the only state memorial to the ‘disappeared’ – a huge wall of names in Santiago’s General Cemetery – focus on its funerary associations; families reject the association with death in cases where the whereabouts of the ‘disappeared’ remains unknown, and the way in which the wall conveys what was done, but not why it was done nor who did it.29 These memory actors’ engagements with official state narratives and commemorations (especially when they are victims’ associations) are in reality often bound up with a series of demands – legal rights for indigenous peoples, medical and housing provision for displaced and traumatised survivors, justice and a social commitment to human rights. But their memory interventions are also directed beyond the state, into the public (and private) sphere of memory. Grassroots memorial activists in Chile have confronted a broader public evasion of the memory of the disappeared with what might be termed ‘countermemorial’ efforts, with the same underlying conception as their German counterparts: to provoke, unsettle, and encourage a rethinking of a history and one’s relationship with it.30 One, orchestrated by ‘Colectivo 199’, involved carrying oversized cardboard cut-outs of disappeared comrades or relatives through the streets of Santiago and installing them in the main square in front of the presidential palace, so that pedestrians were obliged to walk through them.31 The Women of Srebrenica also confront memory on the public square (as well as the national and international arena), organising a gathering in the centre of Tuzla on the 11th of each month which displays 189

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handsewn pillowcases embroidered with the name, year of birth, and birthplace of a missing person from Srebrenica.32 Australia’s Stolen Generations wanted not only official recognition but to provoke white Australians into reconsidering their history and relationship with indigenous peoples in the present. Each of these interventions is thus interacting in a highly charged public sphere, not with only those who adopt the official memories, but also with those with a stake in the old regime (such as the right-wing Chilean constituencies who retain a large measure of social power), those who deny or relativise the murders, and may indeed have participated in them (such as the Bosnian Serbs who have created an alternative ‘genocide museum’ down the road from Potočari, and commemorate their dead on 12 July),33 and those who are depoliticised or largely indifferent to the history of violence (as many white Australians have been; much the same can be said of North Americans’ relationship with First Nations peoples). There are, of course, many other private or silenced memories and commemorations of genocide which are not aired in public – although publicly articulated memories will of course act on private memories, whether inflecting, countering, or confirming them. Some are family stories or personal variations of a more general survival story. Some are perpetrators’ memories of killing, kept quiet for fear of prosecution but perhaps evidenced by a photograph album stored in the attic recording images of camaraderie and death. Others are silenced through fear – such as the relatives of those murdered in Bali and the ‘hidden Armenians’ in Turkey discussed above, or, in a more complicated fashion, the Rwandans whose experiences and memories do not ‘fit’ the Rwandan government’s polarised and ethnicised narrative of Tutsi victims and Hutu perpetrators: the stories of Rwandans in ethnically mixed marriages, of Hutu killed for their political opposition to Hutu Power, of civilians killed by the RPF immediately after the civil war. As Jennie E. Burnet writes, both the second and third have been ‘erased from the national imagination’34 – these experiences and memories cannot be socially validated – and the first is not publicly articulable, since the government views the statement ‘Hutu died too’ as intent to relativise and deny what they define exclusively (since 2008) as a genocide of Tutsi.35 The official proscription and social explosiveness of these (and other) stories means that many Rwandans adopt a strategy of ‘chosen amnesia’, argues Suzanne Buckley-Zistel, choosing what to remember and what to forget publicly in order to permit cohabitation.36 These private memories, then, coexist alongside the other memorials and the memory discourses circulating in the public sphere. Both they and the activities of other memory-makers discussed above point towards the fact that official remembrance cannot control the meaning of the past for citizens, even if certain narratives and forms of memorialisation can be part of a bid for social control. The sites and spaces of genocide are a palimpsest of memories and meanings; the official annual commemorations at a Rwandan church may control the meaning of the past once a year, but they cannot control everyday memories provoked by everyday places in the aftermath of genocide.37 Nevertheless, part of the point here is that suffering and pain are not always socially validated, and the danger with submerged or ‘hushed’ histories – as has so clearly been shown with regard to the breakup of the former Yugoslavia38 – is that they can all too easily fuel conflict at a later date: as Buckley-Zistel comments, the danger of chosen amnesia in Rwanda, because it prevents conversations about why the genocide happened and elevates some sufferings of others, is that ‘it leaves social antagonisms untouched. It prevents the social transformation of the society into one that will render ethnicity-related killings impossible.’39 190

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The global sphere of memory These struggles over memory are not confined to the domestic arena. Memory actors – whether victims calling for recognition, or state officials or artists designing a memorial or museum – now operate in (and are aware that they operate in) a memory sphere which is increasingly globalised, and which can itself validate, contest, or inflect domestic narratives and representations. In the aftermath of genocide, the globalised (and globalising) memory norm of ‘never again’ is indigenised – nunca más, da se ne ponovi, ntidigasubire – but states and activists take up and instrumentalise human rights discourses in often very different ways. Whilst states which are explicitly seeking to break with the genocidal past often deploy human rights discourses, with more or (usually) less sincerity, in order to regain international standing and funding for development, activists use the power of personal testimony, and quite specifically the moral power of the word ‘genocide’, to assail both the domestic and the international conscience: their aim is not just to jolt domestic populations, but to elicit a response (and pressure) from the ‘international community’.40 Occasionally this has triggered what one might term a ‘geopolitics of apology’ – Australia’s ‘Sorry Day’, Germany’s apology to Namibia in 2004 – but it is important to remember that these apologies have largely been symbolic (an apology exactly a century after the beginning of a genocide is otherwise rather arbitrary) and are ultimately governed by domestic politics or more standard geopolitics: Australia’s Stolen Generations had to wait until 2008 and a government change for an official (again, largely symbolic – though undeniably emotionally powerful) apology, Kevin Rudd’s first act as Prime Minister;41 and while (implausible) rumours circulate that Turkey will not be permitted to join the EU until it recognises the Armenian genocide, its regional power is one of the major reasons nations such as the US and UK have evaded recognising the genocide themselves. Beyond the symbolic political arena, there are other, more direct interventions from outside the domestic sphere. The development of transitional justice mechanisms following the demise of the Latin American dictatorships, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and genocide in Rwanda and Bosnia has meant that some form of reconciliation commission has been set up for almost every recent conflict.42 The raft of associated experts, staff, and researchers will necessarily inflect memory as they organise justice and truth-telling processes, and facilitate community workshops or try to help survivors ‘work through’ their trauma. Each process draws out and airs personal memories and experiences, often in the public arena, and encourages (or even requires) the respondents to assign new meanings to those memories, emplotting them according to a new register – one of forgiveness and reconciliation. There is no reason, though, to presume that these processes really can bring ‘closure’43 – as some of Eric Stover’s Bosnian respondents argued, reconciliation and ‘justice’ mean many different things to many different people, and while, for example, judicial processes are often hailed as bringing reconciliation through establishing ‘the facts’, ‘tribunal truth,’ based largely on facts about individual events, left little latitude for answering the fundamental ‘why’ questions: Why had the defendants set out to destroy communities that had lived in harmony for decades? Why the excessive brutality, the mutilations, and secret burials of victims? Why the denial and inability to accept that what they had done was wrong?44 191

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Equally, staff who are engaged in facilitating community discussions about the past may remain unaware of those experiences which, as in Rwanda, have already been silenced in the public sphere – thereby in some sense enforcing the domestic status quo. In some ways, then, these international processes introduce another metanarrative into the domestic sphere, one which tries to explain and more importantly neutralise the violence, but which in fact forcefully re-opens survivors’ old questions even as it silences them in the name of closure. These direct interventions can also take the form of the sharing of expertise, and this has been particularly notable in the arena of official memorialisation. The UK-based charity Aegis Trust, which runs the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, has been heavily involved in Rwandan memorialisation, first guiding the design of the Kigali Memorial Centre at Gisozi, and then later the museum at Murambi. In their design, aesthetic and layout these two museums are very reminiscent of Western Holocaust museums, and as various commentators have noted, there is a stark difference between them and the rest of the country’s memorials,45 not only because of the memorials which display the remains of the dead in their gruesome immediacy, but also because they are frequently housed in dilapidated former churches or municipal buildings, and have had to make do with the resources available. In another context, Suzanne Bardgett, then curator of the Holocaust Exhibition and the Crimes Against Humanity Exhibition in London’s Imperial War Museum, and staff from Camp Westerbork Memorial Centre (Netherlands), visited and gave advice on the design of the exhibition in the Srebrenica Memorial Centre. Their influence perhaps shows especially in the small space where the photographs, short life stories, and personal possessions of fifteen of the murdered men and boys are displayed, echoing the current trend in Holocaust commemoration towards individualising the victims (there is a similar room in the Kigali Memorial Centre). Bardgett herself and her team visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington when planning the IWM exhibition; the USHMM has been directly involved in some memorialisation efforts (for example the new Holocaust memorial in Bucharest), and has influenced the design of many more, it seems fair to say (given the relative uniformity in design of the purpose-built Holocaust museums in London, Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, Oslo, Jerusalem, and most recently, Skopje). In one way, these links and networks could be read as symptomatic of ‘the globalisation of Holocaust memory’46 and the spread of its patterns of representation and memorialisation to other genocides. In truth, though, the Holocaust’s meanings are always ‘indigenised’, as William Miles comments,47 and the meanings of the past, in the aftermath of any genocide, will be determined more by the potent private, public and official memories than by international interventions.

Conclusion The examples drawn upon here show that the dynamics of memory and memorialisation after genocide are little different to those which follow most historical events – in that in each, the public sphere of memory is made up of multiple and competing memories, each of which seeks to control, alter, or open up the meanings of the past, and some of which silence others. Memorialisation, too, is used by both state and civic groups to shape and emblematise, or to confront and provoke memory. And yet what does set the memory and memorialisation of genocide apart is, firstly, the emotiveness of the word itself – and the way it intensifies both victim groups’ calls for recognition, 192

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and the evasive self-justifications of states and societies that do not wish to be associated with the ‘crime of crimes’ – and secondly, the urgency which governs memory in the aftermath of genocide, since memory itself is central in dispelling – but also mobilising – social violence.

Notes 1 Dan Stone, ‘Genocide and Memory’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 102–19 (104, 102). 2 Louis Bickford and Amy Sodaro, ‘Remembering Yesterday to Protect Tomorrow: The Internationalisation of a New Commemorative Paradigm’, in Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown and Amy Sodaro (eds), Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 66–86 (69). 3 See also the International Centre for Transitional Justice website: http://ictj.org/. 4 Kevin Lewis O’Neill and Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Genocide, Truth, Memory, and Representation: An Introduction’, in Alexander Laban Hinton and Kevin Lewis O’Neill (eds), Genocide: Truth, Memory, and Representation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2009), pp. 1–26 (5). 5 Wulf Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory Studies’, History and Theory 41, 2002, pp. 179–97 (188). 6 See especially Kansteiner, ‘Finding Meaning in Memory’; Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse’, Representations 69, 2000, pp. 127–50; Alon Confino, Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method’, American Historical Review 102:5, 1997, pp. 1386–403. 7 The seminal works here, respectively, are Charles Maier, The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); and James E. Young, At Memory’s Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000). 8 Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Fatma Müge Göçek, Denial of Violence: Ottoman Past, Turkish Present and the Collective Violence against the Armenians 1789–2009 (Oxford University Press, 2014). 9 For an excellent (comparative) discussion, see James Mark, ‘Containing Fascism: History in Post-Communist Baltic Occupation and Genocide Museums’, in Péter Apor and Oksana Sarkisova (eds), Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums After 1989 (Budapest/New York: Central European University Press, 2008), pp. 335–69. 10 See Leslie Dwyer, ‘A Politics of Silences: Violence, Memory, and Treacherous Speech in Post1965 Bali’, in Hinton and O’Neill (eds), Genocide, pp. 113–46 (especially 116–18). 11 The museum at Van includes a section entitled ‘The Armenian massacres’ – which describes the Turks killed by Armenians during the battle for the city in 1915. See http://www.kultur. gov.tr/EN,39626/van-museum-and-historical-ruins.html. 12 Aleida Assmann and Linda Short, ‘Introduction’, in Aleida Assmann and Linda Short (eds), Memory and Political Change (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 7. 13 Jonathan D. Greenberg, ‘Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25:1, 2005, pp. 89–110 (93–4), citing Clifford Geertz, ‘The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States’, in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), pp. 255–310. 14 Greenberg, ‘Generations of Memory’, p. 94. 15 André du Pisani, ‘The Discursive Limits of SWAPO’s Dominant Discourses on Anti-Colonial Nationalism in Postcolonial Namibia – a First Exploration’, in André du Pisani, Reinhart Kössler and William A. Lindeke (eds), The Long Aftermath of War – Reconciliation and Transition in Namibia, Freiburg: Arnold Bergstraesser Institut, 2010, pp. 1–40; Reinhart Kössler, ‘Facing a Fragmented Past: Memory, Culture and Politics in Namibia’, Journal of Southern African Studies 33:2, 2007, pp. 361–82.

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16 James McDougall, ‘Martyrdom and Destiny: The Inscription and Imagination of Algerian History’, in Ussama Samir Makdisi and Paul A. Silverstein (eds), Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2006), pp. 50–72 (51). 17 Raphaëlle Branche, ‘The Martyr’s Torch: Memory and Power in Algeria’, Journal of North African Studies 16:3, 2011, pp. 431–43 (432). 18 Rachel Hughes, ‘Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials’, in Susan E. Cook (ed.), Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006), pp. 269–92. 19 Judy Ledgerwood, ‘The Cambodian Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes’, Museum Anthropology 21:1, 1997, pp. 82–98 (91). 20 See Scott Straus and Lars Waldorf (eds), Remaking Rwanda: State Building and Human Rights after Mass Violence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011). 21 Sara Guyer, ‘Rwanda’s Bones’, boundary 2 36:2, 2009, pp. 155–75 (162). See also Jens Meierhenrich, ‘Topographies of Forgetting and Remembering’, in Straus and Waldorf (eds), Remaking Rwanda, pp. 283–96. 22 As Aleida Assmann and Linda Short note, at certain moments the experiences and memories of previously marginalised segments of society may themselves become part of the dominant discourses – as, for example, have Holocaust survivor memories. Assmann and Short, ‘Introduction’, p. 8. 23 Branche, ‘The Martyr’s Torch’, p. 439. 24 Katherine Hite and Cath Collins, ‘Memorial Fragments, Monumental Silences and Reawakenings in 21st-Century Chile’, Millennium 38:2, 2009, pp. 379–400 (381). 25 http://www.humanrights.gov.au/publications/bringing-them-home-stolen-childrenreport-1997. 26 Robert van Krieken, ‘Cultural Genocide in Australia’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 128–55 (133). 27 Reinhart Kössler, ‘Political Intervention and the Image of History: Communal Memory Events in Central and Southern Namibia’, in Pisani, Kössler and Lindeke (eds), The Long Aftermath, pp. 371–402 (400). The state narrative was appropriated in a slightly different way in the (then) Soviet Republic of Armenia, where local memorials conformed with prescribed abstract socialist–realist aesthetic, but with a distinct localisation of the meaning of heroism at the memorials in the villages of Musaler and Agarak, where members of the communities which had resisted the Turks at Musa Dagh and Van settled. Commemoration of the Armenian genocide (as a national history) was only permitted by the Soviets after mass demonstrations in Yerevan in 1965, the 50th anniversary. The spate of local memorials constructed after the fall of the Soviet Union almost all take the traditional form of the khachkar (cross). See my ‘Situating Tsitsernakaberd: The Armenian Genocide Museum in a Global Context’, International Journal of Armenian Genocide Studies 1:1 (forthcoming) and Tsypylma Darieva, ‘“The Road to Golgotha”: Representing Loss in Postsocialist Armenia’, Focaal – European Journal of Anthropology 52, 2008, pp. 92–108 . 28 Sarah E. Wagner, To Know Where He Lies: DNA Technology and the Search for Srebrenica’s Missing, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008, pp. 70–71 and p. 281 n16. See also Selma Leydesdorff, Surviving the Bosnian Genocide: The Women of Srebrenica Speak (trans. Kay Richardson) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011). 29 Hite and Collins, ‘Memorial Fragments’, pp. 382–3. 30 James E. Young, ‘The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today’, Critical Inquiry 18:2, 1992, pp. 267–96. 31 Hite and Collins, ‘Memorial Fragments’, p. 391. 32 Wagner, To Know Where He Lies, pp. 72–3. 33 See Paul B. Miller, ‘Contested Memories: the Bosnian Genocide in Serb and Muslim Minds’, Journal of Genocide Research 8:3, 2006, pp. 311–24. 34 Jennie E. Burnet, ‘Whose Genocide? Whose Truth? Representations of Victim and Perpetrator in Rwanda’, in Hinton and O’Neill (eds), Genocide, pp. 80–110 (89, 91). 35 Lars Waldorf, ‘Instrumentalizing Genocide: The RPF’s Campaign Against “Genocide Ideology”’, in Straus and Waldorf (eds), Remaking Rwanda, pp. 48–66.

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36 Susanne Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’, Africa 76:2, 2006, pp. 131–50. 37 See also Jens Meierhenrich, ‘The Transformation of lieux de mémoire: the Nyabarongo River in Rwanda, 1992–2009’, Anthropology Today 25:5, 2009, pp. 13–19. 38 See Robert M. Hayden, ‘Recounting the Dead: The Rediscovery and Redefinition of Wartime Massacres in Late- and Post-Communist Yugoslavia’, in Ruby S. Watson (ed.), Memory, Opposition and History under State Socialism (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1994), pp. 167–84; Cornelia Sorabji, ‘Managing Memories in Post-War Sarajevo: Individuals, Bad Memories, and New Wars’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, 2006, pp. 1–18. 39 Buckley-Zistel, ‘Remembering to Forget’, p. 147. 40 Moreover, the campaigns themselves are often of an international character: diasporas are often very active in lobbying (the Armenian diaspora especially so), trials can easily cross borders (the ICTY and ICTR being the obvious examples, but consider also Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón’s filing of genocide charges against Argentine military officers and his international arrest warrant for Pinochet), as can reparations claims (including the Herero claim against three German companies and the German government submitted in the US courts in 2001: see David Bargueño, ‘Cash for Genocide? The Politics of Memory in the Herero Case for Reparations’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26:3, 2012, pp. 394–424. 41 See Tony Barta, ‘Sorry, and Not Sorry, in Australia: How the Apology to the Stolen Generations Buried a History of Genocide’, Journal of Genocide Research 10:2, 2008, pp. 201–14. 42 For an overview of this process, and the historiography of the field of ‘transitional justice’, see Alexander Laban Hinton, ‘Introduction: Toward an Anthropology of Transitional Justice’, in Alexander Laban Hinton (ed.), Transitional Justice: Global Mechanisms and Local Realities after Genocide and Mass Violence (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), pp. 1–22. 43 If this is even desirable – since it seems to imply a mute acceptance or even ‘forgetting’ of the past, individually/on an individual-by-individual basis/by each individual, rather than leaving open the possibility of an open-ended public discussion of what the past meant and means, and thereby a renegotiation of civic and social identity. 44 Eric Stover, The Witnesses: War Crimes and the Promise of Justice in The Hague (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), p. 117. 45 Pat Caplan, ‘“Never Again”: Genocide Memorials in Rwanda’, Anthropology Today 23:1, 2007, pp. 20–22; Guyer, ‘Rwanda’s Bones’. 46 Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider, The Holocaust and Memory in The Global Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006). Cf. Amos Goldberg’s interesting comments on how the new (2005) Yad Vashem museum interweaves ‘the global change in Holocaust memory in a very special way into its very Israeli national local context’. Goldberg, ‘The “Jewish Narrative” in the Yad Vashem Global Holocaust Museum’, Journal of Genocide Research 14:2, 2012, pp. 187–213 (189). 47 William F. S. Miles, ‘Third World Views on the Holocaust’, Journal of Genocide Research 6:3, 2004, pp. 371–93. See also Shirli Gilbert, ‘Anne Frank in South Africa: Remembering the Holocaust During and After Apartheid’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies 26:3, 2012, pp. 366–93.

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14 WRI TING ‘HI STOR Y ’ F O R H I T LER Holocaust denial since 1945 Mark Hobbs

‘We started here [in Poland] with 3.5 million [Jews] and now only insignificant working parties are left. As for the remainder – we shall say some day – they migrated.’ Hans Frank 2 August 1943.1

Those who promote Holocaust denial claim that two-thirds of European Jews were not slaughtered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Second World War. Instead, Holocaust deniers attempt to replace the established historical narratives of the Holocaust with their own mendacious accounts of the past. They state that there was no Nazi policy of extermination; that the Holocaust is the invention of the Jews with the aim of extorting financial reparations from Germany and to gain sympathy for the state of Israel. It is also an attempt to rewrite the history of the Second World War, in which Nazi Germany is presented as a victim and in which the war crimes of the Allied powers far outweighed those of Germany. The primary aim of denial is to present antisemitic ideology, extreme nationalism and far-right ideologies as a viable political alternative to Western democracy, free of any connection to genocide. Holocaust denial is not a straightforward label to apply and this is due to two factors; first, what deniers say and do changes and their definition and understanding of the Holocaust differs widely from how academics understand the Holocaust. Second, the way in which denial has been studied by historians and activists fighting against it has at times blurred the lines about what constitutes denial. Holocaust deniers attack the main premises of the Holocaust: that there was an organised extermination programme using gas chambers, crematoria or death camps to kill millions of Jews; that an estimated six million Jews were killed; that there was an intention to commit genocide on the basis of racial identity.2 Deniers do, however, acknowledge, and at times celebrate, Nazi antisemitic laws and the presence of widespread antisemitism in Nazi Germany. Deniers assert that antisemitism was based on a genuine and real threat from Jews and their conspiratorial networks. The terms and motifs adopted by academics have also contributed to a complication in the way in which we approach denial. ‘Holocaust denial’ may be the most commonly employed term but others such as ‘revisionism’, ‘negationism’ as well as ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ variants of Holocaust denial are also employed to describe the phenomenon. These terminologies consolidate themselves around the idea that the history of the Holocaust has been rejected outright or a concerted effort has been made to minimise the scale and magnitude of the events. 196

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This chapter explores the individuals who have attempted to rewrite the history of genocide, in this case the history of the Holocaust, and explores the inherently genocidal motivations behind that act. Holocaust denial is the continuation of Nazi thought and incorporates the traditional antisemitic tropes in order to, paradoxically, suggest that antisemitism, particularly Nazi antisemitism, does not lead to genocide, while simultaneously containing the genocidal qualities of redemptive antisemitism outlined by Saul Friedländer: a view in which antisemites ‘redeem’ themselves and the world by destroying Jews and the international Jewish conspiracy.3 The aim of this chapter is not to respond to the arguments of Holocaust deniers, for this has been done comprehensively before and by numerous academics, historians, institutions and anti-racism groups.4 Rather, the purpose of the chapter is to explore the key themes and the history of the movement from 1945 to the present day in order to show the prevailing continuities of antisemitism and how it has responded to changes in contemporary society, Holocaust historiography and public memorials of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial before ‘The Holocaust’ As the opening quotation of this chapter shows (taken from the diary of Hans Frank, the Governor of occupied Poland’s Generalgouvernement) the first people to deny the Nazi genocide of the Jews were the Nazis themselves. Frank’s prediction details the type of ‘history’ that the Nazis may have written in regard to the disappearance of Jewish populations throughout Europe. When combined with other high-ranking Nazi responses to the Final Solution it is clear that there was synchronicity in their attitudes towards their crimes. Heinrich Himmler, in his speech to senior figures in the SS at Posen in October 1943, described the murder of European Jewry as an unwritten and ‘never to be written’ page of glory in Germany’s great history.5 Nazi newspapers also made no mention of the fate befalling the Jews in the occupied territories.6 Details about the extermination of the Jews of Europe did, however, reach the population of Germany through a number of channels.7 Nazi denial should come as no surprise because, like any murderer, the Nazis attempted to conceal their crimes. This was evidenced by the dismantling of the ‘Reinhard’ death camps once they had completed their murderous task; the destruction of the crematoria at Auschwitz; the exhumation of mass graves and burning of the victims’ bodies; and the destruction of documents pertaining to the crimes at the close of the Second World War. Frank’s and Himmler’s ideas of a ‘never to be written page of history’ did not come to fruition; in fact quite the opposite is true as this tragic page in history is now one of the most documented and written about genocides. Yet, some individuals and groups have attempted to make the fantasy of Frank a reality and claim that, amongst a whole cavalcade of mendacious lies, Jews did migrate from German-held territory and were not the victims of genocide.8 In the initial aftermath of the Second World War, individuals were active in denying what by the 1970s had become known as the Holocaust. Therefore it may seem problematic to discuss Holocaust denial before the monolithic label of the Holocaust had crystallised in the public consciousness and academic research. Talking of Holocaust denial before it acquired the name could be seen as employing a teleological way of thinking. Yet this is not the case, for while some have talked about a ‘silence’ regarding the Holocaust in the years after the Second World War, it is clear that the genocide of the Jews of Europe was discussed. Scholars have recently attested that this silence 197

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was somewhat of a ‘myth’.9 Indeed, the early forms of denial, ‘revisionism’ or ‘negationism’ attest to this fact by their continued attempts to discredit the testimony of the survivors and the evidence presented at postwar tribunals. These are not denials of the Holocaust as we understand it today, but rather an attempt to deprive Jews of their victimhood under the Third Reich and in Nazi-occupied territories and suggest that mass murder and the destruction of European Jewry was fabricated and that Germany was a victim. The first generation of revisionist writers set in motion the building blocks for those authors who would follow them, and the intrinsic belief that a Jewish ‘plot’ was at work provided the foundation of all future work. It is also apparent that the arguments on which these writers rested their thesis were drawn from the annals of anti-Jewish conspiracy theory which had contributed to the Holocaust itself. As early as 1942 Alexander Ratcliffe, leader of the Protestant Defence League, responded to newspaper reports and speeches in the House of Commons which spoke of Nazi atrocities against the Jews of Europe in his newspaper Vanguard and in additional pamphlets. In his pamphlet The Truth about the Jews, he wrote: ‘there is not a single authentic case on record of a single Jew having been massacred in Germany or unlawfully put to death under the Hitler regime’. Ratcliffe went on to state that after the war historians would prove that 95% of the accounts of atrocities against the Jews were ‘the invention of the Jewish mind’ and that the photographs had been forged in ‘Jewish cinema studios’.10 Ratcliffe’s arguments were based on his predilection for antisemitic conspiracies. The pamphlet itself was not dedicated to the reports emerging from Europe but rather a diatribe of antisemitic tropes based on Protocols of the Elders of Zion conspiracy theory.11 In his mind, this validated his belief that the reports of murder and massacre were a Jewish hoax.12 Ironically – but not surprisingly, given his fanatical obsession with the Jews – Ratcliffe was giving reports of Nazi atrocities in Europe a distinctly Jewish dimension at a time when the Allied powers were trying to stress the universality of suffering at the hands of the Nazis rather than Jewish particularism.13 It was after the war had ended that these early denials began in earnest. In 1948 the French denier Paul Rassinier, much noted and cited by Holocaust deniers because he had been interned at the Buchenwald and Dora concentration camps, published Passage de la ligne (‘Crossing the line’). The work is directed towards exonerating the German SS camp guards and Nazi hierarchy. His argument rests on the notion that it was not SS guards which had been responsible for acts of unspeakable brutality but rather the prisoners to whom they had entrusted the running of the camps. Rassinier also suggests that the testimony of witnesses could not be relied upon (except, of course, his) and that reports of conditions in the camps had little more evidentiary value than common gossip. Initially Rassinier did not deny the existence of the gas chambers, but claimed that there were not as many as reported and that they were the product of rogue SS men who disobeyed orders and had no connection to the Nazi hierarchy in Berlin.14 This argument was later developed and expanded by David Irving, a British military historian of the Second World War, who would claim that Hitler had not known about the Holocaust. In Hitler’s War Irving claimed that Hitler was such a ‘weak dictator’ that mass murder of the Jews was organised by Nazi functionaries and Himmler. In essence Irving tried to bend the arguments of functionalist historians to a point in which Hitler was absent from any decisions about the mass murder of the Jews. Irving also claimed that once Hitler became aware of what was happening it was too late for him to stop the genocide, taking the functionalist 198

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account of the Holocaust to a point which proved untenable for a historical narrative.15 By 1964 in Le Drame des Juifs Europeéns (‘The Drama of the European Jews’) Rassinier claimed that the gas chambers were an invention of the Zionist establishment, as was the charge that six million Jews had been murdered. Rassinier was not alone in France in denying Nazi atrocities or the Final Solution. Maurice Bardèche, an unrepentant fascist and defender of French collaboration, attacked the evidence which related to the destruction of European Jewry presented at Nuremberg in his 1948 book Nuremberg ou la Terre promise (Nuremberg or the Promised Land). As Stephen Atkins highlights, the principles which Bardèche laid down in this work were the primary arguments adopted by deniers: (1) Jews are responsible for World War II, (2) eyewitnesses are not reliable, (3) horrors of the communist regime should not be forgotten, (4) atrocities committed in the camps are committed by the deported, (5) after the first defeats of the Germans, things became more difficult in the camps, (6) at no time did the National Socialist regime want to exterminate the Jews, and (7) if there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, it was to prevent disease.16 However, as Stephen Atkins and Deborah Lipstadt have suggested, deniers tended to distance themselves from Bardèche because of his overtly explicit pro-fascist views, which indicates the early tensions which grew out of fascist and Nazi thinking after the defeat of Germany in 1945. Nazism and fascism may have been militarily defeated in most of Europe but it still pervaded the minds of its supporters, and this proved more difficult to extinguish. This was not only true of ardent Nazis. As Tony Judd demonstrated, a consistent majority of Germans in the immediate years after the war felt that Nazism was a ‘good idea, badly applied’.17 As a result key components of these ideologies were used to explain the societal environments in which these individuals lived; extreme nationalist sentiments, anti-democratic, anti-Soviet and antisemitic beliefs were very much embedded in their world view. Through such ideological filters these writers created a ‘history’ which explained the present in which they found themselves. And the glue which held this history together was the notion of a conspiracy at work which, to their minds, redeemed and confirmed their analysis of the present and past. This conspiracy came in the familiar form of a Jewish or Zionist plot and relied heavily on the propaganda peddled by the Nazis. In this line of thinking Nazi Germany had been engaged in a very real war against the Jews. It was the Jews who had been the instigators of the Second World War and had started the war against the Nazis as a result of the anti-Jewish measures implemented by Nazi Germany. The defeat of Nazism had seen the Jews victorious and many far-right individuals saw the postwar anti-fascist thinking as a direct product of Jewish propaganda. Deniers believe this ‘victory’ was epitomised in the Nuremberg Tribunals, which they claim were under the control of Jews. For deniers, the information which emanated from the postwar courtrooms was simply propaganda, aimed at besmirching the ideologies they held dear. The way in which denial was disseminated differed from individual to individual and group to group. This is evidenced in the way some deniers were eager to distance themselves from politically toxic individuals like Bardèche. Yet, as always, the past had to be considered and explanations for it found but the accounts which would be constructed were based on a proscribed ideological outcome: Jews had not been murdered in any great numbers by Nazi Germany or her allies; genocide was a myth 199

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propagated by the Jews. And in order to give these arguments an air of legitimacy the conspiracy had to be given a structure which could at least pertain to some kind of ‘truth’.

The pseudo-academic approach to Holocaust denial It should be noted that while Holocaust denial became entrenched in a distinctly farright way of thinking, it was not unique to extreme right-wing circles; the extreme left and extreme Islamic political movements have also engaged, and continue to engage, in Holocaust denial. Holocaust denial therefore has an intrinsically political utility, and while many deniers claim not to be antisemitic or engaged in attempts to rehabilitate Nazism, preferring to cast themselves in the role of pursuers of ‘truth’, Holocaust denial cannot function without conspiracy at its heart. This is the fact which renders it an absurdity. Holocaust deniers are constantly engaged in trying to make the world see their ‘truth’ and by the late 1960s and early 1970s this had led to a recalibration in the presentation of denial. Deniers began to apply a pseudo-academic framework to their work which aped the traditional conventions of academic scholarship. By using footnotes and bibliographies and presenting their work as legitimate historical revision deniers aimed to attract a wider public readership. This recalibration included the establishment of Institute for Historical Review (IHR) in the United States in 1978 by Willis Carto (founder of the antisemitic United States lobby group Liberty) and William McCalden (co-founder of the neo-Nazi British National Party). Its ‘peer-reviewed’ Journal of Historical Review attempted to move away from overt and crude antisemitic tropes used by the first generation of Holocaust deniers. Conspiracy and antisemitic arguments remained intrinsic to the works published. From 1992 the journal was edited by Mark Weber (a member of the antisemitic white supremacist National Alliance in the United States) who had joined the IHR in 1978. Weber became the public face of the IHR, appearing on The Montel Williams TV show in 1992 on which he claimed that the number of Jews killed in the Second World War was significantly lower than six million.18 Other examples of this pseudo-academic approach can be seen in the publications which emerged at this time: Thies Christophersen’s Die Auschwitz Lüge (The Auschwitz Lie), Wilhelm Stäglich’s Auschwitz-Mythos (Auschwitz Myth), Richard Harwood’s19 Did Six Million Really Die? and Austin App’s The Six Million Swindle, all of which were published in 1973. These were later joined in 1976 by Arthur Butz’s Hoax of the Twentieth Century and Paul Rassinier’s Debunking the Genocide Myth (1978). The common themes of these works built on the established protocols of the first generation of Holocaust deniers. The work of Christophersen also added to the arguments of Holocaust deniers because he had been at the Auschwitz complex (he worked in the labour camp of Raisko) and claimed to have visited Birkenau several times and not to have seen any evidence of mass extermination. Christophersen likened the death camp to a sort of holiday resort where prisoners could listen to music in their rooms, swim or visit the brothel. He later rescinded this allegation when he was captured on film stating that he had lied about the gas chambers because of his loyalty to the SS and his desire to protect German honour.20 Despite this, deniers still frequently use Christophersen as a reliable witness and conveniently forget to mention the videotape episode in which he had thought he had been talking to a trusted band of loyal neo-Nazi supporters. 200

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These second-generation deniers attempted to consolidate the publication of the first and build upon them by constructing arguments to destabilise the narratives historians of the Holocaust were in the process of constructing.21 These works attempted a more detailed interaction with Holocaust scholarship with the ultimate aim of presenting an alternative historical narrative of the Second World War: they claimed to be the ‘other side’ of the argument: the counter-argument to the ‘exterminationist’ explanation of legitimate academic historians. They still contained the same overarching conclusions of their forbears but were ‘supported’ by footnotes and lengthy calculations which attempted to prove that six million Jews were not murdered in any systematic way and instead had, as Frank prophesised, migrated to the United States or the Soviet Union.22

‘Sink the Auschwitz!’ Holocaust denial and the ‘Battleship Auschwitz’23 In 1990 the IHR published in their journal a transcript of a speech David Irving gave at the institute’s tenth conference. Irving explained ‘the historical profession – above all, the revisionist historical profession – have found as our own task, the major task: “Sink the Auschwitz!”’ In a speech loaded with Titanic and militaristic metaphors, Irving called upon his fellow deniers to divert their efforts to disproving that the death camps had been a site of mass genocide. Irving claimed: The Auschwitz has been steering amongst the icebergs, and finally it has begun to scuttle itself. They’ve [survivors, academic historians and Nazi war crime hunters] begun to haul down the flag of the battleship Auschwitz. They’ve taken down the placard. They’ve taken down the memorial to the four million, and they’ve replaced it with a rather smaller memorial to one million. Irving claimed that the removal of the memorial to the murder of four million people at Auschwitz and its replacement with a memorial to one million was evidence of the victories of the deniers. Of course this was ludicrous; historians as far back as the 1960s had claimed that the Soviet figure of four million deaths at Auschwitz was too high and arrived at a figure that was closer to one million.24 Auschwitz had always been a prime focus for attack by Holocaust deniers, yet as Holocaust memory began to crystallise in the late 1980s deniers’ attacks became more concentrated. As Peter Hayes has noted, Auschwitz is the ‘capital of the Holocaust’, the place which is ‘indelibly linked with all of its multiple dimensions’ as well as being the dominant and pervading site and embodiment of the Holocaust in public and collective memories.25 It is for this very reason that deniers have been drawn to attack Auschwitz; they think that if the public and historical perceptions of this site of murder can be changed and destroyed and the history of it rendered untenable then the history of the Holocaust will also be erased. This kind of attack is not limited to Auschwitz; they have also sought out other key symbols of the Holocaust for their protracted attacks, a key example being the diary of Anne Frank.26 To this end deniers have tried in a variety of ways to ‘prove’ that their arguments outweigh those of legitimate historical research and in this task they have turned to other disciplines to support their fanciful hypotheses. This was epitomised in The Leuchter Report. Its author, Fred A. Leuchter, had been hired as an expert witness by Ernst Zündel, a German national living in Canada, for his defence at his 1988 trial 201

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for reporting false news. At this time Zündel was a leading exporter from Canada to the United States and Germany of Nazi memorabilia, antisemitic and Holocaust denial literature. Zündel was on trial for the publication and redistribution of Richard Harwood’s Did Six Million Really Die?27 The trial was a showcase of the Holocaust denial ‘glitterati’ with French far-right professor Robert Faurisson, Mark Weber and Bradley Smith all testifying in Zündel’s defence. Also testifying for Zündel was David Irving, who claimed that after reading the evidence of Leuchter he had fully ‘converted’ to Holocaust denial rather than the ‘half-way house’ position he had espoused before: that the Holocaust had taken place but Hitler had not known about it.28 Leuchter was instructed to collect samples from the sites of the gas chambers in Poland, specifically the sites at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Majdanek. In the report Leuchter claimed to have identified only trace amounts of residual cyanide from the gas chambers, whereas he identified a concentration 150 to 1,000 times higher in the chambers for delousing clothing. Holocaust deniers hailed this as conclusive proof that the gas chambers were a myth and the Holocaust a falsification of history. Leuchter’s ‘evidence’ was, however, deeply flawed, as was Zündel’s choice of his ‘expert witness’. Leuchter had no background in chemistry, nor did he have any supporting credentials for his profession as an engineer and the report was dismissed on this basis at the trial. Leuchter’s report had not taken into account that much lower levels of hydrocyanic acid were needed to kill humans than lice, or the fact that the gas chambers took less time to kill their victims than in the delousing chambers (which had to operate for hours in order to kill the lice, and thus explained the presence of higher levels of hydrocyanic acid in the delousing chambers). Furthermore, it was impossible to explain why there should have been any levels present in the gas chambers, which deniers like Zündel and Faurisson claimed were morgues.29 Dispute all the evidence to the contrary, the report was published in 1989 by David Irving’s publishing house, Focal Point Publications and Ernst Zündel’s Samisdat Publications. This report is still widely used in Holocaust denial literature as ‘scientific proof’ that the gas chambers were a fabrication. As Marvin Perry and Frederick Schweitzer have noted, the report ‘is tantamount to Goebbels quoting the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to justify Nazi antisemitism. And if the history of the Protocols is any indication, The Leuchter Report will have a long life and win converts.’30 The attacks on Auschwitz did not end with the Zündel trial, however, and were again a recurring theme of the 2001 libel trial brought against Deborah Lipstadt and Penguin Books by David Irving. Irving claimed that Lipstadt wrongly branded him a Holocaust denier and antisemite. Irving, like Zündel’s defence lawyer, attempted to use the trial to prove that the systematic murder of Jews had not taken place, or had been grossly exaggerated and that his work and views were the product of genuine historical revisionism. During the proceedings Irving attempted to prove the Holocaust deniers’ adage ‘no holes no Holocaust’, meaning that if the openings in the roof of the crematoria could not be seen or ‘proved’ to have existed the purpose of such structures could not have been genocidal. This claim was proven to be false and shown as such by Robert Van Pelt in his exchanges with Irving in the courtroom, his expert testimony and in his and other academics’ subsequent publications.31 Again the deniers were defeated and Irving was found to be a manipulator of the historical record, an antisemite and a Holocaust denier; Lipstadt and Penguin Books were cleared of all charges against them and Irving was forced to pay hefty legal fees. It is clear that Holocaust deniers have not made any headway with trying to infect historical 202

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narratives with their particular brand of bigotry. Irving’s cry to sink the Auschwitz ‘battleship’ came to nothing and it remains impervious to the feeble volleys of Holocaust deniers. The Lipstadt trial had wider implications for Holocaust denial, and began what Nick Terry had described as a decline in the output of Holocaust deniers. The Journal for Historical Review closed in 2002, and by 2009 Mark Weber admitted that while a ‘worthy endeavour’, Holocaust revisionism had ‘proved to be as much a hindrance as a help’ in ‘the real world struggle against Jewish-Zionist power’.32 This setback had a further consequence, however: Holocaust deniers in the wake of the failure of their attacks on Auschwitz had by the mid-2000s directed their attention to the Aktion Reinhard camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. A new body of texts were directed towards Treblinka by veteran denier authors Carlo Mattogno and Jürgen Graf.33 In light of these developments Holocaust denial has entered a period of decline, with the first generation of deniers dead and the second generation either dying off or putting down their pens. Essentially, as Nick Terry has argued, Holocaust denial lacks ‘new blood’ and most of these deniers are now ‘either dead or inactive. It’s down to only three or four authors who are capable of writing such books . . . the big names of the eighties and nineties are mostly over 60. Very few under-60s are stepping up to replace them.’34 That is not to say that these texts do not continue to have a resonance, as the comments by Perry and Schweitzer above attest to; such texts are the Protocols of Zion in a post-Holocaust world. The ideas within the denial tracts are constantly recycled amongst extremist political and fundamental religious groups.

The political uses of Holocaust denial: Constructing history and memory As Deborah Lipstadt has rightly highlighted, Holocaust denial is an attempt to rehabilitate extreme far-right ideologies; to cleanse extremist nationalism of the taints of National Socialism.35 The pseudo-academic structures employed by deniers are part of an orchestrated and surreptitious attempt to camouflage their true objectives. However, the overt nature of their antisemitism and belief in a conspiracy is explicit, and suggests little in the way of an alternative history; it is eventually deconstructive and replaces the established past with an tangential fable that is suited to their ideological agenda. As Robert Van Pelt has shown, deniers have ‘not been able, or willing, to even begin writing a single piece of investigative journalism (let alone produce one product of serious revisionist historiography) that gives us the origin and development of this conspiracy’.36 The conspiracy is, however, of central importance and constructs the pasts which allow them to make sense of their ideologies. It is not enough to simply say that denial is about the political rehabilitation of Nazism for the extreme nationalists. Denial also forms the backbone of a shared ‘history’ or a form of constructed ‘collective memory’ that has been constructed to maintain the belief in the conspiracy. This is all too apparent in the far right of Europe and America, in which different parties or movements use Holocaust denial in different ways to underpin their ideologies and essentially use the conspiracy of ‘the Jews’ to explain their political failure. As demonstrated by Robert Paxton, all movements under the umbrella of ‘the far right’ have differences and range from extremist terror cells to parties which attempt to blend extreme nationalism with a blend of populism. As one would expect, the use and presentation of denial varies within these movements. In extremist groups denial 203

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(or in some cases Holocaust celebration) and antisemitism in publications is overt and akin to a modern-day Der Stürmer, whereas far-right populist parties, for example the British National Party under Nick Griffin, tend to steer clear of public endorsement of denial. In 1997 Griffin wrote ‘when it comes to influencing the public, forget about racial differences, genetics, Zionism, historical revisionism and so on’. He called for a moderation of language in order to achieve power through ‘idealistic, unobjectionable, motherhood and apple pie concepts’, fashioning the party as a true defender of British democracy; however, he simultaneously stated ‘of course, we must teach the truth to the hardcore’.37 Griffin’s comments are important as they give an insight into the ways in which farright groups seek to shelve what they see as unpopular with the general public. Yet, to them it is not that far-right ideologies do not have mass appeal because of the catastrophic destruction of European Jewry or the phenomenal death toll of the Second World War. It is that the Jews ‘won’ the Second World War and since 1945 have been using their power and influence to destroy the vestiges of nationalism. This gives us a strong indication of what Griffin and others mean by ‘the truth’.38 These fanciful theories were further extended and used by members of the far right to portray a sense of victimisation – that they had been silenced after the victory of the Jews and the defeat of Nazism; and that their ‘truth’ has been suppressed by liberal thinking and a conspiracy of censorship by Jews. This way of thinking is often presented as a totalitarian framework or with reference to what has been called in some extremist circles ZOG or the Zionist Occupation Government.39 In this context the true indications of Holocaust denial are obvious – it is not just that the Holocaust with its spectre of genocide prevents deniers from validating their ideologies to the public, but also that there has been a concerted effort to silence them. In this regard they focus on institutions such as the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, Anti-Defamation League, Searchlight and the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance and use the efforts of these groups as the ‘face’ of the Zionist conspiracy against them. The growth in what has become known as Holocaust ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’, in which the Holocaust has become publicly and legally enshrined in European collective memory or with the introduction of Holocaust Memorial Day has also contributed to the belief that a conspiracy is at work.

Conclusion The denial of the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War has been a continual and evolving process which encompasses the attitudes of the Nazis themselves towards the genocide. While the central argument of the deniers remains unchanged: that there was no systematic genocide of the Jews of Europe, Holocaust deniers have had to change and modify the presentation of this message. Denial in itself contains intrinsic qualities needed to produce genocide because it perpetuates a myth that there is a very real conspiracy hidden from the world. The conspiracy, because of its mutability, allows the frustrations of those susceptible to its logic to demand recompense. This means that a form of reckoning must be had against those who are perceived to control society in order to restore a hitherto unknown, imagined, and largely ideologically driven, vestige of ‘freedom’. While this message is hidden in some pseudo-academic denial publications the political message remains transparent and clear: that the Jews are responsible for creating the ‘Holocaust myth’. This is the inherent paradox of Holocaust denial, that the purveyors are stuck between denying 204

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the event while also simultaneously suggesting that the intention behind the genocide was just. As former far-right adherent Ray Hill explains, the ‘eternal dilemma’ for those who support far-right ideology and Holocaust denial is that deniers are ‘never really sure whether to deny the Holocaust or defend it’.40 In studying denial we therefore gain a greater understanding of the type of thinking which leads to genocidal outcomes. Holocaust denial is a constant reminder that Nazi thinking was not entirely extinguished by military might in 1945 and that there is a determined band of people who still seek to make Hans Frank’s musings in 1943 a reality.

Notes 1 Extract from the diary of Hans Frank, cited in Główna Komisja Badania Zbrodni Niemieckich w Polsce, Central Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Vol. 2 (New York: 1982, first published in 1947), p. 43. 2 Michael Shermer and Alex Gorbman, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do they Say It? (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), p. 100. 3 Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1933–1945, abridged edition (London: Harper Perennial, 2009), p. xv. 4 See Richard Evans, Telling Lies About Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial (London: Verso, 2002); Deborah E. Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (New York: The Free Press, 1993); Deborah E. Lipstadt, History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving (New York: Harper Collins, 2005) and John C. Zimmermann, Holocaust Denial: Demographics, Testimonies and Ideologies (Maryland: University Press of America, 2000). 5 Cited in Lucy Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews (London: Penguin Books, 1975), pp. 191–2. 6 J. Herf, The Jewish Enemy Nazi Propaganda During World War Two and the Holocaust (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 138. 7 Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, p. 361. 8 For an example of this argument in Holocaust denial literature see Richard E. Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?: The Truth at Last (Uckfield: Historical Review Press, 1974). 9 David Cesarani and Eric J. Sunquist (eds), After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence (London: Taylor & Francis, 2011). 10 A. Ratcliffe, The Truth about Jews (Glasgow: NP, second edition, 1943), p. 15. 11 This conspiracy theory can be dated back to the publication of a pamphlet in 1903 in Imperial Russia, in which a notion that leading Jews were planning to dominate the world was propagated. It is probable that it was written by the Okhrana (Russian secret police service). Although it has been published on various occasions since then, and in many languages, the original document was a forgery. 12 Ibid. 13 For more information on Western governments’ responses to the fate befalling Europe’s Jews during the Second World War see T. Kushner, The Holocaust and the Liberal Imagination: A Social and Cultural History (London: Blackwell, 1994). 14 For a detailed account of the work of Rassinier see Stephen E. Atkins, Holocaust Denial as an International Movement (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2009), pp. 84–7. 15 For a detailed deconstruction of Irving’s thesis see Martin Broszat, ‘Hitler and the Genesis of the Final Solution: A Reply to David Irving’, Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 13, 1979, pp. 390–429. 16 Atkins, Holocaust Denial, p. 89. 17 Tony Judd, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (London: Vintage, 2010), pp. 58–9. 18 For more information on the activities and publications of Weber and the IHR see Atkins, Holocaust Denial, pp. 163–9; Shermer and Grobman, Denying History, pp. 43–8. 19 A pseudonym for Richard Verrall, the deputy chairman of the far-right National Front in the United Kingdom. 20 Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), p. 211. 21 For excellent discussion of early Holocaust historiography see T. Lawson, Debates on the Holocaust (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), ch 2; Dan Stone, Constructing the Holocaust (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2003), ch 3.

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22 For examples of these arguments in denial tracts see Harwood, Did Six Million Really Die?; Arthur R. Butz, The Hoax of the Twentieth Century: The Case Against the Presumed Extermination of European Jewry (Newport Beach, CA: Institute of Historical Review, 1992). 23 D. Irving, ‘Battleship Auschwitz’, The Journal of Historical Review, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1990, p. 490. 24 For evidence see R. Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1961), p. 572. 25 Peter Hayes, ‘Auschwitz, Capital of the Holocaust’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2003, pp. 330–50. 26 For a detailed rebuttal of Holocaust deniers’ claims about the diary of Anne Frank see Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, pp. 223–36. 27 For more details see Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitism, pp. 203–6. 28 For discussion of Irving and the Leuchter Report see Shermer and Gorbman, Denying History, pp. 55–61. 29 For a detailed rebuttal of the Leuchter Report see Zimmermann, Holocaust Denial, pp. 181–91. 30 Perry and Schweitzer, Antisemitism, p. 206. 31 For access to the expert witness report by Robert Van Jan Pelt and all the defence expert reports see http://www.hdot.org/en/trial/defense.html. 32 M. Weber, ‘How relevant is Holocaust revisionism?’, Institute for Historical Review (7 January 2009). Available at: http://www.ihr.org/weber_revisionism_jan09.html. 33 See Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: Holocaust Denial and Operation Reinhard: A Critique of the Falsehoods of Mattogno, Graf and Kues (A Holocaust Controversies White Paper, First Edition, December 2011). Available at: http://holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.co.uk. 34 http://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/39171/holocaust-denial-decline-says-historian. 35 Lipstadt, Denying the Holocaust, p. 7. 36 R.J. Van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 318. 37 N. Griffin, ‘BNP Freedom Party!’, Patriot, No. 4, 1999, pp. 4–7. 38 The term ZOG derives from The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel written by William L. Pierce under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald. 39 For an example of this see the British far-right commentator Colin Jordan’s fictional novel: C. Jordan, Merrie England – 2000 (Harrogate: Gothic Ripples, 1993). In the novel Jordan presents a neo-Nazi Orwellian vision of Britain in the year 2000, in which a totalitarian liberal democracy has taken over the United Kingdom and the world and the terroristic Ministry of Harmony attempts to stamp out any vestige of National pride or Nationalism in the Nation. Particularly of interest is chapter six ‘The staging of the Holocaust’ in which Jordan claims that the figure of six million Jews had risen to ten million and that a remembrance service was held every day at 11 am to remember the Holocaust. In the novel Jordan explains that the result of the Holocaust myth is that Jews wore a yellow Star of David in public to denote their privileged position in society. 40 R. Hill and A. Bell, The Other Face of Terror: Inside Europe’s Neo-Nazi Networks (London: Grafton Books, 1988), p. 88.

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15 ‘WHITE GENO C I D E’ Postwar fascism and the ideological value of evoking existential conflicts Paul Jackson

As scholars such as Aristotle Kallis have ably demonstrated, before 1945 fascist movements often followed the lead set by Nazism and regularly ‘licenced’ genocidal activities.1 A cluster of fascist and proto-fascist movements, such as the Croatian Ustaša, were actively genocidal during the Second World War, in broadly the same way as the Nazis themselves. Since 1945, genocidal aspirations among a wide variety of fascists operate on the level of fantasy, not reality. Indeed, aside from the Holocaust denial movement explored elsewhere in this volume, one common response from a wide variety of postwar fascists has been to celebrate past fascist genocides. Examples here are quite numerous, and include the creation of a board game based on Monopoly where the winner is the person who sends the most Jews to gas chambers; this was produced by the German National Socialist Underground.2 Meanwhile the British neo-Nazi group Combat 18 developed a notably ambivalent attitude towards the Holocaust, claiming at one point: ‘Our view on the Holocaust is if it didn’t happen it should have; if it did happen it’s a pity they didn’t kill them all.’3 Another response to genocide has been to find new ways to evoke the existential conflict raised by the idea of the destruction of one defined community for the preservation of another, resulting in various articulations of the theme that white people are now themselves subject to an ongoing process of cultural genocide, or ethnocide (both terms are regularly employed in the discourse). This chapter focuses on such trends found among postwar fascists, especially the theme of presenting white people as subject to genocide. The document titled the ‘White Genocide Manifesto’, created by the American neo-Nazi activist David Lane, typifies this discourse – one identifying an ongoing process of genocide against white people. This is a trope that has also been developed by the intellectualised postwar fascist milieu the New Right. The continued interest in themes linked to genocide among the motley collection of neo-Nazis and self-styled intellectuals that comprise postwar fascist milieus is an often neglected topic too, raising the question for researchers: why focus attention on such odd, and usually quite marginal, viewpoints? This abuse of the idea of genocide by postwar fascists is important for scholars of genocide studies for a number of reasons. Firstly, its significance relates to gaining a fuller understanding of how genocides impact on the longer-term viability of extremist milieus, especially those like postwar fascist cultures that see themselves as contemporary representatives of the same tradition in which interwar Nazis placed themselves. Exploration of the topic tells us how fascisms have tried to reconfigure themselves in the face of the ideology’s almost total discrediting by the Nazi regime.4 207

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Secondly, it is important because of the ways in which contemporary fascists, on occasion, use such ideas to help justify violent actions. Of course, fascist movements are no longer in control of states, as in interwar and wartime Europe, and so are in no position to carry out acts of mass violence on an entire community of people. Yet postwar fascists are still capable of carrying out acts of, relatively speaking, smallerscale terrorist violence and mass murder. Here, the case of Anders Breivik is crucial to highlight. His manifesto, 2083 – A European Declaration of Independence, is laced with statements both decrying an alleged genocide against white Europeans, while also calling for a ‘cultural’ revolution in Europe that is clearly genocidal in scope.5 Should Breivik’s wild vision be turned into reality, it would see swathes of the political left executed en masse, while Muslims in Europe would either be expelled from the continent, or themselves killed in an unfolding civil war. In the name of this highly unrealistic and fantastical vision, clearly both revolutionary and genocidal in nature, Breivik justified killing 77 people on 27 July 2011. To explore this milieu, what follows does not try to offer a comprehensive overview of every instance of this trend across Europe and America. This would be impossible in the limits of a single chapter-length discussion. Rather, it largely focuses on the author’s own research areas on Anglophone examples of postwar fascism from Britain, America and Europe. It seeks to highlight a representative sample of the phenomenon taken from a series of high-profile postwar fascists, focusing on their engagement with the theme of genocide. But before we can move on to explorations of the theme through examinations of evocative case studies, central terms need to be given some boundaries. In particular, it is important to clarify what, for this purpose of this survey, is meant by ‘fascism’ and ‘neo-Nazism’.

Neo-Nazism and neo-fascism ‘Fascism’, ‘neo-fascism’ and ‘neo-Nazism’ are terms that are often used interchangeably, yet it is worth considering why specialists in this field highlight the need to draw distinctions between different types of postwar fascist activity. The first clarification to be made here is between fascism as a generic term, and neo-Nazism as a specific type of postwar fascism. This largely follows Roger Griffin’s impact on debates over the definition of fascism. Griffin’s approach to categorising ‘fascisms’ stresses that the phenomenon does not represent a singular movement; rather, fascist milieus are inherently diverse, and develop in a wide variety of ways.6 Indeed, many fascists see their own ideology as fundamentally incompatible with others who can also be usefully categorised as fascist. Consequently, the history of fascism is littered with personality conflicts, competing claims over ‘national’ territory, and the inherently paranoid mentality promoted by the ideology leading to accusations that broadly cognate movements are actually under the control of a Jewish conspiracy.7 For Griffin, to help minimise the idea that definitions for fascism imply they ultimately represent a single, coherent movement, he suggests we should define fascism through an ideal type model. He also suggests we should expect to see various aspects of this ideal typical model in a number of groupings and organisations, some of which get on with each other, others that do not. Griffin’s ideal type model, pithily reduced to the phrase ‘palingenetic, populist ultra-nationalism’, is useful for another reason too: the approach focuses on the inherent myth-making quality found in fascist ideology. His term ‘palingenesis’ highlights the ideological creativity of fascists in 208

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synthesising diffuse messages into a (relatively) consistent discourse, while stressing the generic feature of fascism aspiring to achieve some form of revolutionary renewal for the national community and the creation of a new, anti-liberal political system of some description. (This distinguished fascism from, say, the non-revolutionary, populist far-right politics such as that found in Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party.) Griffin’s focus on such mythic aspects within the fascist mindset have been developed, in part, from George Mosse’s analysis of the phenomenon, and Mosse also helpfully coined the term ‘scavenger ideology’ to highlight the eclectic ways in which different fascists have created unique ideological syntheses.8 The mythic worlds create by fascists have also been a feature developed by historians such as Emilio Gentile, who suggest fascism is a form of ‘political religion’,9 and Nicholas Goodrich Clarke, who was particularly drawn to the range of mystical reference points found in twentieth-century fascist milieus, both before and after 1945.10 From such perspectives, we can also take the point that fascists have always had a loose approach to engaging with empirical reality, and are drawn to revelling in a wide variety of paranoid fantasies, delusions of grandeur, and interpretations of the world marked by an inability to develop a sense of proportion. In its postwar years fascism has taken a number of paths. Some fascists after 1945 have looked to the interwar period for inspiration, while others rejected this earlier legacy. Within the variety of fascisms that developed in the interwar years, Nazism was the most prolific and was also, of course, particularly notable for its focus on themes of race and the purification of a national identity, understood in racial, biological terms. Meanwhile, other variants of postwar fascism developed similar themes, but often without the same level of focus on blood as the key marker of national identity. Since 1945, those that have adopted the distinctly biologically racist approach have tended to be drawn to attempts to reconfigure aspects of Nazism to meet a post-1945 set of issues. This trend we can dub neo-Nazi in orientation. Here, Britain’s Colin Jordan would be a case in point, as would America’s David Lane. Yet postwar fascisms are more complex than just neo-Nazi milieus. Other fascist protagonists have rejected the Nazi heritage, seeing its legacy of genocide as detrimental to the agenda of promoting a revolutionary project for white people. One notable example here is the scrupulously intellectualised form of postwar fascism associated with figures such as Alain de Benoist, often dubbed the Nouvelle Droite or New Right. This evocative example of postwar fascism actively rejects identification with the Nazi heritage, yet once unpacked we see that its political ideas can again be identified by Griffin’s approach as distinctly fascist: especially through its promotion of racial purification, while also rejecting liberal ideas promoting the rights of individuals.11 In this type of intellectualised, ‘meta-political’ fascist discourse, we see that Nazism can be rejected in the same breath as communism, both taken as examples of a failed totalitarian politics. More recently still, the potent, though more usually non-revolutionary and populist Islamophobia that has developed in the 2000s has helped to fuel a new wave of fascist revolutionaries too. Here, Anders Breivik is an exemplar of the trend, a figure who also rejects the Nazi heritage, seeing it as too imperialistic, claiming its failure by 1945 led to the growth of a culture after the Second World War in Europe deeply hostile to what he described as a ‘culturally conservative’ agenda that would promote the interests of white people.12 With the divisions within postwar fascisms in mind, we can turn to some central examples of such figures engaging with ideas promoting the need for genocide. 209

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Neo-Nazi activists and the ‘white genocide’ Despite lacking a large-scale fascist culture in the interwar period, after 1945 America witnessed the growth of a variety of fringe, Nazi-inspired groupings. This includes the American Nazi Party, the Christian Identity movement and its central organisation Aryan Nations, as well as William Pierce’s National Alliance. In part as an initiative to help bring together disparate sections of the sub-community, in 1995 activist Don Black set up a website where many of those drawn to such movements could discuss ideas, and also interact with the global neo-Nazi milieu. As a result, www.stormfront.org has become one of the central hubs for neo-Nazi inspired discussion among Americans, and also now has a truly global following.13 Discussion threads here regularly centre on the theme of white people being subjected to genocidal politics by governments acting on the wishes of a deeper Jewish conspiracy to control the world. One posting exemplifies the hyperbolic way such discussions politicise the term ‘genocide’: Diversity is a plan with objectives and the following seems to sum up ‘diversity’ perfectly: ‘The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.’ That is how Raphael Lemkin described GENOCIDE when he created the term for the UN. Diversity = Open immigration Diversity = Forced integration of White schools at gun point Diversity = Promoting ‘assimilation’, i.e. intermarriage Diversity = Destroying the economic existence of White families by discriminatory hiring practices Diversity = Demanding that everything White become less White Diversity = Creating places that Whites cannot safely live Diversity = Funding to move non-Whites into areas because they are ‘too White’ Diversity = Only allowing Whites who make up nearly 70% of the population to be 20% of the Ivy League which further destroys the economic existence of the group Diversity= Threatening universities with loss of tax status for being ‘too White’ Diversity = A world without White children Diversity is a code word for White genocide Diversity = White genocide14 Such postings typify a widespread concern articulated in Stormfront discussions that white people are not merely treated unfairly, but they face a sustained threat to their ongoing existence. These views do not merely come from the grassroots; they are promoted by leading activists too. Central figures in the American context that have promoted this theme 210

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include David Lane.15 Lane was a leading protagonist within the United States’ neoNazi counter-culture from the 1970s until his death in 2007. His input into the milieu included helping to form the country’s most prominent neo-Nazi terrorist grouping of the 1980s, The Order, as well as publishing a series of writings while in prison, from 1985 until his death. These texts included promoting a new, neo-pagan faith based on Odinism that endorsed Nazi ideals, which he dubbed Wotanism, as well as producing a wide array of material promoting the need for a white racial revolution. Many of these were included in a collection of essays published in 1999 called Deceived, Damned, and Defiant: The Revolutionary Writings of David Lane. The book contained many texts by Lane himself, as well as others written by an assortment of Nazi-inspired protagonists, spanning a variety of American figures as well as Britain’s Nick Griffin and Colin Jordan, both of whom we will return to below. Deceived, Damned, and Defiant is an archetypal example of neo-Nazi cultural production, consisting of a range of pseudo-philosophical, and quasi-historical, discussions broadly calling for a purification of the white race, while decrying the liberal politics of the modern Western world. Its opening essay, setting out the central themes for the whole book, called ‘White Genocide Manifesto’, is clearly steeped in the politicised usage of the term genocide. In this discussion, Lane sets out the core idea found in many neo-Nazi discourses, such as the message board post cited earlier, that white people are being subjected to a deliberate attempt to destroy their culture, especially via government-led policies promoting cultural integration; in his estimation purposefully designed to make white people an ‘extinct species’. He continues this point as follows: Recognizing that no race commits suicide voluntarily, the Manifesto exposes the racial-religious tribe which now rules over the once White countries and which denies the White race not only White countries, but White schools, White neighborhoods, White organizations and everything necessary for survival as a biological and cultural entity. Let it be understood that the term ‘racial integration’ is only a euphemism for genocide. The inevitable result of racial integration is a percentage of inter-racial matings each year, leading to extinction, as has happened to the White race in numerous areas in the past. As the White remnant is submerged in a tidal wave of five billion coloreds, they will become an extinct species in a relatively short time. This genocide is being accomplished by deliberate design. Following from such a diagnosis of white genocide, he then moves on to his manifesto itself, which consists of fourteen points that essentially argue that ‘all Western nations are ruled by a Zionist conspiracy to mix, overrun and exterminate the White race’. While echoing Nazi antisemitic conspiracy themes, he also stresses that this agenda represents an existential threat to white identity as follows: ‘political and religious systems can be destroyed and resurrected, but the death of our race will be eternal’.16 Understanding Lane’s views is important for interpreting the wider neo-Nazi milieu as his various writings, as well as his widely adopted ‘14 Words’ slogan ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children’, now echo around the world in contemporary neo-Nazi contexts. This slogan itself has a clear genocidal aspiration set within it. It is also worth noting that his White Genocide Manifesto also consists of fourteen points, indicative of the ways in which number codes form a core aspect of neo-Nazi sub-cultures, and underscores how Lane sought to link the idea of a white genocide to his overarching political message. 211

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While Lane exemplifies the very extreme end of American neo-Nazism, another figure within this broad milieu, presenting similar arguments yet trying to present himself in a more credible light, is David Duke. The Southern Poverty Law Center summarises Duke’s eclectic profile as follows: ‘David Duke is the most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, long-time Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial who has nevertheless won election to Louisiana’s House of Representatives and once was nearly elected governor.’17 Duke’s current website hosts a variety of essays that develop the idea that white people are being subject to genocide. Again, we see a key linkage here between raising the idea of a white genocide and decrying liberal political ideals. In one such essay, ‘The Genocide of the White Race is Being Promoted by Liberals’, the point is set out as follows: Our enemies want the next generation of Whites to have no clue how much better and crime-free things were when America was a much Whiter nation. These actions being taken by liberal governments to force non-Whites into every White nation will eventually eliminate the White race itself. Europe will look like Morocco with nothing but kinky-haired brown people. The United Nations tells us that genocide is supposed to be a crime against humanity – but apparently genocide against White people is OK. The Jewish policy of forcing Diversity on every White nation is never criticized (except by us) as being genocidal. If the Jews and liberal governments under their influence continue these policies of accepting millions of Third World invaders into the US and Europe every year, there’s only one possible outcome: The White race will be destroyed.18 Interestingly, such articulations claiming the existence of an ongoing white genocide specifically draw on the United Nations definition of the term genocide to give this theme some parameters. Ironically, then, genocide as an idea set out via liberal, legal definitions becomes a term used to critique a liberal political agenda. Moreover, as with Lane, we also see a clear endorsement of the idea of the world being corrupted by a Jewish conspiracy. Aside from such essays talking about a white genocide, Duke has also developed the theme in other ways too, such as via a series of YouTube videos that engage with the topic in regard to South Africa. In these films one finds Duke attempting to sustain the argument that white people are being systematically killed by black people in South Africa as part of a deliberate policy that developed in the wake of the fall of the apartheid regime to destroy white culture.19 While Lane and Duke offer clear examples of fascists decrying an alleged threat posed by an imagined genocide being carried out against white people, it is also important to stress that other components within American neo-Nazi culture actively promote genocide as a long-term goal too. One of the most significant, revolutionary texts within Anglophone neo-Nazi circles is William Pierce’s fictional account of a neoNazi inspired uprising, The Turner Diaries.20 Written under the pseudonym Andrew McDonald and published in 1978, the book sets out a vision for a political and social palingenesis of the type that Griffin stresses fascists aspire to achieve. The novel is structured as a series of diary entries written in the first person by a protagonist called Earl Turner, hence the title The Turner Diaries. To summarise the genocidal fantasy that underpins the plot, which also offers suggestive comments for readers on how to carry out individual acts of terrorism, readers 212

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learn that Earl Turner’s diaries are discovered in the year 2099, and they set out how in the late twentieth century Turner and a group of associates overthrew a corrupt government, resulting in the downfall of the whole Western capitalist order. The book presents the American government, the mass media and the global economy as an entity controlled by a Jewish conspiracy. Turner meanwhile is part of a guerrilla movement, the Organisation, which develops an increasingly successful terrorist campaign. As the plot unfolds, Turner enters into a mystical inner sanctum of the Organisation, called the Order. This promotion gives him an even greater sense of mission and purpose. Eventually, the Organisation takes control of the state of California, accessing America’s nuclear weapons facilities. Here, attacks are initiated against New York and Israel, followed by a nuclear war between the USA and the USSR. Meanwhile, in California, the Organisation initiates a campaign of ethnic cleansing, killing black and Jewish people, and many white people it perceives as race traitors too. The book finishes with a description of how the Organisation is able to win its international nuclear war, and then create a new world in the wake of apocalyptic destruction that establishes a new political system for white people only. All this is clearly highly fantastical, but nevertheless clearly evokes the revolutionary and genocidal vision for the future driving neo-Nazi cultures. Not only do we see violence legitimised because white society is deemed to be facing an existential threat, but we also see a deep-seated longing for this attack to be resisted, defeated, and for a new era with a racially purified society to emerge. Moreover, one of the reasons The Turner Diaries has connected with so many sympathetic readers in the neo-Nazi counter-cultural milieu is because it gives expression to this theme in an accessible format. As the book develops the fascist revolutionary ideal in a fictional register, echoing in style a post-apocalyptic science fiction genre, it allows the revolutionary and genocidal aspirations of neo-Nazis to be set out in an engaging style not often found in the political writings of fascist activists.21 In particular, it is worth stressing that the novel’s readers have included terrorists who have taken aspects of this vision and related it to their own actions. The name of David Lane’s terrorist group of the 1980s, the Order, was taken from The Turner Diaries. Meanwhile, groups such as the Anti-Defamation League stress its impact on American terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh too.22 If we move the analysis across the Atlantic, we can see a transnational linkage too: David Copeland, a British neo-Nazi terrorist, was also inspired by the vision set out in The Turner Diaries. His terrorist actions in 1999 included planting three nail bombs in London, with the final attack resulting in the deaths of three people. As he justified his actions in relation to The Turner Diaries to the police: If you’ve read the Turner Diaries, you know the year 2000 there’ll be the uprising and all that, racial violence on the streets. My aim was political. It was to cause a racial war in this country. There’d be a backlash from the ethnic minorities, then all the white people will go out and vote BNP.23 What we see with the link between the ideas set out in The Turner Diaries and Copeland’s terrorist campaign is synergy between Pierce’s genocidal vision for the future, and the aspirations of a terrorist wanting to start a race war. It would be too much to suggest direct cause and effect; many more factors were crucial for Copeland’s radicalisation.24 Nevertheless, the ideas set out in the book certainly played a part, and offered a cultural reference point for Copeland to draw on, to help legitimise his actions. 213

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Wanting to unleash a war between races clearly implies that one race should be victorious; conflict based on one race destroying another is highly suggestive of a genocidal vision too. While genocide itself was not a possible activity for a solo-actor terrorist such as Copeland, his ideas can be seen as influenced by what are ultimately genocidal aspirations of ‘purifying’ society for white people. Copeland was himself operating within a complex, though highly marginalised, tradition of neo-Nazi politics in postwar Britain. Other figures from British neo-Nazi cultures have also developed the theme of white people being subject to genocide. One of the most uncompromising among Britain’s neo-Nazis was Colin Jordan.25 He was a lifelong promoter of Hitler in particular, leading movements such as the White Defence League in the 1950s, and the National Socialist Movement and the British Movement in the 1960s. In later life he also published an occasional neo-Nazi magazine, Gothic Ripples, while also developing two novellas, Merrie England – 2000 and The Uprising. As both an extremist essayist, and also a figure engaged in neo-Nazi cultural production, especially novellas, Jordan offers another case study in the intricacies of neo-Nazi ideologies and their use of genocide. One of his more widely read essays, ‘The Way Ahead’ (widely available, for example currently reproduced on www.Stormfront.org) set out his variant of the theme particularly clearly. Decrying a Jewish plot to overturn racial purity with an era of racial mixing, he stressed: this conspiracy is in reality nothing short of genocide. In support of this contention there can now be cited the Genocide Convention of none other than one segment of the vast apparatus of that conspiracy, to wit the United Nations. This Convention defined ‘Acts Constituting Genocide’ in its Article II as follows: ‘In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such.’ It then went on to include as one of these Acts: (c) ‘Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ Think about this, and you will surely come to appreciate that this is exactly what in all its implications, present and future is happening: genocide!26 So once again, with high-profile British neo-Nazis like Jordan, we see an element of ‘doublespeak’ of sorts. He draws on the United Nations’ own definition of genocide to help frame his contention of there being a sustained attack on white people by the same conspiracy that allegedly set up the United Nations in the first place. As stated, Jordan also turned to fiction to help develop his identification of a white genocide. His first book, an attempt at a satirical novella, Merrie England – 2000, most clearly engaged with the idea of white people being subject to genocide.27 The fictional story depicts a Britain where ‘authentic’ white culture is being destroyed by a Jewish plot to overturn a ‘traditional’ sense of identity, replacing it with new cultural values promoting racial mixing and politically correct themes. As its chapters progress, its central protagonist, a white British woman called Annie, is subject to a series of ‘humiliations’ designed to destroy her white identity. After she racially abuses a black man, readers follow her journey of re-education as she is forced by the state into a programme reminiscent of A Clockwork Orange, compelling her to accept a multicultural agenda. The book includes passages decrying the way the memory of the 214

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Holocaust is used to help people reject National Socialist principles. The narrative ends with the total victory of a culturally ‘genocidal’, multicultural state, removing the last opportunity for people to be proud of their white identity: the Jewish-run state broadcasts a new mind control ray that disciplines anyone who has thoughts aspiring towards racial purity. Merrie England – 2000 is on one level a typical trashy, dystopian short story, yet it is also a narrative embedded within a neo-Nazi ideological framework presenting white people as being subjected to genocide by the forces of postwar multiculturalism in Britain. Jordan’s second book, The Uprising, was more reminiscent of The Turner Diaries, telling the story of a revolutionary unit seizing control of Britain, and closes with speeches by the victorious revolutionaries setting out the aspiration to create a new political order for white people. As a pair, both fictional pieces engage with the themes of white people being subject to genocide on the one hand, and the need to carry out a purge of non-white people, genocidal in scope, on the other. While Jordan, like David Lane, had no qualms about identifying himself as a Naziinspired activist, others within the British neo-Nazi milieu have tried to be more guarded in recent times. For example, during the 2000s Nick Griffin has systematically tried to repackage the British National Party, which has its roots in the postwar British neo-Nazi tradition, but rejects an openly Nazi agenda. As late as 1998, we find Nick Griffin – a figure also well respected by American neo-Nazis such as David Lane – embroiled in issues of Holocaust denial. By the 2000s, he tried to restyle himself as a moderate politician, attempting to give his party a more reasonable, family-oriented outward appearance. Yet during the 2000s too, its webpages included links to clearly neo-Nazi material, such as Arthur Kemp’s history of the white race, March of the Titans.28 Moreover, analysts such as Nigel Copsey locate a clearly ultra-nationalist and revolutionary agenda in the party’s ideology of the 2000s,29 while Graham Macklin among others also stress the disingenuousness of this supposed transformation away from neo-Nazi ideals.30 Unsurprisingly then, the BNP typifies the phenomenon of Nazi-inspired political parties that try to present themselves as compatible with liberal democratic processes. Moreover, within its material we find the theme of white people being subject to genocide as a consequence of multicultural political forces. One recent essay from its website, ‘Understanding Why Anti-Whites are so Evil’, written by Jack Dempsey, sets out the theme clearly. The analysis is applied not only to Britain, but also to a variety of what are fuzzily described as ‘White countries’. Like Jordan’s variation of the theme, Dempsey draws on the United Nations definition of genocide to create the argument that the changing demographics in ‘White countries’ has resulted in a situation where ‘forced assimilation and anti-White propaganda conditions’ are being ‘imposed on our people where we can’t sustain our long-term survival’. The piece continues: ‘If looked at with honesty, the UN definition of genocide is happening right now to the White race; but – running synonymous with this evil – there is an army of anti-White Whites all across the world who think this genocide is a good thing.’ The essay goes on to talk about how these ‘anti-White Whites’ are helping to carry out genocide, while the ‘pro-White’ politics of the British National Party offer a legitimate response.31 Here as elsewhere, then, we also see the trope of some white people being classified as traitors to their race, and so the notion of being able to divide white people into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories offers a further important nuance to how the theme of the white genocide is used in a divisive manner. The examples cited so far offer just a small sample of Nazi-inspired activists who have engaged with the theme of an alleged ‘white genocide’ unfolding in the postwar 215

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era. As we can see, the idea of genocide is recurrent in both neo-Nazi understandings of the destruction of a white identity, and their visions of creating a new society that will secure a future for white people. However, neo-Nazism is only one strand of postwar fascism that has developed the theme of white people being subject to genocide. We can see this too in the intellectualised fascist circles of the New Right, as well as the recent emergence of a fascism that revolves around a relatively recent conspiracy theory, one that places Muslims at the heart of an existential threat to white identity.

New Right fascist discourses: Ethnocide and erasure Since its formation, centred upon the think tank Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), founded in 1968 by Alain de Benoist, the New Right has developed a complex discourse, influential within revolutionary fascist and populist far-right milieus. It has also attracted much academic attention in recent years, and the most comprehensive treatment of the movement by Tamir Bar-On styles the ideas developed by the New Right as a variant of fascism32 – an interpretation backed up by others, including Roger Griffin.33 Unlike neo-Nazi tactics of creating political organisations, or carrying out acts of terror, the New Right has drawn on a strategy inspired by the postwar New Left. Loosely inspired by the methods for achieving revolution developed by Antonio Gramsci – especially focusing on securing a revolutionary consensus within the wider cultures of advanced civil societies – New Right activists have primarily sought to create discursive spaces receptive to a radical and revolutionary politics, using these to reinvent the underlying fascist aspirations for a new era for white people. In doing so, the New Right rejects association with interwar fascisms and especially Nazism. Unlike most of the figures surveyed so far, activists linked to the New Right would reject the label ‘fascist’, yet also happily promote ideals that, once unpacked, aim to achieve racial purity in Europe through a revolutionary rejection of liberal democratic political systems: in other words a political and cultural revolution for white people. In France especially, the New Right’s ‘meta-political’ goals have been to influence populist far-right parties, such as the Front National, as well as attempting to penetrate into the wider consciousness too, for example targeting mainstream media outlets such as Le Monde. From its roots in postwar France, New Right strategies have led to a transnational network too. Outside France, leading New Right voices include Pierre Krebbs, based in Germany, who founded the Thule Seminar in 1980.34 More recent contributors also include Michael O’Meara, an American-based author who also engages with the themes found in New Right discourse.35 Currently, the publishing house Arktos acts as one hub for the Anglophone New Right, circulating a wide variety of translated texts by New Right figures. It also offers new prints of older intellectual reference points for fascists, including books by: Arthur Moeller Van den Broek, Karl Schmitt, Francis Parker Yockey, Julius Evola, Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger and Houston Stewart Chamberlain.36 Indeed, interest in the latter figure, one of the central theorists of race of the late nineteenth century whose ideas impacted profoundly on the Nazis’ own understanding of race, is indicative of the central contention of the New Right: that racial differences exist, and that multicultural political agendas create a society defined by universalism and racial mixing that denies not only the white race, but all races, the opportunity to retain their discrete nature and purity. Moreover, New Right activists go on to claim that 216

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white Europeans have a right to preserve their racial purity within the territorial boundaries of Europe. They also assert that Europeans should not interfere with the political dynamics of countries outside the European continent, such as in Africa or Asia; indeed, Europeans should allow non-white races to maintain their own racial purity, though outside of European borders. As such, New Right discourses have decried European colonial projects as attempts to interfere with non-European racial communities, presenting them as driven by a Christian-inspired missionary ideology that has caused great damage to non-European racial purity. Such a framework for assessing the issue of the preservation of the white race allows New Right figures to offer messages both stressing the need to secure a future for white people, while also setting this within a language ostensibly respectful of otherness and cultural difference. Indeed, as James Shields stresses, New Right activists such as Benoist call themselves ‘raciophiles’, and condemn those who support multicultural politics as ‘raciophobes’.37 Shields also suggests we should look to some of the New Right’s wider links to see where such allegedly ‘raciophile’ ideas are drawn from. Links have included interactions with the British publication of the 1960s and 1970s The Mankind Quarterly, as well as the similar German publication Neu Anthopologie, titles described by Shields as ‘combining anthropology, psychology, genetics and race-science within a radical right-wing perspective’.38 Once stripped of its intellectual pretentions, as with the neo-Nazi themes already discussed, the New Right’s basic concern is again for a racially purified Europe to be created, essentially by rejecting liberalism – which promotes individualism, and allows for the mass migration of people to the continent. Indeed, shot through much of the New Right discourse is a set of messages reminiscent of radical left-wing critiques of a homogenising globalisation. Yet rather than decrying such forces for the way they disempower the working classes, for the New Right the central issue is the way globalisation allegedly disempowers those who promote racial purity.39 Within this milieu, one quite distinct from cruder forms of neo-Nazi racism, one regularly sees evocations of genocide coming to the fore in the various discourses created by New Right activists. Also unlike the neo-Nazi circles surveyed earlier, New Right figures tend to employ a wider range of terms to evoke the notion of white people undergoing a cultural form of genocide, especially ‘ethnocide’ and neologisms such as ‘erasure’. Moreover, New Right activists develop their politics via complex messages too. For example, Benoist has defended the right of Muslim women in France to wear religious clothing in public, though, as Bar-On suggests, probably to wilfully underscore his deeper contention that Europeans are in the process of losing a rooted, historical identity.40 One would not expect to find such nuanced engagements with the politics of difference and otherness from neo-Nazi circles. To cite some examples from its literature, the New Right’s programmatic document, ‘Manifesto of the French New Right in Year 2000’, co-written by Benoist, sets out the rejection of the Nazi era clearly. For example, stating: The end of ideologies is an expression designating the historical exhaustion of the great mobilizing narratives that became embodied in liberalism, socialism, communism, nationalism, fascism, and, finally, Nazism. The 20th century has sounded the death knell for most of these doctrines, whose concrete results were genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass murder, total wars among nations and permanent rivalry among individuals, ecological disasters, social chaos, and the loss of all significant reference points.41 217

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Via such claims, we see an attempt to present the New Right as a new, postmodern phenomenon, while decrying Nazism and liberalism in the same breath as political forces of an older era, both complicit in historic genocides. While Benoist is often clear on this break with the past, other contributions to the New Right milieu talk of the impact of globalisation on white communities in a much clearer, and less nuanced, manner than we find with Benoist himself. For example, Pierre Krebbs’ book Fighting for the Essence: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance? sets out an analysis that claims there are no historical examples to be found where two discrete cultures have mixed peacefully. The title, meanwhile, exemplifies his vision for a new era to develop, and typifies the tenor of his writings explaining the present as a battleground for the preservation of white people. In particular, the book claims that the current agenda of multicultural politics represents what he calls a ‘soft genocide’, and he uses terms such as ‘lebanonisation’ and ‘newyorkisation’ to describe and decry the reality of cultural mixing that he sees as impossible in principle. He summarises his concerns as follows: In short, the destruction of racial and cultural homogeneities . . . documents the greatest crime ever committed against the people of the earth . . . The multiracial society of human rights corresponds to a society in which man has lost his most elementary right: that of remaining different – at the same time as he has acquired the freedom . . . to no longer be what he is. At the horizon of this grey, uniform world emerges the wandering crowd of all those whom one has cut off from their people and their identity, in search of themselves, never finding themselves.42 The passage then goes on to cite a poem by Alev Tekinay called ‘Between Things’ that evokes a fundamental loss of identity. Such intellectualised, reflective approaches are again typical of the more cerebral nature of New Right discourse, revelling in ambivalences as much as offering programmatic solutions. Nevertheless, the core concern here is still to clearly denounce liberalism as the political force destroying racial purity, framing its actions as criminal, and genocidal, to the detriment of white people who are bereft of a clear identity. Another of the vocal protagonists within the New Right milieu is Michael O’Meara, whose book New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe also engages with the theme of Europe experiencing a hidden ‘ethnocide’ as a consequence of mass immigration, ignored by politically correct cultures that ostensibly forbid mention of the destruction of a white European identity. Again, this is set within a language that rejects liberalism as a political ideology, and styles it as a force actively destructive of ‘pure’ identities. He sets this out as follows: This people-killing dogma represents, perhaps, the most noxious of liberalism’s anti-European forms, for it legitimises the destruction of the European ethnos. The ethnocidal implications of this dogma are hardly ideological. In the last four decades, since 1962, when Africa breached Europe’s southern frontier (Algeria), the Continent, and especially France, has been inundated by successive waves of Third World immigrants . . . if not soon halted, non-Europeans will come to comprise a majority of the Continent’s population. French cities and towns will then resemble the bazaars of North Africa and its social 218

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life that of the occupied West Bank, while the Europid population which has occupied Eurasia’s western extremities for the last 30,000 years will become a minority and those who previously failed to militarily conquer Europe will be allowed to take possession of its mutilated destiny, without a shot being fired.43 Here we see a much starker picture being developed by another of the New Right’s central voices. For O’Meara, the demographic shift in Europe is styled as a catastrophe for racial purity, one representing an end point for a 30,000-year epoch of allegedly mono-cultural identity in Europe. The hyperbolic reading of the impact of postwar migration includes the connotation that Europe is effectively under attack by migrants, to the point that this represents a form of low-level warfare. O’Meara has written more programmatically on this issue as well, calling for the creation of a new white state. His book from 2010, Towards the White Republic, set out the theme of creating a new state for white people in North America, a vision that relied on the US economy collapsing to create the conditions necessary for a revolutionary transfer to a new political and social system.44 A final voice here exemplifying the variegated nature of New Right’s intellectualised discourses is Alexander Kurtagić. Again typifying the way the New Right tries to present itself as a cerebral movement, in 2012 Kurtagić contributed to the first volume of a pseudo-academic journal, Radix, with the title ‘The Great Erasure’, sold both as a hard copy book and a Kindle e-book. Echoing the themes of David Duke already discussed, the opening essay to the collection sought to give coherence to a wider set of debates that focused especially on South Africa, and how the experiences of white people in the post-apartheid era offered a forewarning of what would develop in the West. Kurtagić’s essay, also titled ‘The Great Erasure’, talked of the issue in terms of a fundamental shift in world history, and unlike many voices linked to the New Right he echoed a neo-Nazi discourse via a nod to the theme of a coordinated Jewish conspiracy as the ultimate explanatory factor for non-white immigration. As he stressed: [A]longside indigenous collaboration, Third World settler colonization in the West has been catalysed by both historical events and the existence of a hostile or at least self-serving exogenous minority of very able intellectuals, businessmen and legislators. The excesses of the National Socialist government in Germany during the 1930s and 1940s, Allied victory in World War II, and the moral capital amassed and exploited by Jews – and especially radical Marxist Jews – as a result of well publicized Nazi persecution, permitted the development of Jewish intellectual movements that subjected traditional European identity and institutions to radical critiques.45 Moreover, Kurtagić’s essay presented Europe as being at a point of transition away from domination by white people, and so concluded that ‘a new moral theory of difference’ was needed to resolve the fundamental tension he felt between securing a future for the white race and respecting national and international laws preventing the expulsion en masse of non-white people, some of whom he recognised as having settled in Europe over successive generations. With this concluding theme, the essay was typical of the New Right in terms of its ostensibly meta-political stance, attempting to reflect on the theme of European identity from a quasi-philosophical position. But underpinning this rhetorical style 219

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is a deeply political message. On the one hand Kurtagić made great play of being fair to various non-white people he dubbed ‘settler colonialists’; yet on the other it is clear that his implications were partisan too: white identity needed to be protected and preserved in Europe; this is under threat from both a Jewish conspiracy and mass immigration of non-white people. As with more openly neo-Nazi discourses on this theme, his thesis stressed that white Europeans were sleepwalking into racial extinction, though he avoided using terms such as ‘genocide’ or even ‘ethnocide’ to articulate these concerns. Instead, he used language such as ‘erasure’ to style the battle for racial purity. As he pithily stressed: ‘Settler colonization is, after all, a game of erasure: settlers erase or are erased; no on-going equitable relationship is possible between settlers and indigenes.’46 In sum, Kurtagić represents a curious example of the trend being explored here among postwar fascists: adopting aspects of interwar and postwar antisemitism, while at the same time distancing himself from the legacy of the Nazis. Moreover, we see echoes of Nietzsche in his variant of the message: white Europeans are held back by the weak morality found in liberal democratic structures, and international law, which collectively prevent more radical action being taken. A new morality is needed to help establish a new, heroic era. These are themes we find in more coded form in the wider cultures of the New Right, exemplified by Benoist, Krebbs and O’Meara. A more nuanced language runs through the New Right’s fascist milieu when compared to the neo-Nazi one, drawing on terms such as ‘ethnocide’ and coining new ones, such as ‘erasure’, to create very similar underlying themes setting out the existential battle that white Europeans are facing as a consequence of non-white immigration.

Contemporary fascist Islamophobia and Anders Breivik While elements of the New Right in the main debate ideas, and try to influence political cultures, other contemporary fascists are more literal, and act on such diagnoses of some form of a hidden genocide being carried out against white Europeans. In particular, the more clearly revolutionary elements found within the various far-right Islamophobic discourses that have come to prominence in the 2000s have helped to cultivate violence. Indeed, in the past 15 years the European far right has been inspired by a wider cultural turn that has become more aware of, and more receptive to, a number of anti-Muslim themes.47 Non-revolutionary, populist far-right parties spanning Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party, France’s Front National and the Italian Northern League have all adopted elements of anti-Muslim politics in recent years.48 Moreover, this wider trend in far-right populism has helped cultivate a new, extremist milieu too, which is largely found online in a variety of websites such as Gates of Vienna and Stop the Islamisation of Europe. Space does not permit detailed exploration of these wider milieus, but we can focus on a pair of central examples of the wider trend of seeing Muslims as representing a force carrying out genocide against white Europeans. One central blogger within the milieu is Peder Jensen, better known by his pseudonym Fjordman, whose ideas again broadly conform to Roger Griffin’s model of fascism. This includes: adoption of a conspiracy theory narrative, presentation of the political mainstream as incapable of resolving an existential crisis facing contemporary Europe, and endorsement of a vision of revolutionary political change to engender a new era in European society that would in effect destroy liberal principles. The latter theme especially allows us to see Fjordman evoking the type of palingenetic 220

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vision of ‘restoring’ a mythic white purity within European society that Griffin places at the core of his ideal typical definition of fascism.49 To summarise some of Fjordman’s core views, it is important to highlight firstly the core conspiracy theory narrative running through his ideology. He imports this theme from the ideas of Bat Ye’or, another prominent voice within the contemporary milieu of European anti-Muslim voices, who in books such as Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide argues that Europeans are being reduced to a state of servitude as a result of the scale of contemporary Muslim migration to the continent. Drawing on Ye’or’s ideas, Fjordman’s blogs of the late 2000s argue that from the 1970s, what is now the European Union was overtaken by Muslim forces largely based in the Middle East, who have used their wealth and access to natural resources such as oil to corrupt European politicians, especially in France. Now, he claims, the EU, as well as national mainstream politicians, essentially operate as a force promoting on the one hand a ‘politically correct’ culture that prevents critical debate over immigration, while on the other also allowing mass migration from Islamic countries to the continent that in scope represents an existential threat to white Europeans. The account is notably hyperbolic, and so Fjordman’s blogs claim contemporary Europe is already in a state of civil war, with Muslims acting like an occupying army in his estimation. From a greatly exaggerated reading of the impact of Islamist-inspired terrorism, alongside Muslims who have engaged in sexual crimes, and dubious assessments claiming Muslim migrants steal from welfare states, he concludes that Islam is carrying out rape, pillage and murder on European soil. These are the activities of an invading army, yet are ignored as a consequence of ‘politically correct’ cultures that prevent discussion of such issues. In essays such as ‘Preparing for Ragnarok’, Fjordman’s blogs set out the theme of conflict between white Europeans and Muslims as follows: All nations around the world try to maintain their ethnicity. Only in white majority Western countries do the authorities wage a deliberate demographic and cultural war against the majority population. This is evil, and Europeans have every right to defend themselves against evil policies. Whites have shown the ability to create societies and social systems that transcend the narrow confines of clan, tribe and ethnic nepotism. This is in many ways a great character trait, but it can also be our Achilles’ heel if it is weaponized and turned against us. We must recognize that we are unusual, and that our values are far from universally shared.50 In sum, Fjordman’s blogs have promoted the need for a European revolution marked by white people overthrowing an alleged invasion by non-whites, especially Muslims, again evoking the ideal of a purification of racial identities. Yet while Fjordman restricted his activities to blogging, one contemporary fascist his ideas helped inspire was Anders Breivik – though Peder Jensen has distanced himself from Breivik’s killings. Breivik drew heavily on Fjordman’s analysis, and included many essays by Fjordman in his own statement of the ideological underpinnings for his terrorist actions, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence. Included here was Fjordman’s essay just cited, ‘Preparing for Ragnarok’, calling for the purification of the white race in Europe. Telling of Fjordman’s impact on Breivik was the number of articles by Jensen that were cut and pasted into the document, consisting of around 14% of the total word count. Moreover, the title of Breivik’s manifesto was 221

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taken from another essay by Fjordman, ‘Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence’.51 As Breivik set out his own analysis, he too was profoundly concerned with genocide, and used the concept to style Muslims as intrinsically drawn to carrying out genocides throughout their history. He employed the term ‘genocide’ 243 times in his overall manifesto, and following Fjordman Breivik’s comments again set out the typically fascist theme of white Europeans being subject to genocide by non-whites. As discussed earlier, we should be careful not to simply present all postwar movements as a singular movement. Breivik, for example, saw himself as quite distinct from neo-Nazis, and his ideals were drawn from alternative reference points too. Most notable here was the way he developed the theme of the conspiracy theory. For Breivik, Muslims and people promoting multiculturalism are the co-conspirators enacting genocidal policies, rather than this being caused by a hidden plot by Jewish figures, as we saw with neo-Nazi activists as well as Kurtagić. Indeed, Breivik even decried the Nazi regime as helping to create the liberal political space in the postwar period where an alleged genocidal attack on white Europeans could develop. He described the legacy of the Holocaust, while also implying his ideal for white people: Thanks to his [Hitler’s] insane campaign and the subsequent genocide of the 6 million Jews, multiculturalism, the anti-European hate ideology was created. Multiculturalism would have never been implemented in Europe if it hadn’t been for NSDAP’s reckless and unforgivable actions. Eastern Europe would have remained free, the US and Russia would never have risen up as superpowers. The balance of power would have remained in Europe. And it would be a beautiful Europe with beautiful cultural conservative policies.52 Elsewhere in the document, Breivik styled his terrorist actions as necessary, because they were specifically a response to genocide being carried out against white Europeans. For example, in one passage he justified his actions as follows: It is my duty . . . to defend my people, my country and my culture from gradual, systematic and deliberate genocide . . . I know that the truth I represent is tough and hard to comprehend and accept in our politically correct times. But the majority of free and patriotic Europeans will learn that what I say here today is the truth. We have the people on our side; we have the truth on our side. We have time on our side. What do you have? It is every European’s duty to defend their people and country against the ideology of genocide, conquest and destruction known as Islam.53 As with figures like Lane and Kurtagić, Breivik saw his politics through a lens of ‘kill or be killed’. His ideology combined the defence of white Europeans with a vision for revolutionary change stemming from his actions, which he felt would help to inspire others to also take up arms and develop a civil war to overthrow the invasion allegedly being carried out by Muslims. For Breivik, a European ‘civil war’, genocidal in scope, had already broken out – a reading of contemporary society he also drew from bloggers such as Fjordman. This called for many future terrorist acts, such as his own, until the forces of ‘cultural conservatism’, promoting the interests of authentic white Europeans, would eventually be victorious. Following from mass killings, a new political order would emerge. His new era would see all white people who had been 222

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deemed ‘traitors’ killed, and Muslims either deported or killed too. He predicted this would finally come to fruition in the year 2083. The genocidal fantasy of purifying Europe in the future is clear from such a projection.

Concluding thoughts Having now explored the ways in which a variety of postwar fascist cultures have engaged with the issue of genocide, we can return to the question of why such themes are so appealing in such milieus. Why does genocide resonate with the fascist mindset after 1945? We have seen that the concept can be used to articulate two themes related to the idea of ‘purity’: firstly genocide as a necessary mechanism for creating a ‘purified’, ‘cleansed’ future for white people; and secondly the theme of fighting a defensive, existential war to preserve the white race against attack from non-white people who are seen to pose a threat to racial purity. In both formats, the employment of genocide by postwar fascists points to the conclusion that fascist politics legitimises its ideas through the presentation of a national or racial community facing a profound existential threat: achieve racial purity, or be destroyed. The movement uses the rhetorical value of the term ‘genocide’, or cognate terms such as ‘ethnocide’ or ‘erasure’, to evoke the idea of society facing such an extreme existential crisis. After all, what could be more threatening than total annihilation? We can turn to Michael Mann’s analysis of fascism, itself largely restricted to exploring the ideology in interwar and wartime years, which offers some further thoughts on the importance of this theme of purity. In particular, Mann stresses the theme of ‘cleansing’ as a central aspect of the fascist ideal.54 Again, this definitional aspiration among fascists leads to very real consequences when ideas such as ‘cleansing’ are applied to entire human societies. While Mann highlights how fascist projects of ‘cleansing’ were all too real until 1945, as we can see, at an ideological level, the aspiration has continued into the postwar era too. As with Griffin’s theme of fascisms steeping themselves in a mythology of rebirth, so Mann’s theme of fascism aspiring towards achieving mythic purity by cleansing an imagined community of people (imagined through racial concepts, idealised national history, or more usually a mixture of these ideals) through violence helps to explain the resonance of genocide among postwar fascists. Moreover, drawing on both these conceptual reference points, in his exploration of the ways in which fascist ideologies ‘license’ genocide before 1945, Genocide and Fascism, Aristotle Kallis also comments on this core aspect of fascist ideology. Kallis underscores interwar fascism’s inherently dramatic presentation of the world through a lens of life and death scenarios as follows: the spectre of the ‘death of the nation’ was needed in order to articulate the countersolution of the ‘death of the [racialised] other’ as a necessary, inevitable strategy to ensure the nation’s life. This was a simple, even naïve and crude proposition, but one that has proved fascinating and eminently popular in the literal sense of the word as ethnocentric nationalism and nation-statism were moving to the forefront of European politics in the first four decades of the twentieth century . . . it was through ‘race’ that the future was portrayed in terms of a stark dilemma: death and oblivion versus rebirth and greatness of the nation. Either way someone had to die, to be eradicated or eliminated.55 223

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As with Mann’s work here, Kallis’ analysis of pre-1945 fascist politics highlights the mass appeal of political movements with such genocidal aspirations in Europe, and the ways their ideologies fed into the cultures of genocide that developed before and during the Second World War. For our purposes of exploring the legacy of postwar fascists and their views on genocide, we can note that this need to see the world though a binary of a life and death confrontation has continued. The theme of ‘destroy or be destroyed’, applied to the level of the national and racial community, remains a widespread concern among postwar fascists. However, unlike the pre-1945 incarnations of fascism examined by Kallis, these are not visions with mass appeal any longer, and so are largely marginalised. For the hardcore, the fantasy of enacting genocide to purify the community remains, but the ability to carry it out has dramatically withered. This has not stopped marginalised fascist activists continuing to create fantastical visions where a community needs to fight an existential conflict for its survival and continued ‘purity’. Such a hardcore is likely to persist, as the underlying drivers for creating small bands of fascists are found within the fabric of modernity. Most worryingly, from this marginalised milieu a small number of fascist terrorists can be motivated, ‘licenced’ to use Kallis’ terminology, by the theme of ‘kill or be killed’ to the point of wanting to spark ‘race wars’, with the ultimate objective of somehow ‘returning’ the race to a never-existent ideal point of purity. For the most part, the postwar interest in genocide and its cognate concepts among fascists has resulted in mere talk, but on occasion fascist concerns with genocide can still lead to violence.

Notes 1 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (London: Routledge, 2008). 2 Jennifer Lipman, ‘Neo-Nazi Monopoly: Pass the swastika, collect £200’, The Jewish Chronicle 6 December 2011, available at: http://www.thejc.com/news/world-news/59665/neo-nazimonopoly-pass-swastika-collect-£200 (accessed 28 March 2014). 3 Redwatch, bulletin of Combat 18, 1993 cited in Nicholas Hillman, ‘“Tell me chum, in case I got it wrong. What was it we were fighting during the war?” The Re-emergence of British Fascism, 1945–58’, Contemporary British History, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2001, pp. 1–34 (15). 4 See Tony Judd, ‘Epilogue: From the House of the Dead: An Essay on Modern European Memory’, in Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (London: Pimlico, 2007). 5 See my analysis of this document, ‘2083 – A European Declaration of Independence: A Licence to Kill’, in Feldman, M. and Jackson, P. (eds), Doublespeak: The Rhetoric of the Far Right Since 1945 (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2014), pp. 81–100. 6 Griffin set out his approach in The Nature of Fascism (London: Routledge, 1993) and has subsequently developed it further, especially in the volume Fascism and Modernism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007). 7 For an overview of the variety of European fascist movements, see Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Pimlico, 2003). 8 George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: toward a general theory of fascism (New York: Howard Fertig, 1999), p. 42. 9 Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 10 Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002). 11 Roger Griffin, ‘Between metapolitics and apoliteia: The Nouvelle Droite’s strategy for conserving the fascist vision in the “interregnum”’, Modern & Contemporary France, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2000, pp. 35–53. 12 For a lengthier discussion on Breivik’s variant of fascism, see Roger Griffin, Terrorist Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), pp. 206–12.

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13 For an overview of the website, see the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘Intelligence Report’ on Stomfront, available at: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/ groups/stormfront (accessed 21 January 2015). 14 At the time of writing, this was taken from the following web address: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1028518-2/ (accessed 28 March 2014). 15 For a detailed overview of David Lane, see George Michael, ‘David Lane and the Fourteen Words’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, Vol. 10, No. 1, 2009, pp. 43–61. 16 David Lane, Deceived, Damned, and Defiant: The Revolutionary Writings of David Lane (St Maries, Idaho: 14 Word Press, 1999), pp. 1–6. 17 Taken from the Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Report on David Duke, available at: http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-files/profiles/david-duke (accessed 21 January 2015). 18 David Duke, ‘The genocide of the White race is being promoted by liberals’ available at: http://davidduke.com/the-genocide-of-the-white-race-is-being-promoted-by-liberals/ (accessed 21 January 2015). 19 An example of one of these films can be found at: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=h7jxwea6wTg (accessed 21 January 2015). 20 The book has been distributed in a number of ways, and currently is available for free via the website Solargeneral, which hosts a wide array of neo-Nazi material, also including Holocaust denial literature. It can be downloaded as an e-book form the following address: http://www.solargeneral.com/library/turner-diaries-william-luther-pierce.pdf (accessed 21 Jaunary 2015). 21 For an overview of the book, see Janet Wilson, ‘Toxic rhetoric: the language of The Turner Diaries: A Novel’, in Feldman and Jackson (eds), Doublespeak, pp. 61–80. 22 For more details, see the following Anti-Defamation League webpage http://archive.adl. org/learn/ext_us/turner_diaries.html?xpicked=5&item=22 (accessed 21 January 2015). 23 Extract taken from an episode of the BBC programme Panorama, the transcript of which is reproduced online at the following address: http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/ static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_30_06_00.txt (accessed 21 January 2015). 24 The Copeland case is discussed throughout Ramon Spaaij’s leading comparative analysis of lone wolf radicalisation, Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism: Global Patterns, Motivations and Prevention (New York: Springer, 2012). 25 For discussion on Jordan’s role within the wider neo-Nazi cultures of postwar Britain, see Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley to the National Front (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998) especially Chapters 8 to 10. 26 Colin Jordan, ‘The Way Ahead’, available at: http://www.stormfront.org/forum/t1009737/ (accessed 21 January 2015). 27 The book is reproduced on the following website: http://www.skrewdriver.net/me2000. html (accessed 21 January 2015). 28 Paul Jackson, ‘Arthur Kemp: profile of a white race ideologue’, Searchlight, May 2012. 29 Nigel Copsey, ‘Changing course or changing clothes? Reflections on the ideological evolution of the British National Party 1999–2006’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2007, pp. 61–82. 30 Graham Macklin, ‘“Teaching the Truth to the Hardcore” The Public and Private presentation of BNP Ideology’, in Feldman and Jackson (eds), Doublespeak, pp. 123–46. 31 Jack Dempsey, ‘Understanding Why Anti-Whites are so Evil’, available at: http://www.bnp. org.uk/news/national/understanding-why-anti-white-whites-are-so-evil (accessed 21 January 2015). 32 Tamir Bar-On’s analysis of the New Right includes the books Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007) and Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (London: Routledge, 2013). 33 For example see Roger Griffin, ‘Plus ca change!: The fascist pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite’, in Edward Arnold (ed.), The Development of the Radical Right in France 1890–1995 (Routledge: London, 2000), pp. 217–52. 34 One curious feature of the New Right is its development of a neo-fascist variant of Wikipedia, called Metapedia. Krebb’s entry here can be seen here: http://en.metapedia.org/wiki/ Pierre_Krebs (accessed 21 January 2015).

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35 Again, Metapedia carries a short biography of O’Meara at the following web address: http:// en.metapedia.org/wiki/Michael_O%27Meara (accessed 21 January 2015). 36 The homepage is: http://www.arktos.com (accessed 21 January 2015). 37 James Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Pétain to Le Pen (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 150. 38 Ibid. 39 On the New Right, also see Alberto Spektorowski, ‘The New Right: ethno-regionalism, ethnopluralism and the emergence of a neo-fascist “Third Way”’, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2003), pp. 111–30. 40 Tamir Bar-On, ‘Intellectualised Right-Wing Extremism – Alain de Benoist’s Mazeway Resynthesis since 2000’, in Uwe Backes and Patrick Moreau (eds), The Extreme Right in Europe: Current Trends and Perspectives (Oakville, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), pp. 333–58 (354). 41 ‘Manifesto of the French New Right in Year 2000’ is reproduced on the website New European Conservative: http://neweuropeanconservative.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ manifesto-of-the-french-new-right1.pdf (accessed 21 January 2015). 42 The book was first published in German in 1997. Quote taken from the English translation, Pierre Krebbs, Fighting for the Species: Western Ethnosuicide or European Renaissance? (United Kingdom: Arktos, 2012), p. 84. 43 Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (United Kingdom: Arktos, 2013), p. 101. 44 Michael O’Meara, Toward the White Republic (San Diego, CA: Counter-Currents Publishing, 2011). 45 Alexander Kurtagić, ‘The Great Erasure’, Radix, Vol. 1, 2012, extract taken from Kindle edition. 46 Kurtagić, ‘The Great Erasure’. 47 This is an issue discussed by many academic voices. Two useful accounts include: Liz Fekete, A Suitable Enemy: Racism, Migration and Islamophobia in Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2009); and José Pedro Zúquete, ‘The European extreme-right and Islam: New directions?’, Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 13, No. 3, 2008, pp. 321–44. 48 Hans-Georg Betz and Susi Meret, ‘Revisiting Lepanto: the political mobilization against Islam in contemporary Western Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 43, No. 3–4, 2009, pp. 313–34. 49 I have developed this theme more fully in the following article: Paul Jackson, ‘The License to Hate: Peder Jensen’s Fascist Rhetoric in Anders Breivik’s Manifesto 2083: A European Declaration of Independence’, Democracy and Security, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2013, pp. 247–69. 50 The reference point of Ragnarok is also commonly used in neo-Nazi mythologies; in both instances it evokes the end of one world and the emergence of another. See Fjordman, ‘Preparing for Ragnarok’, available at: http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/preparing-for-ragnarok.html (accessed 21 January 2015). 51 Fjordman, ‘Native Revolt: A European Declaration of Independence’, available at: http:// www.brusselsjournal.com/node/1980 (accessed 21 January 2015). 52 Anders Breivik, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, pp. 1162–3, available at: http:// unitednations.ispnw.org/archives/breivik-manifesto-2011.pdf (accessed 28 March 2014). 53 Breivik, 2083, p. 1097. 54 See Michael Mann, Fascists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) especially p. 16. 55 Kallis, Genocide and Fascism, p. 84.

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16 ‘ THOSE WHO HA VE T H E S I N . . . GO TO TH I S S I D E’ Genocide and religion Kate Temoney

‘Those who have the sin’ is how a Hutu man identified Tutsis, Tutsis who were singled out for extermination during the Rwandan genocide. The use of the words ‘the sin’ is telling, as it conveys that Tutsis are immanently wicked, marred in some deep way that only the religiously inflected word ‘sin’ can communicate. In this phrase, religion and genocide meet. The terms ‘genocide’ and ‘religion’ are both as charged as they are multivalent and misunderstood, for there is no consensus among scholars as to what these terms mean. Scholarly debates abound regarding the utility and exclusivity of their definitions, normative and prescriptive implications, and relationship to each other. Most definitions and categories are fraught with limitations, tainted with normative commitments, and subject to accusations of essentialization. Nonetheless, definitions and categories do help us think through complex ideas and clarify complex realities, with the caveat that we are mindful not to mistake these definitions and categories as identical to or capable of accounting entirely for the very phenomenon they seek to explain. We use definitions for ‘genocide’ and ‘religion’ no matter how contested, problematic, and open to revision they may be, because we find it useful. What is at stake in understanding these concepts goes far beyond academic battles over nomenclature, as regardless of how we choose to delineate ‘genocide’ and ‘religion’, these are not reified ideas but are phenomena that occur in our world and are of grave consequence. There is no doubt that society at large has an understanding of these terms, and if we allow this fact to be overwhelmed by scholastic disputes, we do so at our peril. One might anticipate that a discussion of genocide and religion would further compound the intricacy of these discourses as well as further problematize their study, and in fact it does. In addition to the aforementioned challenges, there is no singular discussion of religion and genocide that is capable of being exhaustive. Inevitably, our discussion will be attended by omissions. These challenges notwithstanding, they are not so utterly formidable as to occlude the two proposed approaches herein for examining the intersection of genocide and religion both in scholarship and in their commission. To this end, we will briefly review the definitional debates in the field of genocide, religion, and genocide and religion; identify four nexuses of religion and genocide as informed by case studies; and, in the conclusion, proffer pathways for the future development of genocide research and genocide and religion research, which includes not only how religion potentiates genocide but how religion can act as a bulwark against genocide. 227

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What is genocide? Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop summarize a common notion about genocide when they aver that ‘genocide is a new word for an ancient practice’.1 The ‘new word’ was invented in 1943 by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish jurist of Jewish descent, in response to his moral indignation at the release of war criminals responsible for the mass deportation and killings of Christian Armenians by the Muslim Ittihad regime from 1915 to 1917 (although the Holocaust, which occurred several decades later, is commonly considered the paradigmatic example of genocide). Lemkin’s dogged battle to create a law against exterminating entire peoples culminated in the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948;2 Lemkin’s ‘new word’ was finally given a definition. Genocide means any of [a list of] acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group. But the legal definition of genocide was fraught with arguments from its inception. One result of this argument is the trend in genocide studies to propose an alternative definition of genocide to the juridical one, a more expansive concept informed by social theory. Exemplars include, but are not limited to, Frank Robert Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (1990); Helen Fein’s Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (1993); Martin Shaw’s What is Genocide? (2007); and Jacques Sémelin’s Purify and Destroy (2009).3 The criticism often levied against extralegal definitions of genocide is that ‘genocide’ is used to describe acts that are not technically genocidal, thereby compromising the gravity and distinctiveness of genocide. Furthermore, straying from the legal definition of genocide has resulted in the indiscriminate use of genocide to describe any occurrence of mass killing that ‘communicates nothing [more] but the author’s disapproval’and distorts Lemkin’s concept of the term: [For genocide specialists the] assumption is that Lemkin did not properly understand genocide, despite the fact that he invented the term and went to great trouble to explain its meaning. Instead, most scholars presume to instruct Lemkin, retrospectively, about his concept, although they are in fact proposing a different concept, usually mass murder.4 The approach to discussing genocide in this chapter soberly engages the shortcomings of both the legal and sociological definitions and is informed by three considerations: Sémelin’s contention that ‘it is crucial for genocide research to disengage itself from the legal approach’;5 Fein’s assessment that ‘many social scientists have accepted the United Nations Genocide Convention definition of genocide explicitly or implicitly or a broadened version thereof’;6 and Chalk and Jonassohn’s tracing of the sociological, historical, legal and political, as well as personal, influences on Lemkin that gave rise to the spirit behind the Genocide Convention – influences which are not abundantly clear in the extant Genocide Convention due to legal and political compromises that had to be made during its drafting. Lemkin was primarily concerned about violence against civilians, the legacy of European imperialism that he understood as undergirding genocide and, chiefly, the obliteration of culture.7 The proposed definition focuses on contributing to the evolution of the term genocide as informed by phenomenological research and not dictated by legal considerations, as well as to reclaim a 228

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modicum of Lemkin’s considerations in his conception of the meaning of genocide. To this end, ‘genocide’ will be considered to be the deliberate destruction of any civilian group, as identified by the perpetrators, who may or may not be agents of the state, with the aim of permanently eliminating the culture of its victims. One of these cultural demarcations is religion, and it is to the term ‘religion’ that we now turn.

What is religion? Wranglings over the definition of religion reach back to antiquity. Etymological accounts have been offered by Cicero, who located the origin of religion in the Latin word relegere (to read, or reread, ‘all things pertaining to the gods’) and Lactantius, who insisted that religion is derived from the Latin religare (‘to bind’, presumably to God and the faithful to each other). Debates over the genesis of the word ‘religion’ have been eclipsed by arguments over whether the category of religion truly exists, and if it does, how it should be defined and what should or should not be considered a religion. One of the most notable and seminal works of the former argument is Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Georgetown by Jonathan Z. Smith, who contends that religion is manufactured by scholars for the purposes of analytic research.8 Others deem religion to be a social (often Western) construct9 that cannot be explicated from cultural practices10 and therefore cannot be discussed in isolation in any meaningful manner. Those who are willing to engage in defining religion and accept it as a category inevitably encounter three difficulties: one, either working definitions are too vague to have any analytical utility; two, they are too specific to the point of a suspected, biased exclusivity; or, three, are attended by ‘the membership problem’, or the predicament over what belief systems should and should not be considered as ‘religions’. John D. Carlson’s ‘egalitarian’ solution to the irresolvable dilemma of competing categories of religion is that ‘[o]ne who claims a category or title gets to use it’, provided that they offer reasons for their category choice and understand that their conceptualization will be subject to scrutiny.11 Carlson seems primarily to value the heuristic value of conceptualizations, and some definitions of religion are more efficacious than others depending on the determined course of study. Comparably, for our discussion, génocidaires and genocide victims who claim a religious tradition will not be questioned regarding their membership or the legitimacy of their religious claims, though their claims are not decisively privileged, for their claims, too, will be assayed. The definition of religion that will be adopted here is the working definition that Carlson contends because ‘for traditionalist scholars of religion . . . [it] often serves as an adequate working definition’: Religion entails the practices, rituals, beliefs, discourses, myths, symbols, creeds, experiences, traditions, and institutions by which individuals and communities conceive, revere, assign meaning to, and order their lives around some account of ultimate reality generally understood in relationship to God, gods, or a transcendent dimension deemed sacred or holy.12 The reason for adopting this definition of religion is that it takes seriously the fact that people profess and act upon what they understand and identify to be ‘religion’. For example, people who claim to be religious do engage in observable behavior (devotional acts); they do make claims about a ‘transcendent dimension’ (the afterlife); and 229

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they do ‘order their lives around some account of ultimate reality’ (accounts of good and evil).

Genocide, religion, and religious studies in the literature The legal definition of genocide has existed for over 60 years, yet systematic research on genocide has only been a major scholarly endeavour for about 35 years. In their edited volume, The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective, Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan suggest that a professional interest in genocide began with the introduction of Holocaust ‘remembrance days and scholarly interest in the crimes of the Third Reich in the mid-1970s . . . [which] accelerated in the 1990s’.13 Ostensibly, Gellately and Kiernan are referring to social scientists (as opposed to legal scholars), as evidenced by their citation of such seminal works as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn’s The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (1990); Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny’s Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (1995); and Levon Chorbajian and George Sharinian’s Studies in Comparative Genocide (1999).14 Rightfully, Gellately and Kiernan ask ‘Why has it taken so long for many scholars to get seriously involved in genocide research’ (2003: 4)? In response, they offer interest in archival materials. This reply indicates why social scientists became interested in the phenomenon of genocide, but it does not provide a reason for their initial inattention during the nascent stages of genocide research. Alex Alvarez, author of Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach, offers a possible answer, citing social science’s ethnocentrism; emphasis on empiricism rather than theory; and the ‘marginali[zation] of state or political crime’ in criminology, specifically.15 Gellately and Kiernan and Alvarez enumerate many of the subjects that are typically understood as constituting the social sciences, of which religious studies is not one: sociology, political theory, history, anthropology, psychology and philosophy. A 2009 edited work, The Genocide Reader by Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, omits religious studies as one of the many growing approaches to genocide studies, as does The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (2010) and Genocide: A Comprehensive Introduction (2006). The editors and authors of these volumes reference religion in their discussions, typically how religion functions as one of many ideological and cultural faultlines along which people can be differentiated and ‘othered’ as an enemy, but not religious studies as a scholarly perspective. Presumably, because religion is not historically understood as a single discipline among the social sciences, it is often marginalized. However, the field of religious studies inherently encompasses all of the social sciences, affording religion a facility for interdisciplinary study. Therefore, Religious Studies is well equipped to bring together disparate attempts at genocide research. Furthermore, analytical concepts specific to religion, such as appeals to divine authority, the cosmic reordering of time and space, sacrifice, and soteriology, can further illumine, expand and deepen the contributions of various disciplines. For example, how political power and authority is enhanced by divine fiat, how philosophical treatments of evil include not only acts but essentialist claims about an irredeemable ‘other’, and how temporal historical accounts are enhanced by parochial mythologies that transcend time and space. This lacuna in genocide studies has been most recently filled by two edited volumes: Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack’s In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (2001) and Steven Leonard Jacobs’s Confronting Genocide: Judaism, 230

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Christianity, Islam (2009). The editors note that ‘not many scholars have looked either at the religious aspects of modern genocide, or at the manner in which religion has taken a position on mass killing’16 and that ‘“religion” is all too often overlooked as an important factor in contributing to either the implementation and perpetuation of genocide, or as a foundational underpinning and rationalization for such collective acts’.17 These assertions naturally implicate religion scholars, as fellow social scientists, and why they have elided the saliency of religion in genocide research until recent decades. Perhaps it is because religion is commonly understood to be an ancillary and not a main motivating factor in genocide perpetration, as there is general agreement among scholars that religion is often a necessary but not a sufficient cause of genocide. Paul R. Bartrop challenges this conception when he writes that ‘[r]eligious wars of extermination are so ingrained in the popular consciousness, even three and four centuries ago, it had become a given that religion is a root cause of violence, war, and mass murder’.18 Or, perhaps, as Israel W. Charny contends, it is possible that scholars are reticent to denounce the religious traditions with which they identify.19 Henry R. Huttenbach concisely summarizes the intersection of religion and genocide perpetration and the importance of examining their relationship when he writes, [R]eligion – meaning the faithful, the doctrine, the clergy and their institutions – can easily be prompted to buttress genocidal thought and action in a wide array of capacities. The religion–genocide nexus needs to be carefully studied in general, and, in particular, must be carefully monitored in times of social crisis. The worst-case scenario would be to continue underestimating, or even denying, that the nexus exists. It is the task of scholars to expose and explore it, and for policy makers to dismantle the religion–genocide connection.20

The nexuses of religion and genocide Genocide is neither monocausal nor aleatoric. Religion is rarely the motivation for undertaking genocide; rather, its lethality is actualized when paired with some other planned aim. Religion has the unique, ambiguous and potent capacity to make appeals to divine authority, necessitate the cosmic reordering of time and space, necessitate and normalize sacrifice, and imbue the worldly life with implications of salvation and the soteriological life. A claim made by Mark Juergensmeyer about religion and terrorism is analogously instructive regarding religion and genocide. He contends that religion does not inevitably cause violence, but religion is ‘crucial for these [violent] acts, since it gives moral justifications for killing and provides images of cosmic war that allows activists to believe that they are waging spiritual scenarios . . . religion often provides the mores and symbols that make possible bloodshed’.21 Furthermore, although R. Scott Appleby believes that religion can contribute to peacemaking, he also acknowledges that religion has ‘so often inspired, legitimated, and exacerbated deadly conflicts’.22 This section will attempt to apply Huttenbach’s idea and examine the ‘religion– genocide nexus’, with historical illustrations, as a technique for thinking about how religion structurally functions in genocides as opposed to merely identifying similar features of genocides. In other words, the intent is not solely to enumerate and identify patterns across genocides throughout history, but to understand how focusing on religion and religious studies elucidates these patterns. The nexuses 231

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under discussion are not mutually exclusive and could be explicated with different historical illustrations, as the strategy herein is one of using many possible avenues to elucidate the relationship between genocide and religion. The four nexuses are: (1) theological warrants and frameworks, which make genocide not only thinkable but permissible; (2) religious alterity, which reinforces the distinctiveness of the group targeted for extermination and imbues the victims’ ‘otherness’ with sacral import; (3) the technique of usurping religion’s potency through rhetoric, which simultaneously appropriates religious authority and crushes potential religious opposition; and (4) the role of religious figures and institutions in genocide perpetration, which symbolizes divine endorsement and diffuses the responsibility of perpetrators. First, it would be best to add a word about the selected historical illustrations. Unfortunately, genocide is universal and there is no shortage of examples to choose from, both pre-modern and modern. Totten and Bartrop list several genocides that have transpired over the centuries, fifteen to be exact, ranging from 416 bce (the Athenian mass slaughter of Melians) to the present (the killing of black Africans by the Arab militia in the Sudan).23 In this list are atrocities that are considered part of the canon of generally indisputable genocides: the Holocaust (1933–45), and the genocides in Armenia (1915–23), Cambodia (1975–9), the Former Yugoslavia (1995), Rwanda (1994), and Darfur (2003–present). Many of these genocides will, too, be the focus of the religion–genocide nexuses. It is also important to note that there is growing scholarship on lesser known and studied genocides such as those in the Congo, Australia, East Timor, Bangladesh, Tibet, Gujarat, Iraq and the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, to name a few. In some of these cases, the Christian missionary impetus to bring civilization to non-Christian brutes in the distant corners of the world veiled the rapacious intentions of countries to acquire resources and labor, resulting in what has been named ‘utilitarian genocides’, or genocides where indigenous peoples are exterminated in the name of ‘progress’. Theological warrants: Nexus one Steven Leonard Jacobs argues that ‘even when the evidence is incontrovertible (e.g., the Armenian, Rwandan, Darfur [Sudanese] genocides), it is approached from the perspectives of historians, political scientists, sociologists, and the like, with no attempts to address the theological frame out of which religions operate or their institutional structures, buildings, liturgies, curricula, etc. – which proceed from those orientations’.24 Theological warrants for genocide, in the form of text and dogma, then, are a logical place to begin in understanding how religion interacts with genocide. ‘Genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational; yet we need to understand it as thinkable’, and divine commands to annihilate peoples not only makes genocide thinkable, but permissible.25 The section ‘Textual Warrants for Genocide’ in Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, is replete with references to biblical excerpts. Mamdani similarly references these pericopae and believes that they typify ‘the genocidal impulse to eliminate an enemy’,26 – setting a stage for conscripting sacred text in genocide campaigns both specifically and generally. Three prime illustrations are God’s instruction to King Saul to smite Amalek and his descendants – including presumably innocent children – (1 Samuel 15:5; Ecclesiastes 7:16); God’s instruction to Moses to ‘utterly destroy them’ (the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, 232

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and Jebusites) of a besieged city (Deuteronomy 20:17); and the command to kill every male, boy and woman who has known a man by lying with him (Numbers 31:7; 17). In the Islamic tradition, Rubenstein compellingly maintains that the Islamic tradition of jihad and dhimma contributed to the Armenian genocide (although more explicitly so to the massacre of Armenians from 1894–6), which ‘at least in part . . . [justified] the belief that they [Turks] did no wrong in exterminating Armenians’.27 He further writes that Muslim jurists conceived the concepts of jihad and dhimma based on the Qur’an and hadith, of which ‘[t]he dhimma was . . . the outcome of jihad’, the dhimma being a ‘pact of submission and protection . . . imposed upon defeated Jews and Christians’, who, despite being ‘People of the Book’, are not of the true religion and still ‘constitute a threat to the true religion’ and thus to peace and justice’. Therefore, peace can only be established through defeat of the dar al-harb (the territory of heedlessness) and the territorial expansion of the dar al-Islam (the realm where ‘all peoples are united under the aegis of a truly Islamic state’.28 Religious alterity: Nexus two Three ways in which religion may functionally reinforce alterity are by amplifying existing national and ethnic distinctiveness, essentializing religious difference by branding enemies as irredeemably evil, and situating victims in the context of an antagonistic religious narrative (for instance, as enemies of God, inherently sinful, or ‘Christ killers’). The consequence of othering is that it leads to dehumanizing victims and making them targets for extirpation because they are not only a threat to the perpetrator group’s existence but to the divine order itself. This latter function is particularly operant in cases where the victim and perpetrator share a religious identity, as was the case in the Rwandan genocide. In the case of Sudan, the black African Christian and animists of the resource-rich south (and the non-Arabs of the western region of Sudan) are the targets of the Arab, Muslim-dominated government of the north who impose the Arabic language and Shar’ia law on the entire country. The state uses the Janjaweed (Arab militia) to terrorize, rape and kill civilians, and although the politicization of religion is one of the many faultlines for conflict, religious antagonism remains a salient and underlying factor of the violence even if not the most prominent one.29 In the case of the Former Yugoslavia and Armenia, religion played a much greater role in contrasting perpetrators and victims. Religious identity was grafted onto ethnic identity, making the two inseparable; what is commonly referred to as an ‘ethnoreligious’ identity. In the former Yugoslavia, othering was made possible through an already existing ethnic and national difference by religion (Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats and Muslim Slavs): In some cases and such is the case in point, nation, myth and religion are closely related. Here religious differences reinforce ethnic ones and strengthen the construction of distinct national identities. Serbia and Croatia involve two culturally similar peoples that also share much common history and territory, such that, although religious nationalism is only part of the nationalist endeavour, religion highlights ethnic and national boundaries.30 Religion functions less as representative of specific practices and beliefs and more as a racial categorization with its attending traits, such as Slavs being ‘Christian by nature’, 233

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meaning that any Slav who is not a Christian (i.e. Muslim) is a ‘Turk’ – a reference to the Ottoman army, led by Sultan Murad, who overthrew the Serb Prince Lazar (who is styled as a Christ figure) in the battle of Kosovo polje.31 Similarly, in the Armenian genocide, the ethnic and national identities of Muslim Turks and Christian Armenians were inextricably fused, to the extent that to convert to Islam was to become a Turk. Leonard B. Glick writes: No matter what their personal religious convictions may have been, the Turkish perpetrators looked upon Islam as an integral element in their collective identity; likewise, Christianity was an equally definitive element in the identity of victims, who could have ‘become Turks’ (if ever) only by converting to Islam.32 What is less often a focus of academic attention are the dynamics of religion in genocides among peoples who share the same religion and sect. Instead of religious difference functioning as a demarcation of the enemy, a common religious system functions as the basis for sustaining narratives of differentiation, of legitimacy and illegitimacy, by exploiting shared religious tropes and exploiting the potency of religious symbols and ideals by perverting or inverting their multivalence. The Rwandan genocide is such an instance of violence, where Hutu Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists massacred their fellow Tutsi Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists. A scene from the documentary film Roger: Genocide Baby (2011) further highlights how appeals to religious concepts reinforce the idea of an Other.33 Miss JoJo, a popular Rwandan recording artist who memorializes the genocide in her music, relays her witnessing the shooting of her mother. She indicates that men entered the house and sorted the inhabitants for execution: ‘Then they started saying “We want to see all those who have the sin to go this side. And those who don’t have the sin to go this side . . . ”.’ What this religiously inflected statement exemplifies is that perpetrators viewed Tutsis as indelibly marked by transgression, a transgression that necessitated extermination. The appropriation of religious rhetoric and potency: Nexus three ‘Those who commit genocide often endow their actions with some sort of religious meaning, frequently putting forth the assertion that, in destroying entire groups of people, they are doing God’s work’.34 This ‘meaning’ is a religious narrative that provides the ritual space and maintenance required to sustain genocidal action by appealing to the potency of religious symbols and tropes and conscripting divine approval, resulting in the authorization of behavior that would otherwise be deemed criminal. David Little reinforces this notion when he quotes Max Weber: ‘groups wish to see their positions transformed from purely factual power relations into a cosmos of acquired rights, and to know that [those rights] are sanctified’. Little summarizes Weber’s sentiment: ‘human beings seem compelled to evaluate given political and economic arrangements in reference to sacred or cosmic standards’.35 (Génocidaires put religious language to deleterious use by co-opting the power of religious language (typically laced with either implicit or explicit religious referents) exploiting sacred spaces and, at times, juxtaposing violent acts with sacred time. Collectively, these techniques concomitantly weaken potential religious and moral opposition to, and strengthen the domination of, genocide perpetrators – in effect, conferring the 234

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potency of religious authority and obedience upon the génocidaires. Destruction of religious monuments and forced conversions are not only a means of destroying a religious group’s identity; they also, very publicly suppress and undermine potential moral opposition from institutionalized religions and their adherents. Religious language figured heavily in the Rwanda genocide. The primary conduits of genocide-inciting propaganda in Rwanda were radio broadcasts and newspapers, which appealed to divine authority and biblical allusions. A radio broadcast blared, ‘Let us rejoice friends. Cockroaches have been exterminated. Let us rejoice friends. God is never wrong’ (Roger: Genocide Baby, 2011). Explicit, biblical appeals are exemplified by the publication of the Hutu 10 Commandments, widely circulated in December 1990 and the European-inspired Hamitic myth, which contends that Tutsis are from the ‘land of Ham’ (Egypt) and therefore not indigenous to Rwanda. Mahmood Mamdani argues that this colonial racialization resulted in Tutsis being considered an ‘alien presence [not a different ethnic group] . . . For the Hutu who killed, the Tutsi was a settler, not a neighbor, . . . [their mission] to eliminate a foreign presence from home soil, literally and physically’.36 It is this mythic history that is a referent in a speech by one of Rwanda’s genocide organizers, Leon Mugesera, who stated that Tutsis ‘should be “sent back down the Nile”’.37 Appropriating the sacrality of religion in genocide is further evinced by killing individuals in and near religious spaces as well as committing acts of violence juxtaposed with sacred time. In Rwanda, a vast number of Tutsis were killed in churches, and ‘tabernacles, baptismal fonts, pulpits, vestments, crucifixes, statues, altars, Bibles and prayer books – all the sacred symbols and icons of religion – were slashed and damaged, leaving those who witness the deliberate desecration stunned by the extent of the rage which must have driven the violators. There are many reports of screaming victims being physically dragged to churches before being killed at the entrances’.38 Regarding sacred time, there is speculation that the fact that the genocide occurred four days after Easter may have created a planned opportunity to manipulate the themes of violence and sacrifice associated with Christ’s crucifixion and, at least, have been an opportunistic coincidence that could have bolstered and condoned genocidal thinking. In Kishinev in 1903, Jews were killed in a pogrom after Easter.39 Similarly, in Armenia, Turks urged genocides from mosques, massacred Armenians in churches (including burning 2,500 Armenians in the Cathedral of Urfa), and many of the killings in Armenia followed Friday services.40 The genocides in the Balkans provide yet more illustrations. The epic myth of the Battle of Kosovo, magnified and perpetuated by the Serbian Orthodox Church, promoted Muslims as ‘Christ-killers’ and deserving targets. As Michael Sells understands it, the Serb Orthodox Church sacralized the battle of Kosovo, creating ‘sacred time’ and ‘sacred space’ by catapulting the events of the 1389 battle into the present and conducting ritual ceremonies centered on Lazar relics in the very place known as the ‘Serb Jerusalem’, Kosovo.41 Metropolitan Amfilohije of Montenegro – the bishop of the diocese of Montenegro – on numerous occasions expressed his hostility toward non-Serbs. Amfilohije also ‘announced that the Serbs could not renounce Kosovo either in this world nor in the afterlife, and that they should fight for it until the end of time, even at the price of death’, essentially situating what is essentially a this-worldly struggle in cosmic time – a message further reinforced by his status as a bishop. It is to the status of religious figures, as well as institutions, and how they contribute to the dynamics of genocide that we turn to next.42 235

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The participation of religious institutions and individuals in genocide perpetration: Nexus four Some research has been conducted on the significance of churches, the involvement of clergy, and exegetical support of violence as they relate to the commission of genocide, as ‘Christian churches, were involved on several levels in preparing the theological, moral, political, and mythical groundwork for genocide in this century’.43 Despite these observations, this component of genocide has been largely under-studied. Religious institutions (i.e. churches) and religious individuals (primarily clergy) have both implicitly and explicitly condoned genocide – implicitly by remaining silent and explicitly by actively buttressing state propaganda, or worse, enthusiastically participating or actively facilitating genocide. Church or clerical support of the state’s genocidal aims may be a product of fear and/or a long-standing alignment of the parochial with the political, whereby both have a primary interest in maintaining their hegemony. Among the best-documented reactions of church officials to genocide were the responses of Roman Catholic and Protestant clergyman during the Holocaust, which ranged from passivity (the majority) to a full-throated endorsement; those few clergy who protested did so primarily out of the self-interest of their churches rather than out of moral indignation at the persecution of Jews.44 In the case of Rwanda, Alison De Forges reminds us that the majority of Hutu killers were not monsters or psychopaths but ordinary citizens who participated in the genocide reluctantly and under duress, mostly ‘because attacks were incited or ordered by supposedly legitimate authorities [such as clergy]; [moreover], those with misgivings found it easier to commit crimes and to believe or pretend to believe they had done no wrong’.45 In effect, ‘church authorities left the way clear for officials, politicians, and propagandists to assert that the slaughter actually met with God’s favor’.46 Moreover, given that clergy are typically seen as moral paragons and that churches are, literally, sanctuaries, what may be at least surprising and at worst disturbing is that many Rwandan clergy were directly involved in killing and raping victims and that scores of Tutsis lost their lives within church walls. Longman sheds light on why he believes this moral inversion was possible in Rwanda. [W]hile churches were not the chief organizers of the Rwandan genocide, their long practice of teaching obedience to authority and of engaging in ethnic politics made it possible for Rwandans to ignore the principle of sanctuary and participate in the killing of Tutsi without feeling that their actions were in conflict with church teachings. In fact, the organizers of the death squads in many local communities included not only prominent lay church leaders but sometimes priests, pastors. Catholic brothers, catechists, and other church employees, and the fact that death squads attended mass before going out to kill or that killers paused during the massacres to pray at the altar suggests that people felt their work was consistent with church teachings. Far from being mere passive bystanders, Christian churches provided essential support for the slaughter.47 The sacred space of church, rather than being a haven, was an altar of sacrifice. As shocking as these events may be, Longman’s contextual explanation helps us better understand how these acts were possible, not only in Rwanda but in Armenia, where imams incited genocide by using their authority to reassure mobs that that violence was in accordance Shari’a law.48 236

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No clergy were indicted and sentenced by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, although church officials played an integral role in the genocide. The Serbian Orthodox Church authorized violence in various ways, by both denying the violence Muslims were enduring and supporting ‘ethnic cleansing’. For instance, acts of violence were at times planned and organized in Serbian Orthodox churches, as was the case in Brčko,49 and formal rituals were presided over by Serbian religious leaders to mark the successful cleansing of specific territories.50 Clearly, the Serbian Orthodox Church was not only aware of the campaigns being conducted by Serbian militia forces, but high-level clergy endorsed the campaigns – elevating the violence to divine ritual, even going so far as to bless arms and invoke God as the protector of their conquered territory.51

Conclusion In summarizing several authors’ stances on religion and genocide, Gary A. Phillips notes that Glick insists that religion is incapable of being a possible remedy to genocide perpetration because it is part of the problem and ‘inherently ethnocentric and violence-generating’.52 While Glick’s comment draws much-needed attention to the destructive capacity that religion has in genocides, and how this may impugn the ability of religion to heal the very wounds it helps inflict, Glick ignores how the persuasive power that he attributes to religion can be harnessed to mitigate or act against genocide as well. Rubenstein, contra Glick, goes so far as to champion the idea that a ‘religious transformation’ is required to squelch a ‘purely secular, rationalistic approach to our social problems [as it] is unlikely to produce the collective altruism our situation demands’.53 David Patterson agrees when ‘he makes the case for religious teaching as the only antidote to genocidal ideologies’.54 Religion has played, and can continue to play, a pivotal role in resisting genocide and in the healing process of victims of genocide, most notably by public condemnation of genocide, heroic acts – such as engineering the sheltering or escape of victims of genocide – and in the aftermath of genocide, providing aid and lending support to reconciliation efforts. As the title of Appleby’s 2000 work, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation, indicates, religion harbours both a destructive and constructive capacity. The pragmatic goal of genocide studies is genocide detection and prevention, and religion, too, can be used to this end by religious institutions and clergy coordinating with governmental and non-governmental agencies in identifying genocide triggers and assessing how their own religious traditions and clergy contribute to genocides. One such trigger has been identified by the United Nations Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, which launched a related project in February 2010. The project indicates that ‘inflammatory speech often precedes mass atrocities, especially genocide . . . [and the outcome of their work] will result in (1) a blueprint for monitoring dangerous speech in situations at risk of genocide and mass atrocities, and (2) a methodology for gauging the dangerousness of specific speech acts’ (United Nations n.d.). As our discussion of religious rhetoric makes clear, such rhetoric can certainly constitute ‘dangerous speech’; therefore, religious rhetoric (written and spoken) should be monitored in furtherance of genocide prevention. In addition, religious leaders can promote an immanent critique of religious dogma, institutions, and training. Agreeing with Fein, Longman writes that ‘the involvement or resistance of religious institutions in genocide can have a profound impact on the 237

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success or failure of genocidal movements’.55 An earnest investigation into how religious ideology and individuals have abetted genocide could help determine how religious individuals and institutions can effectively resist genocide amongst their own ranks and counteract perversions of religious ideology. As for possible avenues of the future study of genocide as informed by religion, religion should continue to be a major part of genocide studies discourse, both as a practiced phenomenon and as a method of inquiry. This discourse should include Western and non-Western scholars and investigate not only how religion potentiates genocide but how it can hinder its commission and potentially forecast its perpetration. Another recommendation is to devote more study to the perspective of genocide perpetrators, as this can yield invaluable insights into what génocidaires believe motivates their actions – religious and otherwise. Last, scholars of genocide studies should continue to study less well-known genocides and guard against being bound by a preoccupation with the Holocaust as the model for researching genocides, for when ‘the Holocaust is taken as the “ideal type” genocide, scholars and advocates of a particular case often seek to fit theirs within a “Holocaust paradigm” at the expense of careful contextualization’.56 There are arguments both for and against the Holocaust as singularis or unique. Regardless of one’s stance, it is vital to study genocides in order to identify not only how they are different but also how they are similar. As genocide research continues to flourish, religious tensions and antagonisms should be one of many features of genocide worthy of investigation, alongside other commonly explored factors, such as economic crisis, political tensions, and competition for resources. Indeed, the nexus of genocide and religion is complex, but it is as necessary to understand as it is difficult to research. Religion and religious studies are fruitful avenues for genocide study not only in identifying how genocides may be legitimated and potentiated but also in how genocides can be prevented and mitigated.

Notes 1 Samuel Totten and Paul R. Bartrop, P.R. (eds), The Genocide Studies Reader (New York and London: Routledge 2009), p. 13. 2 United Nations (2013), The Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide. Online. http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/projects.shtml (accessed 3 April 2013). 3 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press 1990); Jacques Sémelin, Purify and Destroy (London: Hurst, 2007); Martin Shaw, What is Genocide? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007). 4 Chalk and Jonassohn, History and Sociology, pp. 3, 21. 5 Sémelin, Purify and Destroy, p. 310. 6 Helen Fein, Genocide: A Sociological Concept (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI: SAGE Publications, 1993), p. 47. 7 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 25, 37. 8 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1982). 9 See for example, Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). 10 William T. Cavanaugh, ‘The Myth of Religious Violence’, in Andrew R. Murphy (ed.), The Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), p. 28.

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11 John D. Carlson, ‘Religion and Violence: Coming to Terms with Terms’, in Murphy (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, p. 9. 12 Carlson, ‘Religion and Violence’, in Murphy (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, p. 9. 13 Robert Gellately and Ben Kiernan The Specter of Genocide: Mass Murder in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003), p. 6. 14 Samuel Totten, William S. Parsons and Israel W. Charny (eds), Genocide in the Twentieth Century: Critical Essays and Eyewitness Accounts (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 1995, Garland 1995); Levon Chorbajian and George Sharinian (eds), Studies in Comparative Genocide (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). 15 Alex Alvarez, Governments, Citizens, and Genocide: A Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approach (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 3–9. 16 Omer Bartov and Phillis Mack ‘Introduction’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2001), p. 1. 17 Steven L. Jacobs, ‘Introduction. Genocide in the Name of God. Thoughts on Religion and Genocide’, in jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), p. ix. 18 Paul Bartrop ‘The Ten Commandments, The Holocaust, and Reflections on Genocide’, in Steven L. Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), p. 210. 19 Bartov and Mack, ‘Introduction’, in Bartov and Mack (eds), In God’s Name, p. x. 20 Jacobs, ‘Introduction. Genocide in the Name of God’, p. x, emphasis added. 21 Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), pp. xi–xii. 22 R. Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000), p. 70. 23 Totten and Bartrop, Genocide Studies Reader, p. 133. 24 Jacobs, ‘Introduction. Genocide in the Name of God’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, pp. ix–x. 25 Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 8. 26 Mamdani, When Victims become Killers, p. 9. 27 Richard L. Rubenstein, ‘Jihad and Genocide: The Case of the Armenians’, in Steven L. Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide: Judaism, Christianity, Islam (New York: Lexington Books, 2009), p. 133. 28 Rubenstein, ‘Jihad and Genocide: The Case of the Armenians’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 121. 29 Jok Madut Jok, ‘Sudan: Religion and Conflict’, in Murphy (ed.), Blackwell Companion to Religion and Violence, pp. 419–22. 30 Vjekoslav Perica, ‘The Sanctification of Enmity. Churches and the Construction of Founding Myths of Serbia and Croatia’, in Pa˙l Kolstø (ed.), Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (London: Hurst, 2005), p. 131. 31 Michael Sells, ‘Kosovo Mythology and the Bosnian Genocide’, in Bartov and Mack (eds), In God’s Name, p. 183. 32 Richard Hovannisian, Armenia on the Road to Independence, 1918 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) quoted in Leonard B. Glick ‘Religion and Genocide’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 106. 33 Roger: Genocide Baby Documentary. Produced and directed by Nick Andrews. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation, 2011. 34 Bartrop, ‘The Ten Commandments, The Holocaust, and Reflections on Genocide’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 210. 35 David Little, ‘Studying ‘‘Religious Human Rights’’: Methodological Foundations’, in Johan David van der Vyver and John Witte, Jr. (eds), Religious Human Rights in Global Perspective (Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1996), p. xx. 36 Mamdani, When Victims become Killers, p. 14. 37 Timothy Longman,‘Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda’, in Bartov and Mack (eds), In God’s Name, p. 153.

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38 Hugh McCullum, The Angels Have Left Us: The Rwanda Tragedy and the Churches (Risk Book Series. Geneva: WCC Publications, 2004), p. 76. 39 Edward Judge, Easter in Kishinev. Anatomy of a Pogrom (New York University Press, 1995); Cathie Carmichael, ‘Symbolism, Violence and the Destruction of Religious Communities in the Russian and Ottoman Empires c. 1870–1923’, in Philip Broadhead, Damien Keown (eds), Can Faiths Make Peace?: Holy Wars and the Resolution of Religious Conflicts (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), p. 76. 40 Rubenstein, ‘Jihad and Genocide’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 127. 41 Sells, ‘Kosovo Mythology’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, pp. 181–4. 42 Klaus Buchenau, The Churches and the Hague Tribunal: A Serbian Orthodox and a Croat Catholic Perspective (Forschungsplattform Südosteuropa online at http://www.fpsoe.de), p. 6. 43 Bartov and Mack, ‘Introduction’, in Bartov and Mack (eds), In God’s Name, p. 3. 44 Glick, ‘Religion and Genocide’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 106. 45 Alison Des Forges, Leave none to tell the story: Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1999), p. 7. 46 Timothy Longman, ‘Church Politics and the Genocide in Rwanda’, Journal of Religion in Africa, 31.2, 2001, p. 164. 47 Longman, ‘Church Politics’, pp. 166–7. 48 Rubenstein, ‘Jihad and Genocide’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 127. 49 Sells, ‘Kosovo Mythology’, p. 188. 50 Bartov and Mack, ‘Introduction’ in Bartov and Mack (eds), In God’s Name, p. 7. 51 Paul Mojzes, ‘The Genocidal Twentieth Century in the Balkans’, in Jacobs (eds), Confronting Genocide, p. 177. 52 Gary A. Phillips, ‘More Than Jews . . . His Blood Be Upon All the Children: Biblical Violence, Genocide, and Responsible Reading’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. 80. 53 Richard L. Rubenstein, Age of Triage: Fear and Hope in an Overcrowded World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1983), pp. 229, 232. 54 Jacobs, ‘Introduction. Genocide in the Name of God’, in Jacobs (ed.), Confronting Genocide, p. xiv. 55 Timothy Longman, Christianity and Genocide in Rwanda (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 17. 56 Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses, ‘Changing Themes in the Study of Genocide’, in Bloxham and Moses (ed.), Oxford Handbook, p. 4.

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17 CU L TU RAL G ENO C I D E Destruction of material and non-material human culture Uğur Ümit Üngör

Introduction Cultural genocide is the destruction of a culture of a people as opposed to the people themselves. This chapter examines the phenomenon of cultural genocide and problematizes some of its aspects. It theorizes the concept by distinguishing between the destruction of material culture and the assault on non-material culture. Departing from the early definition of cultural genocide by Raphael Lemkin, the chapter relates his work to that of critical sociolinguists who have analyzed the question of forced linguistic change of minorities. It discusses the usefulness of cultural genocide as an analytical category and argues that whereas material culture can be destroyed in a matter of hours, assaults on non-material culture are longer processes much more difficult to steer or perceive. This chapter discusses a relatively under-studied theme related to genocide: the destruction of material and non-material culture. The field of genocide studies has engaged with the theme of violence against culture fairly comprehensively. By now, we understand relatively well how processes and policies of cultural genocide emerge and develop. We know that the three major ideologies causative of modern genocides also bear responsibility for assaults on and destruction of cultures: colonialism, communism and nationalism. Overall, the scholarship on colonialist cultural genocide is better developed than that on nationalist and communist cultural genocides. A programmatic essay on the directions of the scholarship should address which avenues of research are best pursued in the study of cultural genocide, and what the particular set of questions to pose may be. This brief chapter obviously cannot do any justice to the rich literature in this field or provide an exhaustive plan for either complex question. Rather, it will attempt to identify and problematize certain issues relevant to the concept, particularly from the angle of nationalist cultural genocide. The central questions in this exercise need to be: How and why do political elites launch policies to eradicate cultures? How effective are these policies? Cultural genocide is the destruction of the culture of a people as opposed to the people themselves. It occurs when the culture of a people is attacked and damaged or destroyed, and the continued existence of the group with its distinct ethnic identity is thereby threatened. Examples include interfering with the transmission of existing culture to future generations of the group (forced assimilation), destroying the group’s cultural symbols such as libraries or houses of worship, or erasing the group’s existence from the historical record. The concept of cultural genocide is often used 241

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interchangeably with the term ‘ethnocide’, but this may be slightly misleading. In order to understand cultural genocide, a fundamental distinction needs to be drawn between two distinct phenomena: the erasure of non-material culture (ethnocide) and the destruction of material culture (vandalism). In this chapter, these concepts will be analyzed as the two main components of cultural genocide.

The legal prehistory According to Raphael Lemkin, cultural genocide consists not only of forced assimilation, but also of ‘drastic measures used to aid in the rapid and complete disappearance of the cultural, moral, and religious life of a group of human beings’.1 Lemkin famously argued in his 1944 book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe that: [G]enocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups.2 But his contemporary, the Dutch legal scholar Pieter Drost, disagreed forcefully: Genocide is collective homicide and not official vandalism or violation of civic liberties. It is directed at the life of man and not against his material or mental goods. The protection of culture belongs primarily to the province of human rights and, perhaps to a lesser degree, also to the department of minority rights. It is foreign to the field of criminal law. In a convention on group murder it is completely out of place.3 The legal scholar Matthew Lippman takes a middle position: he argues in favor of a prohibition of cultural genocide but nuances his position by adding that it can only function as an adjunct to physical genocide. He observes a clear distinction between assimilationist policies and ‘the deliberate destruction and desecration of icons, libraries, monuments, and coercive religious conversion’. In the latter case, he continues, ‘there is little doubt that there is an intent to both physically exterminate the group and to eliminate all remnants of its existence’.4 The disagreement between legal scholars is reflected in the ambivalence of the legal record. Initially, a UN Ad Hoc Genocide Committee produced a draft convention, Article III of which proposed to ban ‘any deliberate act committed with the intent to destroy the language, religion or culture of a national, racial or religious group on grounds of national or racial origin or religious belief’. This included prohibiting the language of the group, destroying libraries, museums, schools, historical monuments, places of worship or other cultural institutions and objects of the group, and subjecting members of a group to such conditions as would cause them to renounce their language, religion or culture. But as the treaty was finalized, a debate emerged over its scope: American, Swedish and Canadian representatives opposed the inclusion of cultural genocide in the Convention, whereas the USSR supported it. Detractors, some 242

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of whom feared claims by indigenous groups, argued that it defied logic and proportion to include in the same convention both the extreme violence of mass murder and the peaceful closing of libraries. Supporters agreed with the broader conception that a group could be effectively erased by an attack on its cultural institutions only. Finally, an executive committee rejected the article because it deemed physical destruction much graver than assaults on culture, and it feared non-ratification by states and hence ineffectivity of the convention. Consequently, the final 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide made no mention of cultural genocide. A similar fate befell genocide against political groups.

Ethnocide: Destruction of non-material culture Ethnocide typically begins with the twin process of the perpetrator’s aggrandizement of its own culture and denigration or assaults on the victim’s culture. This is often followed by various policies and assaults on the culture of the minority group, ultimately resulting in detrimental consequences for the latter. The first authoritative study of ethnocide may well have been the 1970 book La Paix Blanche by the French ethnologist Robert Jaulin. In this book, Jaulin observes the aggregate effect of missionaries, corporations, armies and colonists on the native culture of the Bari people, in the borderlands of Venezuela and Colombia.5 Whereas Jaulin’s is an anthropological study, what it has in common with Raphael Lemkin’s work on genocide is its advocacy, assumptions, and personal involvement. Close research into Lemkin’s papers demonstrates that, a child of his time, he was strongly influenced by the then reigning intellectual conventions and assumptions on culture and ethnicity. This was a blend of reified groupism and a global-cosmopolitan nationalism: Lemkin strongly believed ethnic and national groups had the fundamental right (if not duty) to perpetuate themselves culturally.6 There is little sociological or anthropological space in Lemkin’s thought to imagine cultural change in its voluntary forms or processual nature, or for hybridity and the considerable internal diversity of various cultures. Traditionally, culture has been statically defined as the sum of language and literature, art, artifacts, and architectural monuments that together define an ethnic or national group. Culture is a central focus of nationalist movements and nation states. The considerable efforts they expend on cultural policies can count as evidence for how seriously human cultures are taken in the nationalist world view. But rather than a continuously changing and socially learned process of shared interpretations and intangible symbols, non-material culture is viewed as a vehicle for nation formation and a carrier or embodiment of the nation. It is reified and essentialized as if it had a concrete material existence, and instrumentalized as a medium of societal homogenization.7 To implement their policies of cultural homogenization, nationalist elites have the state’s educational infrastructure at their disposal. Under nationalist regimes, educational policies are not regarded primarily as intellectual enrichment for the minority population, but as a vehicle for forcible assimilation of populations perceived as alien. The relationship between education and nationalism has been researched fairly well.8 Education plays a crucial role in the establishment and consolidation of nations. Indeed, ‘education is the most important means of consolidating national unity and passing it on to later generations’.9 Nation states are committed to ‘compulsory, standardized, public mass education systems, through which state authorities hope 243

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to inculcate national devotion and a distinctive, homogeneous culture’.10 The characteristics of nation states are boundedness in space (territorial unity) and population (homogeneity), but unboundedness in time, which means transgenerationality and permanence guaranteed by symbolic national culture and the education system.11 In other words, the ambition of nationalist elites is the comprehensive cultural homogenization of space and time. Partly for this reason, education is a contested borderland between the public responsibilities of the state and the private concerns of parents, since the identity of new generations is constructed in transactions which occur at and across this boundary. It is in these transactions that the force field between private and public socialization is composed, and the future of communities shaped. Some scholars of minority education have offered critiques ranging from pursuing bilingualism to the thesis that all education in dominant languages is assimilationist, subtractive, and damages the cultural self-esteem of ethnic minorities. In other words, assimilationist submersion education of minorities is ethnocidal.12 The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu on the other hand has argued that education systems (e.g. the French one) have strengthened class distinctions rather than offering opportunities for upward social mobility. He introduced the term ‘symbolic violence’ to account for the perpetuation of these power relations through forms of coercion which are effected through ‘gentle, invisible violence, unrecognised as such, chosen as much as undergone’.13 The symbolic violence in this status quo represents the invisible force holding lower social classes down and furthering class domination, i.e. the values and interests of the elite classes in society. According to Bourdieu, this way the education system functions as a mechanism of cultural stasis, not of forced cultural change.14 These debates on ethnocide are closely tied to a vital ethnic marker: language. To what extent can linguistic change be discussed under the heading of ethnocide? The theoretical backdrop for this problem can be traced to an unresolved contradiction in the study of linguistic change and language politics. Whereas one school of thought argues that the global decline of indigenous and minority languages attests to improvements in processes of global societal integration of speakers of those groups, another group of scholars sees this decline mainly in terms of deliberate linguistic destruction or system-produced cultural decline.15 Exemplary of the former group is Abram de Swaan’s comparative study Words of the World: The Global Language System. In this study, he sketches a global hierarchy of language use, identifying super-central, central, and peripheral languages. De Swaan argues that in order to improve their socio-economic status in the global economy by increasing their communicative efficacy, speakers of peripheral languages will attempt to acquire central and super-central languages. This unplanned but directional (‘blind’) process produces voluntary language abandonment and decline of peripheral languages. Importantly, De Swaan warns against language sentimentalism and argues that languages are not extinguished or destroyed but abandoned by their speakers in their emancipatory efforts at upward social mobility.16 In other words, culture is considered as the unceasing processes of assigning meaning to the world and drawing group boundaries that are subject to mutual influence and continuous change. If we follow this logic, sociologically speaking it may hardly be possible to annihilate non-material culture as such, for people tend to adjust, reshape and revive cultures in various ways. In contrast, scholars of the second school have rejected this approach in favor of a model of hegemony and decline, invoking ‘minority protection’ and the watchword of ‘diversity’ to sustain an ideal of maximum linguistic heterogeneity. Tove 244

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Skutnabb-Kangas, for example, in her comprehensive study Linguistic Genocide in Education, interprets states’ language policies towards indigenous and minority languages as leading to the disappearance of linguistic and cultural diversity. Subtractive education, she argues, assaults the native languages and thereby damages the cultural lives of the peoples at its receiving end. In her view, the decline of indigenous and minority languages in processes of global linguistic change are tantamount to ‘linguistic genocide’. She identifies the English language as the main culprit of global linguistic de-heterogenization.17 In these objectivist approaches, a sustainable development argument is deployed to advocate that the approximately 7,000 languages (and cultures) that currently exist globally should be maximally preserved for as long as possible. The ecological metaphor expressed in this argument might unwittingly contain a Eurocentric bias: it is disputable whether indigenous cultures can be expected to exist for the pleasure and self-gratification Western liberals derive from their continued existence. All in all, these two paradigms seem unlikely to be fully reconciled in the foreseeable future. A comparison of the experience of ‘stolen children’ in boarding schools also paints a somewhat ambivalent picture. There is a wealth of research on Nazi Germanization of Polish children, Turkification of Armenian and Kurdish children, the Aboriginal Stolen Generations in Australia, and Native American and Canadian residential schools. In these cases, intensive use was made of boarding schools to assimilate children of a different, ‘tribal’ and ‘backward’ culture into a ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ one. To what extent can we interpret these as regular forms of state and nation formation, versus colonial forms of cultural domination? The false opposition implicit in this polemic must be seen as part of the problem rather than the solution. Lumping together these disparate cases would be inaccurate, therefore violence must play a central role in understanding this issue. There is a clear axis of tension between deeply violent versus less coerced cultural policies. Moreover, there are quite fundamental differences between the cultural and linguistic policies of dictatorial regimes versus those of relatively moderate states. In a continuum of cultural policies, the contemporary European democracies would figure at one end with considerable space for negotiation and low levels of coercion. Moving on the axis toward more coercion, France’s nineteenth-century educational policies towards minority languages such as Breton, Basque and Corsican would figure next, before American and Australian cultural policies towards Native Americans and Aboriginals. Finally, the utterly destructive policies towards cultural minorities such as the Soviet Union (in Chechnya and the Crimea in 1944), Nazi Germany in Poland, and the Croatian Ustaša regime’s treatment of Serb children would figure firmly at the other extreme of the continuum.18 Whereas most children indeed experienced cultural estrangement, others did quite well in these schools. Contrary to the objectives of state authorities or the myths of indigenous activists, the experiences of children in boarding schools produced unintended adverse effects. The children did not necessarily hate or resent their education and their collective identity was not destroyed but often fostered at these schools. The very institution designed to extinguish the children’s primary identity altogether may have well in fact contributed to its persistence in the form of pan-indigenous or pan-minority consciousness and nationalism in the following years and decades.19 Moreover, it was not infrequent that removal of some children in fact improved both their physical condition and enhanced their opportunity prospects in the broader society where they lived.20 The ethnocide argument may not always apply either. The children often started their education in the new culture and language at the age of 4 to 12, rather late to 245

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socialize children from scratch. Psychologists have argued that by that age, a child will have passed ‘the capacity for full cultural acquisition’ of one single national culture.21 Sociologists, too, emphasize that ‘identities which are established this early in life – selfhood, human-ness, gender, and . . . kinship and ethnicity – are primary identities, more robust and resilient to change in later life than other identities’.22 Partly for this reason, the boarding school experience for many turned out to be hardly fruitful, potentially traumatic, and in the long term alienating. Still, this form of forced cultural change of children straddles the distinction between social welfare and genocide. In principle, when a perpetrator is open to cultural change of the victim group, this would logically mean that massacring them is not necessary. If the victims can abandon their group identity, why still murder the group? Therefore, one could argue that forced cultural change and mass murder are mutually exclusive phenomena. However, this is not always the case. First of all, cultural destruction is often complementary to physical destruction: Nazi anti-Polish policy was also a mix of elite massacres and child kidnapping, and so was Young Turk anti-Armenian policy. What appears from this brief comparison is that cultural policies and violence are inextricably linked: by the time that persecution has escalated to the point of active, malicious destruction of the victim group’s culture, mass murder of the victim group itself is not far away. The distinction between ethnocide and vandalism, alluded to earlier, is relevant. Whereas material culture can be destroyed in a matter of hours, assaults on non-material culture are longer processes much more difficult to steer or perceive. Even draconian ethnocidal interventions can hardly fully extinguish cultures. The search for genocidal intent(ions) in order to trace an agency for ethnocide then becomes a redundant matter.23 For example, the ‘erosion’ of indigenous cultures as a result of the spread of ‘capitalism’ suggests that there is no clearly identifiable human agency for the consequences of those processes of cultural change.24 The problem of intent and the tension between contingency versus conspiracy thus dissolves: cultural change can be the unintended historical product of two groups that make contact, or the manipulation of a group’s future through proactive cultural policies, respectively. The sociological concept of ‘blind process’ might clarify this aspect of cultural genocide: the blind social process refers to ‘the long-term and unplanned, yet structured and directional trends in the development of social and personality structures’.25 The consequences of blind processes are more difficult to gauge than those of chronologically relatively compact state policies. This may mean that some of the earlier definitions of cultural genocide (e.g., ‘to organize a systematic degradation of the cultural and linguistic, through measures which slowly or rapidly would lead inevitably to the actual extinction of a minority’)26 may overlook the blindness of the process, as nothing is inevitable or preordained. A non-teleological theory of ethnocide needs to take into account this important distinction between blind processes and policy.

Vandalism: Destruction of material culture At three a.m. on May 7, 1993, light sleepers in Banja Luka were woken up by the sound of two huge explosions, much louder than anything they had heard before . . . Serb soldiers or thugs – nobody knows which, and the difference is hard to tell – had detonated several thousand pounds of dynamite under Ferhad Pasha and its sister mosque, Arnaudiya, built in 1587. After four centuries, all that remained of them was rubble.27

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The above quote is an account of the destruction of a mosque during the dissolution of Yugoslavia, when a large number of churches and mosques were completely destroyed or severely damaged. The widespread destruction of cultural and religious heritage in Bosnia was thoroughly researched by the Hungarian-American bibliographer András Riedlmayer in several published works. Riedlmayer documented damage to and destruction of 392 sites, including mosques (especially minarets), churches, shrines, archives, libraries, religious schools, clock towers, monastic establishments and dervish lodges. He argues that there are strong indications that the destructions were not haphazard but pre-planned and well organized, suggesting that the perpetrators may have been working from prepared lists.28 Why are cultural symbols and material culture targeted, often after the destruction of the human beings themselves? Assault on symbols of an ethnic group aims to destroy or dissolve the group by taking away the symbols it adheres to. The analogy to genocidal processes, in which the perpetrators socially construct an imaginary enemy group and then set out to destroy people physically, is unmistakable. In cultural genocide too, the perpetrator’s imagination of the victim’s cultural symbols is followed by physical attacks on those structures and objects. Contrary to processes of ethnocide, in events of vandalism the irretrievability of the cultural assets and irreversibility of the destruction policy is clearer to perceive. The nationalization of space is a major fixation of the perpetrators. Imposing a single visible architectural landscape on a multi-ethnic society and homogenizing the public space is a vital part of the genocide itself.29 This preoccupation reaches obsessive dimensions. The famous video clip of Ratko Mladić entering Srebrenica is often quoted for his announcement of a final settling of scores with the ‘Turks’. But before that particular segment in the video, Mladić is seen walking through the ravaged streets of the town with his men. At one point he stops abruptly, points at a street sign carrying a Muslim name and angrily orders it to be taken down. He shouts: ‘Take down that street sign! Selmanagić Reuf Street’, and rants at his men for being too slow.30 This captures the essence of cultural genocide: every visible trace of the victims’ culture needs to be removed from the public space and replaced by the perpetrator’s culture. This is most notable in the Armenian genocide, during which cultural destruction was a functional component of the Young Turks’ attempt at erasing Armenian existence from the Anatolian heartland and the Ottoman eastern provinces. Besides less old churches and seminaries, many medieval Armenian monasteries such as Narekavank, Varakavank, Arakelots Vank, Surp Garabed and Surp Khach were destroyed by the Young Turk regime in 1915 and nowadays no trace remains of these centers of Armenian cultural life and religious learning. It is estimated that around 2,500 sites were destroyed, damaged, or converted into an unrecognizable state as a result of the genocide.31 This is recognized and theorized by Richard Bevan in an important comparative study of architectural destruction. Bevan explicitly interprets the destruction of the victims’ architecture as a project of memory in which the defacing and destruction of churches was an essential part of creating continuity with the past, of re-forging a Turkish past for the Armenian historical landscape. To the perpetrators, this type of cultural destruction furthers two aims: it ostensibly proves that the victims never even existed in the area, and it reflects their desire to leave nothing recognizable for the survivors to return to.32 Raphael Lemkin had his ideas on the destruction of material culture too. At a law conference in Madrid in October 1933, he named it ‘vandalism’ and defined it as the 247

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‘systematic and organized destruction of the art and cultural heritage’ of a group.33 Lemkin saw a group’s achievements in fields of science, arts and literature as contributions to ‘world culture’ and therefore he argued that the destruction of any nation’s culture must be regarded as directed against world culture – in other words, a cultural crime against humanity. His postulates of moral universalism dictated that vandalism ‘is the opposite of the culture and progress of humanity’ and ‘shock[s] the conscience of all humanity’.34 Nazi violence against culture prompted Lemkin to develop his ideas further, and in Axis Rule he defined vandalism as ‘malicious destruction of works of art and culture’.35 The destruction of books and libraries constitutes an important aspect of vandalism. A famous example occurred in the First World War, when the invading German army burnt down the baroque-style library of the Catholic University of Leuven. In approximately ten hours, about 300,000 books and a huge collection of manuscripts were annihilated.36 The coming of the Nazi regime heralded a quantitative as well as qualitative leap into unprecedented destruction. The Nazis launched multi-faceted policies of prohibition, excision, and violent destruction of non-German culture. They had a remarkably elaborate vocabulary at their disposal to describe their policies of ‘Germanization’ and persecution: Arisierung (economic), Germanisierung (territorial), and Umvolkung or Eindeutschung (cultural). Where they did not try to destroy cultural life, the Nazis permitted a highly restricted and closely supervised cultural existence for the occupied peoples.37 Well before the war, the Nazis launched assaults against material culture. In 1939, Head of Visual Arts in the Reich’s Propaganda Ministry Franz Hofmann, an art historian, argued that all ‘degenerate art’ that was unexploitable for propaganda purposes should be ‘burned in a bonfire as a symbolic propaganda action’. Goebbels agreed with the proposal and on 20 March 1939, 1,004 paintings and sculptures and 3,825 drawings, watercolors and graphics were burned in the courtyard of the Berlin Fire Department’s headquarters.38 The public burning of Jewish books and organized destruction of Jewish libraries is known for its ruthless thoroughness and symbolic nature. Liberal contemporaries’ reactions do not differ much from Lemkin’s: the book burnings were an assault on Jewish culture, but ‘shocked the conscience of humanity’ universally.39 The Second World War then unleashed the full ferocity of Nazi violence against culture. The invasion of Poland and the Soviet Union in particular, spelled destruction for the cultural treasures of those countries. In 1944, the Nazis systematically destroyed around 80% of Poland’s libraries, including the Załuski, Krasiński, Przeździecki and Zamoyski libraries. The Verbrennungskommandos burned down a total of 16 million items, including books, maps, manuscripts, books, drawings, prints, atlases, parchments, plans, textiles, porcelain, faience, glass, gold and silver objects, diplomas, engravings, coins and miniatures.40 The invasion of the Soviet Union brought even more destruction. In 1942, the Soviets set up an Extraordinary Commission to document and study the cultural losses in Ukraine, and concluded that major collections and libraries in Kiev, too, had been comprehensively destroyed by the ‘Hitlerite vandals’.41 A similar fate befell several libraries in the Yugoslav wars. On 18 May 1992, Serbnationalist forces deliberately shelled with incendiary munitions the Oriental Institute of Sarajevo, destroying 5,263 bound manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew and archaic Bosnian, as well as tens of thousands of Ottoman-era documents. Three months later, on 27 August 1992, Serb artillery fired 25 mortar shells on the National Library in Sarajevo, setting ablaze approximately 1,200,000 books and 600 sets of 248

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periodicals, original manuscripts, private archives, the entire catalogue system, microfilm, computers and photo labs.42 Chief librarian Kemal Bakaršić reported about the latter destruction: The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ash, floated down like a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand.43 The destruction also extended to the collections and laboratories of the Sarajevo Institute of Science, where physicists, biologists and chemists saw their experiments and research results destroyed.44 Another post-communist war was that between Georgia and Abkhazia of 1992–3, in which both camps destroyed the cultural artifacts of the other. Abkhaz nationalists destroyed a statue of the medieval Georgian poet Shota Rustaveli and erased all Georgian cultural references from Abkhazia’s capital Sukhumi. The Georgian army retaliated by ordering the destruction of Abkhazia’s archive in a deliberate attempt to wipe out the region’s historical record. On 22 October 1992, five men in unusual black uniforms broke into the state archive, poured kerosene all over, and set it ablaze, destroyed 95% of an archive that stretched back to 1840.45 Why do political elites burn books and destroy libraries? The librarian Rebecca Knuth offers an explanation that focuses on the nature of nationalist and communist book burnings as anti-liberal ideologies. Libraries are destroyed because books and libraries preserve and provide witness to multi-ethnic memory, store evidence of the validity of a multitude of perspectives, and facilitate intellectual freedom and open discussion.46 But the key to understanding this phenomenon might lie in the concept of historical memory, or, to be precise, memorial narratives. Narratives are the backbone of modern ethnic and national identities; they provide meaning to past experiences and secure continuity with the future. The assault on written texts, the embodiment of narratives, then constitutes an assault on the very identity itself. Book burnings are a project of memory par excellence. The aim of the Serb-nationalist forces was to erase a body of knowledge that could demonstrate that Slavs professed Islam in Bosnia for many centuries, i.e. that an Islamic Bosnian identity could be proven through the many narratives stored at the library. As Knuth concludes her book Libricide: ‘The destruction of books and libraries attacks not only individual selfhood but also culture as the foundation of group identity.’47 This brings us back to the essence of genocide: the attempt to destroy group identity. Cultural destruction is not a thing of the past, but still very much among us. The past decade has witnessed vandalism around the world, from the 2001 Taliban shelling of the Buddhas at Bamiyan, to the recent crises in Mali and Syria. The 2003 Americanled invasion of Iraq was followed by a looting rampage of innumerable items stored at Baghdad’s national museums.48 Despite much outrage against the US for not preventing and stopping these thefts, this was at worst a crime of omission, not commission. Most of the art was looted, not destroyed; most of it by Iraqis, not Americans. The US did not invade Iraq with the expressed objective of destroying its material culture. The brutal Syrian civil war in its turn witnessed serious destruction of cultural heritage such as citadels, monasteries, mosques, temples and souks. When rebel groups entrenched 249

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themselves in the ancient inner city of Aleppo, the Syrian army shelled it, setting off fires that destroyed most of the souk.49 Neither side wished or targeted the destruction of the historic center, but as a side effect of the fighting the damage was still enormous. One of the most blatant episodes of cultural destruction was Azerbaijan’s annihilation of the Armenian cemetery at Old Julfa in Nakhichevan. From 1998 to 2005, the Azeri army pulverized every single medieval Armenian khachkar (cross-stone) and grave in that town. Soldiers were seen (and videotaped) hacking the khachkars into small pieces with sledgehammers, and dumping them into the Araxes river with a large truck.50 The most recent episode of cultural destruction happened in the summer of 2012, when the Islamic fundamentalist Ansar Dine group in Mali began destroying UNESCO World Heritage sites in Timbuktu. The city houses many shrines to Islamic saints, revered by Sufi Muslims, and libraries containing some 700,000 manuscripts that date back to the spread of Islam in West Africa in the early fourteenth century. Armed with guns, pickaxes and hoes, the Salafists destroyed several tombs and mausoleums, sparking sharp outrage from the UN Security Council, UNESCO, the Malian Culture Minister, and Islamic authorities.51 At the time of writing, the demolitions were continuing.

Discussion In this assessment of cultural genocide and its two main components (ethnocide and vandalism), I argue that we are dealing with a range of disparate and cognate phenomena and epiphenomena that can not be lumped together indiscriminately without precise disaggregation. The relationship between cultural destruction and physical destruction is not entirely clear. It is not unproblematic to analytically equate a people’s forced cultural change with a people’s murder. Ethnocide with less or more physical violence on the victim group needs better conceptualization, as well as the roots of modern, ideological vandalism. Two tentative conclusions may be drawn: the importance of ties, and the notion of death. Cultural genocide in both its material and non-material form is in essence about destroying ties, exemplified best by the Armenian genocide. Ethnocide destroys emotional ties. The most common interpretations of the forced assimilation of Armenian orphans and forced marriages of Armenian women have approached the problem from the perspective of national alienation. The conversions and assimilations are seen as loss of identity and absorption into Turkish identity. But sociologically, they were constituent aspects of the genocide and aimed at the destruction of the most basic social ties of the victim group: kinship and marriage. Vandalism destroys material ties. The destruction of the victims’ property intends to prevent restitution and break the survivors’ wish to return to their land. The Young Turk regime in 1915 and in 1922 made clear that the confiscation and destruction of Armenian property would ensure that their ‘material ties to Anatolia will be severed’ (Anadolu ile maddi alâkaları kesilmiş bulunacakdır).52 Both ethnocide and vandalism then converge in their fundamental objective, namely invalidating the victims’ claim to nationhood by assaulting the markers and symbols that can unite ethnic groups. Finally, we need to ponder the question how and when culture ‘dies’. Moral outrage against ethnocide is perhaps understandable (although not when it is greater than outrage against the mass murder of human beings), but advocacy, alarmism and sentimentalism are not always helpful in answering the question. We might rather 250

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suggest that culture dies the other way around: killing people kills culture, as genocidal processes necessarily include the destruction of the culture of the victim group as well. The death of human beings necessarily imposes the disappearance of the unique cultural skills of academics, artists, high culture, peasant culture, etc. Whereas killing culture without killing humans might be possible in the most extreme cases, what is certain is that when people are killed, culture dies too. Millions of victims of Nazi genocide possessed unique intellectual and artistic skills. One of countless examples is Natan Spigel (1886–1942), an Expressionist painter from Łódź. The Nazis interned him in the Radom ghetto in 1939, murdered him in Treblinka in 1942, and confiscated and burned all his work. Of hundreds of works, only a handful survived.53 This type of destruction is irretrievable: when you kill people, you also kill culture.

Notes 1 United Nations Economic & Social Council (UNESC), Draft Convention on the Crime of Genocide (New York: United Nations, UN Doc E/447, 1947), p. 26. 2 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1944), p. 79. 3 Pieter N. Drost, The Crime of State: Genocide. United Nations Legislation on International Criminal Law (Leiden: A.W. Sythoff, 1959), p. 11. 4 Matthew Lippman, ‘The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Forty-five Years Later’, Temple International and Comparative Law Journal, Vol. 8, No. 1, 1994, pp. 1–84, at p. 77. 5 Robert Jaulin, La Paix Blanche: l’Introduction à l’Ethnocide (Paris: Seuil, 1970); Robert Jaulin, De l’Ethnocide: Recueil de Textes (Paris: Union Générale d’Editions, 1972). 6 A. Dirk Moses, ‘Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept of Genocide’, in Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds), Oxford Handbook on Genocide Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 22–5. 7 Heather Rae, State Identities and the Homogenisation of Peoples (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 8 For an overview of the literature see Susanne Wiborg, ‘Political and Cultural Nationalism in Education’, Comparative Education, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2000, pp. 235–43. 9 Abram de Swaan, Human Societies: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), p. 126. 10 Anthony D. Smith, National Identity (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 16. 11 Joep Leerssen, ‘Nationalism and the Cultivation of Culture’, Nations and Nationalism, Vol. 12, No. 4, 2006, pp. 559–78. 12 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, ‘Linguistic Genocide’, in Dinah Shelton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity (New York: Macmillan Reference, 2005), Vol. 2, pp. 653–4. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), p. 127. 14 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (London: Sage, 1977), p. 4. 15 Damien Short, ‘Cultural Genocide and Indigenous Peoples: a Sociological Approach’, International Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 14, No. 6, 2010, pp. 833–48. 16 Abram de Swaan, Words of the World: the Global Language System (Cambridge: Polity, 2001). 17 Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, Linguistic Genocide in Education or Worldwide Diversity and Human Rights? (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2000). See also: John Eliot, ‘Conversion, Colonialism, and the Oppression of Language’, in George E. Tinker (ed.), Missionary Conquest: The Gospel and Native American Cultural Genocide (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993), pp. 21–41. 18 For an attempt at a comparative, theoretical argument see Robert van Krieken, ‘Reshaping Civilization: Liberalism between Assimilation and Cultural Genocide’, Amsterdams Sociologisch Tijdschrift, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2002, pp. 215–47. 19 David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).

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20 Robert van Krieken, ‘Cultural Genocide in Australia’, in Dan Stone (ed.), The Historiography of Genocide (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 130. 21 For a general discussion of language acquisition by children see Victoria Fromkin et al., ‘The Development of Language in Genie: A Case of Language Acquisition Beyond the Critical Point’, Brain and Language, Vol. 1, 1974, pp. 81–107. 22 Richard Jenkins, Social Identity (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 21. 23 For a synopsis see Alison Palmer, ‘Ethnocide’, in Michael N. Dobkowski and Isidor Wallimann (eds), Genocide in Our Time: An Annotated Bibliography with Analytical Introductions (Ann Arbor, MI: Pierian, 1992), p. 4. 24 Cf. Samuel Totten and Robert K. Hitchcock (eds), Genocide: A Critical Bibliographic Review, Vol. 8: Genocide of Indigenous Peoples (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2011). 25 Norbert Elias, ‘Towards a Theory of Social Processes’, British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1997, pp. 355–83. 26 Constantin Michael-Titus, In Search of ‘Cultural Genocide’ (Upminster: Panopticum Press, 1976), p. 5. 27 Peter Maass, Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War (London: Papermac, 1996), pp. 84–5. 28 András J. Riedlmayer, Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1992–1996: A Postwar Survey of Selected Municipalities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 2002), p. 10. 29 Mirko Grmek, ‘Un memoricide’, Le Figaro, 19 December 1991. 30 The footage is reproduced in the documentary A Cry From the Grave (1999) by Leslie Woodhead. 31 Uğur Ümit Üngör, The Making of Modern Turkey: Nation and State in Eastern Anatolia, 1913– 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 218–50. For a selection of churches destroyed during the genocide see http://www.genocide-museum.am/eng/cultural_genocide.php (accessed 5 September 2011). 32 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), pp. 7–24, 104. 33 Raphael Lemkin, Akte der Barbarei und des Vandalismus als delicta juris gentium (Vienna: Internationales Anwaltsblatt, 1933). 34 American Jewish Historical Society Archives (New York), Raphael Lemkin Collection, Box 1, Folder 11. Raphael Lemkin, ‘Les Actes Constituant un Danger General (Interetatique) Consideres Comme Delits de Droit des Gens’, pp. 5–6. 35 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 91. 36 Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 8. Interestingly, during the second German invasion in 1940, the library was burnt down again, this time with 900,000 books and manuscripts. 37 Alan E. Steinweis, ‘German Cultural Imperialism in Czechoslovakia and Poland, 1938–1945’, The International History Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, 1991, pp. 466–80; Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004), pp. 187–204. 38 Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 25. 39 For an anthology see Klaus Schöffling (ed.), Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt: Stimmen der Betroffenen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983). 40 Jan P. Pruszyński, ‘Poland: The War Losses, Cultural Heritage, and Cultural Legitimacy’, in Elizabeth Simpson (ed.), The Spoils of War: World War II and its Aftermath: The Loss, Reappearance, and Recovery of Cultural Property (New York: Abrams, 1997), pp. 49–52. 41 Nicholas, The Rape of Europa, pp. 200–201. 42 Vesna Blazina, ‘Mémoricide ou la purification culturelle: la guerre contre les bibliothèques de Croatie et de Bosnie-Herzégovine’, Documentation et bibliothèques, Vol. 42, 1996, pp. 149–64; András Riedlmayer, ‘Crimes of War, Crimes of Peace: Destruction of Libraries during and after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s’, Library Trends, Vol. 56, No. 1, 2007, pp. 107–32. 43 Kemal Bakaršić, ‘The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book that Saved Our Lives’, in The New Combat, July 1994, pp. 23–43. 44 Lamija Tanović, ‘The Bosnian Educational System’, presentation at the symposium Minorities and Mass Violence, Amsterdam, 18 December 2012. 45 Thomas de Waal, ‘Abkhazia: Cultural Tragedy Revisited’, Caucasus Reporting Service (Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 21 February 2005).

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46 Rebecca Knuth, Burning Books and Leveling Libraries: Extremist Violence and Cultural Destruction (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2006). 47 Rebecca Knuth, Libricide: the Regime-sponsored Destruction of Books and Libraries in the Twentieth Century (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), p. 49. 48 Peter G. Stone and Joanne Farchakh Bajjaly (eds), The Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Iraq (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2009). 49 Global Heritage Fund, Damage to the Soul: Syria’s Cultural Heritage in Conflict, 16 May 2012. 50 ‘Azerbaijan: Famous Medieval Cemetery Vanishes’, Caucasus Reporting Service (Institute for War & Peace Reporting, 27 April 2006). 51 Pascal Fletcher, ‘Timbuktu Tomb Destroyers Pulverise Islam’s History’, Reuters, 3 July 2012; ‘Mali fighters destroy more Timbuktu tombs’, Al Jazeera, 23 December 2012. 52 BCA, 30.10/218.472.11, Chief of Staff Field Marshal Fevzi Çakmak to Cabinet, 27 September 1922. 53 Memorial Exhibition: Jewish Artists Who Perished in the Holocaust (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv Museum, Helena Rubinstein Pavilion, 1968). See also the memorial website: www.natanspigel.com.

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Part 4 M A S S VI O L E NC E, W A R A N D G E NO C ID E

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18 THE RU SSIAN S T A T E A ND THE WAR I N C H EC H NY A Mike Bowker

When President Vladimir Putin declared on 16 April 2009 that the war with Chechnya was finally over, his claim was met with some scepticism both inside and outside Russia. Lev Ponomarev, the human rights activist, was only one of many who argued that the conflict would continue.1 There seemed to be good grounds for making such a prediction since the underlying causes of the dispute had not been resolved. The majority of Chechens still desired independence while Moscow was just as determined to maintain its territorial integrity. Indeed, any long-term resolution appeared ever more distant due to the radicalisation and Islamisation of the rebels, which was, at least in part, a result of the brutal nature of Russia’s war against the Chechens.2 The destruction and loss of life since the start of the first war in 1994 have been utterly devastating. Estimates vary greatly, but 60,000 people may have died as a result of the conflict since 1994, of whom 80% were thought to be non-combatants. Many more were injured and almost half of the population was displaced.3 Over 200,000 Russians and perhaps as many as 20,000 Armenians left Chechnya in the 1990s. At the end of the Soviet period, ethnic Russians had represented almost a quarter of the population. By the time of the publication of the 2010 census, nonMuslims numbered less than 5% of the total population. The war in Chechnya might formally have come to an end, but instability has spread to neighbouring republics in the North Caucasus – most notably to Dagestan and Ingushetia,4 while Chechen-inspired terrorism also remains a threat in the Russian heartland. Examples of the latter include the bombings of the Moscow Metro in 2010 when 40 died, and Moscow airport in 2011 when 35 died, as well as the attack on public transport in the southern Russian city of Volgograd before the Sochi Olympics in December 2013 when 34 were killed. Although Moscow was claiming, at least from 1999, that the fight for Chechnya was a part of the global war on terror,5 the West felt they had little to learn from the Russian experience. After 9/11, however, Western strategists were reaching for books on counterinsurgency once again in an attempt to come to terms with the post-Cold War threat to security.6 Indeed, the US military published their own handbook on counter-insurgency in 2007.7 There were clear differences, of course, between the West’s global war with al-Qaeda and Russia’s rather more domestic struggle centred on Chechnya, a republic roughly the size of Wales with a population, before the conflict began, of about 900,000.8 Furthermore, the central issue which the West has traditionally tried to grapple with was how a democracy could deal with the threat of terrorism while maintaining both public support and its liberal principles.9 This latter aspect of counter-insurgency policy became less of an issue for Russia under Putin’s presidency. Russia was scarcely a democracy under Yeltsin, but the media was willing to criticise the leadership over its conduct of the war in 257

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Chechnya. It is certainly arguable that the media coverage of the war led to a loss of public support and may have made the war unwinnable. Putin learnt the lesson and censored the media heavily during the second war. He also shifted the country back towards authoritarianism.10 This allowed the Kremlin, it has been argued, to act in Chechnya with a level of brutality which would simply not have been acceptable or sustainable over any period of time in a more democratic and accountable political system.11 In any case, Western strategists have remained sceptical that the use of overwhelming force is an effective way of overcoming terrorists and insurgents.12 Instead, in socalled ‘wars amongst the people’, emphasis is placed on the battle for ‘hearts and minds’.13 In this scenario, the aim of the military is less to take and control territory and rather more to provide security for the indigenous population. A greater feeling of security can then allow for state-building and the search for a long-term peace settlement.14 Of course, such ideas are not new. It is thought the first time the phrase ‘hearts and minds’ was used was by the British in Malaya during the 1948–60 conflict.15 It is important to note that not all commentators are convinced that the strategy to win over hearts and minds could entirely explain the government victory in Malaya, but there is a consensus arguing that the political should play a pivotal role in ‘wars amongst the people’.16 The French theorist and strategist David Galula was even willing to put the relationship between the military and political into percentages, arguing that the counter-insurgency effort should be 80% politics and 20% military.17 There is, however, a real sense in which Russia under President Putin was seeking to challenge this consensus in the case of Chechnya. In counter-insurgency, there is always a delicate balance to be struck between the military and the political, as Galula would accept18 – and Putin certainly did not abandon politics altogether – but there is little doubt that he tilted the balance firmly in favour of force. It could be said he was seeking perhaps to reverse Galula’s percentages. As the second war against the Chechen rebels was launched in 1999, Putin declared his aims were not to talk to terrorists but to get them anywhere, and if necessary to ‘waste them in the toilet’.19 Over 13 years later, in the wake of the Volgograd suicide bombings, his rhetoric might have sounded less vulgar, but it remained one of annihilation rather than negotiation.20 Nor was Putin reaching out to the Chechen people in any serious attempt to win over hearts and minds. There was no attempt to better understand Chechen culture or to seek any meaningful compromise with the rebels. Instead, Putin wanted to project Russian power and to do this he used military force to take back Chechnya and impose Moscow’s own solution on the dissident republic. The strategy has succeeded in defeating the insurgency in Chechnya, however temporary this might be, but instability and the threat of terrorism remains in Russia and the North Caucasus region. Insurgency, in this context, can be defined as a military rebellion in which the insurgents represent themselves as an alternative government. Insurgents might on occasion use terrorist tactics to further their aims, but unlike terrorists they seek to hold territory and confront the state military.21 Terrorists, on the other hand, are generally in a far weaker position and are unable to confront the state directly. They can only hope to gain leverage over the government through their activities.22 Terrorism, therefore, seeks to shape the policy of government rather than to overthrow it.23

Learning the lessons of the first Chechen war In many respects, the first Chechen war of 1994–6 appeared to provide evidence supporting the consensus view regarding the limited utility of force in conflicts amongst 258

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the people.24 Certainly, the war was commonly perceived inside Russia as a disaster and a humiliating defeat for President Boris Yeltsin and the once mighty Russian military. Even those who supported the peace settlement at Khasavyurt in 1996 later came to view it with increasing scepticism.25 For under the agreement, Russia agreed to withdraw its troops from the republic – formally still a part of the Russian Federation – and accepted the de facto independence of Chechnya, although a decision on its final status was postponed until 2001.26 However, the election of Aslan Maskhadov as Chechen President in January 1997 seemed to make the republic’s future secession from the Russian Federation little more than a formality. Maskhadov had been the military commander of the rebels and gained a formidable reputation as a strategist during the war. Although he was perceived to be a relative moderate amongst the presidential candidates, Maskhadov was a nationalist who campaigned in the election for full Chechen independence. Chechnya seemed, at the moment of Maskhadov’s election, to represent a rare case of a strategic victory for an insurgency. Formally, Moscow accepted the Khasavyurt agreement. Yeltsin invited Maskhadov to the Kremlin to ratify the peace agreement, but there were many in Moscow who refused to view Khasavyurt as anything but a temporary retreat.27 Promised economic aid from Moscow never arrived or got lost amidst the corruption in Russia and Chechnya.28 This only added to Maskhadov’s difficulties in trying to assert his authority and rebuild the republic after the war. In the absence of any democratic culture, the legitimacy that Maskhadov might ordinarily have expected after winning the presidential election (which international observers had deemed free and fair), was not forthcoming. Instead, political opponents, such as the militant Islamist Shamil Basayev, formed rival power centres, whilst regional warlords and mafia bosses also challenged his authority. Attempts by Maskhadov to unite the republic behind his administration through creating a broad coalition, which included figures like Basayev, and showing his Islamic credentials through introducing aspects of Sharia law, all failed amidst growing economic and social crisis. Under Maskhadov’s leadership, Chechnya increasingly came to resemble a failed state.29 Even if there had been no desire amongst the military and the nationalists in Moscow for revenge, the descent of Chechnya into anarchy would have encouraged Moscow to reassert Russian sovereignty in the republic.30 Before any renewal of hostilities could be contemplated, however, it was vital to learn the lessons of the first war. This led to a reassessment of intelligence, training, military strategy, and the place of politics in counter-insurgency. Intelligence, which is recognised as vital in such conflicts,31 was seriously lacking in the lead-up to the first war.32 This was starkly revealed as Moscow, by its own admission, consistently underestimated the support for rebel leader Dzhokhar Dudayev after he took power in 1991.33 Most significantly, the situation was misread in November 1994 when Moscow supported a coup against Dudayev. It was true that Dudayev’s popular support had fallen significantly by this time, but he still retained the backing of a significant part of the military. The support for Moscow’s preferred alternative, Umar Avturkhanov, on the other hand, was largely limited to the traditionally more pro-Russian Nadterechny region in the north.34 Therefore, Avturkhanov’s march on Grozny was easily defeated by the Dudayev forces. Moscow’s position in Chechnya was further weakened when its hand in the failed coup was revealed when twelve Russian soldiers were killed and nineteen were captured and paraded on Chechen TV. As a result of this political catastrophe, Yeltsin’s reputation slipped whilst Dudayev’s soared as he was seen in Chechnya as a hero who had successfully defied Moscow. 259

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The Avturkhanov coup had been perceived in the Kremlin as an internal solution to Dudayev’s refusal to compromise on the issue of Chechen independence.35 When it failed, Yeltsin felt he had little alternative but to intervene directly to enforce regime change. However, the preparation and training of the Russian military to conduct such a war was, in the words of Yeltsin himself, ‘monstrously inadequate’.36 In part, this was due to the economic crisis which had led to the defence budget being slashed. There was little money and even less enthusiasm amongst the military leadership for retraining the Russian forces for counter-insurgency actions. According to the military historian Dmitry Trenin, it was only after defeat in Chechnya in 1996 that the military leadership abandoned the idea of preparing for a major war in Central Europe and finally recognised the need to prepare for limited wars amongst the people.37 The military intervention in 1994 had been deeply controversial across the political spectrum in Moscow.38 Majorities in both the State Duma and Federation Council were opposed to military intervention and, later in 1999, started impeachment proceedings against Yeltsin for his conduct of the war. Much of the military was also opposed to launching the war and sections of the secret services were reported to have privately advised against the military intervention.39 But Yeltsin was encouraged to take action by his Defence Minister, Pavel Grachev, who promised that Grozny could be captured by two parachute regiments in just two hours.40 Direct military intervention appeared to be the only way to overthrow the recalcitrant Dudayev and restore Russian sovereignty over the rebellious republic. Yeltsin was also tempted by the prospect of ‘a short, victorious war’ as a means of reinvigorating his flagging approval ratings as President.41 Despite differences over policies and concerns over whether the war was constitutional, the Security Council backed the military intervention unanimously.42 Yeltsin, having made this fateful decision, retired to a Moscow hospital to receive surgery for a persistent nose problem fully expecting to rise from his bed in a few days to announce military victory and the overthrow of the Dudayev regime. Despite Russia’s considerable military advantage, events turned out rather differently. Nothing had been learnt from the failed Avturkhanov coup, and Moscow blundered into a conflict which has subsequently dominated much of post-Soviet politics in Russia. Air strikes began on 2 December 1994 and the ground assault on Grozny was launched nine days later. The expectation was that a display of military power would be sufficient to cow the rebels into submission. When Russian forces met widespread and determined opposition from both Chechen rebel fighters and civilians, they were unprepared for a long drawn-out guerrilla campaign. In fact, the war was ill-starred from the beginning. Tank convoys entering Chechnya were trapped and destroyed on the main road into the republic by the rebels simply destroying the first and last tanks.43 There were also reports of Russian infantry in the republic being often left unsupported because of a lack of all-weather air capability and night-flying aircraft.44 When a quick victory was not forthcoming, morale amongst the Russian forces slumped, and increasingly they resorted to the ‘reckless use of air power and artillery and abuse of prisoners and civilians’.45 The Chechens, on the other hand, were better prepared, better motivated and better led by their future President Aslan Maskhadov. The insurgents were also well armed, having taken over much weaponry abandoned by the Russians when they left the republic in 1992. The automatic rifles, grenades and portable anti-tank weapons may not have been as advanced as those available to the Russian forces, but they often turned out to be more effective in this type of ‘new warfare’. The insurgents proved 260

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to be more mobile and flexible than their opponents and, as is generally the case in such wars, knew their way around their home republic far better than the invading Russian forces.46 They also enjoyed considerable support amongst the Chechen people and, often indistinguishable from non-combatants, the insurgents were able to hide amongst the people when the occasion demanded. The Chechen rebels were, as Mao put it, like fish in water.47 The geography of Chechnya also helped the rebels. The border with Georgia was highly porous whilst the mountains in the south also provided a safe haven for the rebels both to escape from the Russian forces and to regroup and plan future attacks. After the failure of the initial assault on Grozny, the Russians sought to adapt to the changed situation on the ground. A new command was brought in, smaller units were used and more experienced fighters were introduced.48 The overwhelming superiority of Russian forces combined with this new strategy allowed the Russians to clear Grozny of rebel fighters by March 1995.49 When the rebels retreated south to the mountains, Yeltsin announced in May of that year that the military campaign was completed.50 However, the rebels simply shifted from insurgency to terrorism. Thus, on 14 June 1995 Shamil Basayev led about 200 rebels in an attack on a hospital in Budennovsk in neighbouring Dagestan. After Russian attempts to free the hostages failed, Basayev and his fellow rebels were granted free passage back to Chechnya.51 With 150 civilians left dead in Budennovsk, this deal was highly controversial in Russia and widely perceived as a most public humiliation for Moscow.52 It also turned out to be a watershed which, it is reported, convinced Yeltsin that there was no military solution to the conflict in Chechnya.53 Grozny had been taken by the Russian forces in January 1995 but had never been fully sealed. This allowed Basayev to lead a group of rebels into the capital in March 1996 to engage directly with Russian forces for five days.54 A more concerted uprising began in August with the rebels seeking to recapture both Grozny and Chechnya’s second city, Gudermes. Two weeks of fighting led to 500 Russian dead and 1,400 injured or missing in action.55 The fighting proved that the war was not over and put mounting pressure on Yeltsin to get a settlement. The war had never been popular with the Russian public and it now threatened his chances in the presidential elections of 1996. Yeltsin had refused to talk to Dudayev since the start of the war, but the latter’s death in April 1996 made it possible for negotiations to begin with the new Chechen leadership. Yeltsin himself did not participate directly in the talks, but delegated Alexander Lebed, the former army general and his running mate in the second round of the 1996 presidential election, to get a peace settlement. Aslan Maskhadov was the chief Chechen negotiator and he recognised the weakness of the Russian position and was able to extract significant concessions from Lebed. As stated earlier, Russia agreed to withdraw its troops from the republic and Chechnya was granted extensive autonomy, while a final settlement on its status was put off until 2001. For the Russian military and nationalists the Khasavyurt agreement looked like a major defeat, but the Chechen radicals were dissatisfied with the postponement of independence. The majority, however, both inside and outside Chechnya, were simply relieved that the war was over.56 Its end was certainly an important prerequisite for Yeltsin’s re-election as President.

The second Chechen war Right-wing groups in Moscow always sought to reverse the Khasavyurt agreement, and as Maskhadov was unable to exert his authority in Chechnya, support for military 261

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action grew within the Kremlin. After the failure in the first war, there was understandable caution in some quarters over launching another. The Prime Minister, Sergei Stepashin, was reported as favouring continued diplomacy until March 1999 when General Gennadi Shpigun, the Interior Ministry’s representative in Chechnya, was kidnapped at Grozny airport and murdered while officially under Maskhadov’s protection. Shpigun’s fate, it was said, undermined any remaining confidence in Maskhadov as a man who could ever stabilise Chechnya.57 When Stepashin was removed as Prime Minister in May 1999 and replaced by the more hardline Vladimir Putin, plans for invasion were already well in place.58 However, the war was effectively legitimised by two dramatic events in late summer and early autumn of 1999. First, a group of militants led by the Chechen Shamil Basayev and the Saudi-born Ibn al-Khattab intervened in neighbouring Dagestan in August in support of Islamist uprisings in a number of villages. This intervention showed that the militants in Chechnya were willing to act to promote their declared aim of driving out the Russians from the North Caucasus and forming an Islamic caliphate across the region.59 However, the Dagestanis generally did not welcome outside intervention from the Chechens and foreign Islamists and, after some fierce fighting with Russian forces, the militants were forced to withdraw.60 As they did so, a series of bomb blasts hit cities across Russia in September, killing over 300 people. Chechen militants were blamed, but there were those who believed that the Kremlin was involved.61 For the bomb blasts might not have been vital in terms of Russia’s decision to go to war, but they were crucial in gaining public support in Russia for a renewal of military action against the Chechen terrorists.62

Military strategy The withdrawal of the rebels from Dagestan provided Russia with an opportunity to pursue them into Chechnya and overthrow the Maskhadov government. Although Yeltsin was President at the time, it was Putin, as Prime Minister, who took overall political control of the war. Putin was determined to improve coordination between the different institutions involved in the conflict: the defence ministry, the internal ministry (MVD) and secret services (FSB). He also offered the military greater freedom to determine tactics,63 and made sure they had enough forces to overcome the Chechen rebels. This time, 100,000 troops were used in the initial invasion of Chechnya – about four times the number used at the same stage in 1994. The exact number of rebel fighters was not known, but estimates suggested that there were about 10,000–15,000 fighters and perhaps up to 30,000 irregulars available in both wars.64 The greater number of Russian forces deployed in 1999 were closer to the kind of advantage strategists suggest government forces require to overcome guerrillas, especially in an urban setting.65 Reports at the time also suggested that more professional forces were used on this occasion, but it appears the majority were still untrained conscripts.66 Putin later referred to the Russian soldiers sent to Chechnya as ‘kids who had never seen combat’.67 Russian forces reached Grozny by October, but then laid siege to the city for several months. On 20 December 1999, Moscow called on all civilians to leave the city three days before the full-scale assault would begin.68 It was hoped that the extensive use of artillery and air strikes would force the Chechens into submission and avoid the need for urban combat.69 This did not happen, however, and the rebels continued to resist until Russian ground troops finally took the capital in February 2000. This 262

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apparent military victory was only achieved after Grozny, in the words of one Russian newspaper, was turned into a ‘slaughterhouse’ and virtually ‘razed to the ground’.70 The capture of Grozny did not mean an end to the war and further progress remained slow as urban warfare proved to be particularly difficult. As a result, the Russians tried to resolve the problem through highly destructive aerial bombings of towns and cities. This tactic was largely successful as the Russians were in occupation of all the key villages and towns in Chechnya by the beginning of 2001 – something that was never fully achieved in the first war.71 To emphasise the point that the insurgency was coming to an end, overall command in Chechnya was transferred from the military to the FSB (secret police) in January 2001 and then to the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs) in July. In April 2002, Putin formally declared the ‘military stage of the conflict . . . completed’.72 Just as in the first war, however, the proclamation of an end to the war only seemed to encourage terrorism. Both Maskhadov and Basayev favoured terrorism as a tactic against Russian targets, but Maskhadov favoured limiting attacks to Chechnya itself, whilst Basayev and the militants argued for spectaculars in the Russian heartland.73 It seems Basayev won the argument and his subsequent terrorist actions certainly attracted headlines. The most spectacular cases were the Dubrovka theatre siege in Moscow in October 2002 and the Beslan School siege in September 2004. Both were embarrassments for the Russian authorities.74 For although all the terrorists were captured or killed, there were heavy civilian casualties in both cases, at least in part because of incompetence on the part of the state security services.75 How far such terrorist spectaculars helped the Chechen cause, however, is highly debatable. There was some sympathy for the ‘black widows’ who had lost family members as a result of the war in Chechnya, but the callous nature of such terrorist atrocities led to a hardening of both public and political elite positions in Russia. They also led to further tensions within the rebel leadership and, instead of mobilising the targeted constituency as hoped, seemed to erode support amongst the ordinary Chechen people.76

Political policy The terrorist atrocities increased public support for the Kremlin’s view that it was impossible to negotiate with the rebels. Indeed, the tentative peace process which seemed to be making some progress in 2002 was called off by Moscow after the Dubrovka theatre siege.77 Maskhadov’s alleged involvement in the planning of the siege also legitimised his complete ostracism from this point by the Kremlin.78 Instead of negotiations with the rebel leadership, Moscow adopted a policy of ‘Chechenisation’, which involved encouraging Chechens to join the Russian side, in the hope of exacerbating divisions amongst the rebels. As part of this policy, Akhmad Kadyrov who, along with a number of other Chechens, had defected to the Russians prior to the second war was appointed Chechen leader by Moscow in June 2000.79 Kadyrov’s base of support was largely limited, like Avturkhanov before him, to the pro-Russian region north of the Terek River.80 In an effort to broaden support and legitimise Kadyrov’s regime, a referendum on a new constitution was held in March 2003 when an unlikely 90% approved Chechnya’s membership of the Russian Federation, and in October 2003 Akhmad Kadyrov’s presidency was ratified in an election when he received an equally impressive 82% of the vote.81 Unlike in the case of Maskhadov’s election in 1997, international observers 263

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expressed doubts over the results, arguing that conditions in Chechnya at the time were hardly conducive to a free and fair vote.82 Indeed, the election, like Maskhadov’s before it, did not appear to endow Kadyrov with much legitimacy in the eyes of the people. His government proved to be highly repressive as Kadyrov used extensive force to maintain his position. Innocent people were caught up in so-called sweeps (zachistki) of suspected terrorists and sent off to filtration centres. Many never returned, while those who were freed reported cases of mental and physical abuse. Critics argued that such policies were entirely counter-productive and actually led to a rise in terrorist atrocities over the period.83 Kadyrov himself suffered the consequences when he was assassinated at a public gathering in Grozny on 9 May 2004. This was clearly a major setback for Putin’s plans for Chechnya, but it did not derail Moscow’s policy entirely. An interim leader, Alu Alkhanov, the former Chechen MVD chief, was elected President in 2004 with 73% of the vote, while Kadyrov’s son was groomed as his father’s long-term successor. As soon as Putin took office as President in May 2000, he was determined to strengthen and centralise the Russian state. This gained particular impetus after the Beslan School siege of 2004 when Putin blamed incompetence and corruption among local leaders for the terrorists being able to cross countless checkpoints without challenge and enter the school building undetected.84 As a result, Putin abandoned direct elections for the executive heads of the regions who were thereafter effectively appointed by the President, although they did still need ratification by their local parliaments. Utilising these enhanced powers, Alkhanov was removed as Chechen President and replaced by Kadyrov’s son, Ramzan, in February 2007 shortly after his thirtieth birthday, when he became old enough, according to Chechnya’s new constitution, to take up the post. Ramzan Kadyrov has proved to be an even more controversial figure than his father. He is an eccentric character who quickly assembled his own 3,000-strong private army, known as the Kadyrovtsy. He presides over a highly corrupt and repressive regime. In an interview two days before her murder, the independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya referred to Kadyrov as a ‘Stalin of our times’ and ‘a coward armed to the teeth’.85 Lacking even the legitimacy of dubious elections like his two most immediate predecessors, Ramzan Kadyrov has sought to consolidate his leadership through four interlinked policies: a concerted effort to rebuild the republic economically; a ruthless campaign against the terrorists; repression of any form of political opposition; and a renewed commitment to Islam and Sharia law in Chechnya. Below, we will look in turn at each of these policies in a bit more detail. The economic reconstruction of Chechnya under Ramzan Kadyrov’s leadership has been remarkable. Moscow has used its windfall profits from bloated oil prices to funnel massive sums of aid to the republic.86 In the past any money seemed to get lost amidst endemic corruption, but one of Kadyrov’s main achievements has been ensuring that a significant amount of money remained in Chechnya. Poverty and unemployment remain at very high levels, but Chechnya has been transformed in a relatively short period as money has been invested in roads, education, hospitals and other forms of infrastructure.87 Kadyrov has called on Chechen refugees to return home and even went so far as to invite foreign tourists to visit his newly prosperous and stable republic. Many of these changes may be superficial, but it seems that they have, nonetheless, conferred a certain legitimacy on Kadyrov that eluded others in his post, including his father.88 264

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Ramzan Kadyrov’s legitimacy was also based on offering the Chechen people greater security, which they undoubtedly craved after the two wars.89 To achieve this, he has continued the policy of targeting rebel leaders while simultaneously offering amnesties to those willing to switch to the government side. Kadyrov claims that the ‘bandits are in agony’, and said: ‘We have cornered the bandits, and soon we will finish them off.’90 Some theorists support the idea of targeting leading rebels as a means of defeating terrorism, but Ramzan Kadyrov’s campaign has been far broader than that. As before, innocents, along with genuine terrorists, have suffered as a result of his ruthless anti-terrorist campaign. The main security threat facing Chechens these days comes less from the Islamist militants and rather more from the Kadyrovtsy. Kadyrov has also shown himself unwilling to tolerate any form of political opposition. A lesson learnt from the first war was the need for unity. Divisions in Moscow were perceived as weakness and were exploited by the militants in Chechnya. There is no sign of political opposition from political parties or the Chechen parliament, but some journalists and human rights activists have dared to criticise the Kadyrov regime and suffered for it. Anna Politkovskaya, a journalist who wrote for Novaya gazeta and was a persistent critic of Ramzan Kadyrov, was murdered in the doorway of her apartment block in October 2006, and Natalya Estemirova, who worked in Grozny for the human rights organisation Memorial, was kidnapped on her way to work in July 2009 and later found murdered in Ingushetia. Kadyrov denies any part in their murders and the Kremlin has defended him against any such accusations.91 Even if this is so, Ludmilla Alexeyeva, Head of the Moscow Helsinki Group, has argued that Moscow bears much responsibility through its unstinting support for the Kadyrov regime which, she says, has ‘created a culture of impunity’ in the republic.92 Kadyrov has used force to maintain his position, but he has also gained support through his policies of economic reconstruction. He has also sought legitimacy by promoting Islam as a crucial part of Chechen tradition and identity. As part of the reconstruction process, Kadyrov has built mosques and holy places as well as a Russian Islamic University, which opened in August 2009.93 Chechnya has always had a Muslim majority, but traditionally of the non-political Sufi branch. All leaders since Dudayev have viewed it as vital to identify themselves as Muslim and have felt obliged, often through domestic pressures rather than personal commitment, to introduce elements of Sharia law. Ramzan was aware that he, like his father, was viewed by many in Chechnya as a puppet who was wholly dependent on Moscow.94 The embrace of Islam was a way of articulating his regime’s independence while simultaneously appealing to the constituency of some of the militants. Yet Kadyrov’s promotion of Sharia law has been controversial in some quarters for promoting the more repressive aspects of Islam, including the abnegation of the rights of women.

Dealing with the rebel leadership Both Yeltsin and Putin have been criticised for never negotiating seriously with either Dudayev or Maskhadov. They were both elected by the Chechen people and were widely regarded as more moderate than the possible alternatives.95 Moscow was never prepared to compromise on the core issue of Chechen independence, and the militant Islamist demand that Russia should withdraw from the whole of the North Caucasus was entirely off the agenda. Nevertheless, face-to-face meetings might have been worthwhile. For while evidence from other terrorist campaigns seems to suggest 265

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that negotiations alone are rarely enough to bring violence to an end, they can sometimes, at least, help manage or de-escalate crises.96 They can also be important in maintaining public support for an anti-terrorist campaign. In the case of Chechnya, the opinion polls suggested that the Russian people strongly supported military action in the first year of the second war, but thereafter there was a majority that supported negotiations, even if there was not much hope of their achieving very much.97 In fact, Moscow never wholly rejected negotiations.98 Most notably, they were held in the prewar period, 1991–4, and as part of the process in agreeing a settlement at Khasavyurt in 1996, and in the period leading up to the Dubrovka theatre siege in 2002.99 Yet all these talks were perceived in the Kremlin to have failed. Furthermore, it was believed the talks in themselves provided the terrorists with undeserved legitimacy and indicated, however erroneously, a weakness on the part of Moscow and a readiness at least to consider concessions.100 Theorists see political and military elements as inextricably intertwined in counterterrorist and counter-insurgency strategy.101 Rupert Smith reminds us that the result of military force is death and destruction. In the circumstances, the best the military can provide are the conditions for a political settlement to be constructed.102 When there appears to be little sign of an end to the conflict, as in the case of Chechnya, critics are always likely to call for a shift of emphasis in these elements. Yevgeni Primakov, a tough-minded Russian diplomat who, amongst an array of other duties, had been one of Yeltsin’s more successful Prime Ministers, argued in 2004 that ‘the problem of Chechnya will not be resolved by purely military means. At this stage it is not primarily a military problem . . . This is a war that can be stopped only through negotiations.’103 The former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev agreed. In the aftermath of the Beslan School siege, he still argued that terrorism is defeated ‘by political means, not by the use of force’.104 Gorbachev recommended that the extremists should be isolated but the government should negotiate with the more moderate elements of the rebel leadership. This was very much Lord Judd’s view too. As a member of the Council of Europe with special responsibility for Chechnya, he wrote that there needs to be ‘an inclusive political process’, to create a lasting peace. ‘Winning hearts and minds’, he continued, ‘is not a wet liberal option; it is pragmatic and essential.’105 Lord Judd was willing to accept that negotiations with the militants, such as Basayev and Khattab, were unlikely to bear fruit, but promoted others, such as Maskhadov and Akhmad Zakaev, as moderates with whom a deal could be struck.106 Indeed, he felt that that the Russian unwillingness to do so had been ‘counter-productive’ and only extended the conflict.107 In practice, however, Putin would only talk to his chosen leaders in Chechnya. The aim was to isolate the militants as Gorbachev desired,108 but there was a tendency to tar all rebels with the same brush. There were a number of important defections to the loyalist side, including Akhmad Kadyrov, but the real divisions amongst rebel leaders were not fully exploited by Moscow.109 Instead, anti-Russian rebel leaders were targeted ruthlessly over the years. Ibn Khattab was killed in 2002, Zelikhan Yandabiyev and Abu Waleed in 2004; Aslan Maskhadov in March 2005, and Maskhadov’s successor, Abdul Khalim Saidullayev and Shamil Basayev in 2006. It can be argued that the deaths of the rebel leaders might have had some impact on the course of the conflict. Arguably, the death of Dudayev paved the way for the Khasavyurt agreement in 1996 while the demise of Basayev in 2006 coincided with a decline in terrorism, and particularly in suicide bombing.110 Many theorists on terrorism, however, remain sceptical of the long-term value of such targeting believing that, in the absence of a long-term solution, new leaders will 266

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always emerge and there is no guarantee that the successor will be any less radical and any easier to deal with.111 Indeed, Basayev’s successor, Doku Umarov, was credited with the re-emergence of terrorist activity in the summer of 2009.112 The only country that has targeted more terrorist leaders than Russia in Chechnya is Israel, and such a policy does not appear to have brought a Middle East settlement any closer.113 In fact, Moscow appeared to adopt the targeting policy as a substitute for negotiations. Maskhadov had been calling for negotiations up to his death in March 2005. Any compromise solution would have been difficult to achieve by this time, but he was the last authoritative figure in the Chechen leadership who might have been able to deliver. His murder signified clearly Moscow’s unwillingness to compromise. It also had the advantage from the Kremlin’s point of view of significantly reducing the number of rebel leaders who Moscow could realistically be expected to negotiate with.

Maintaining public support in Russia Moscow made little attempt to win over the hearts and minds of the people in Chechnya, but there was a need to maintain a minimal level of support for military action in the rest of the Russian Federation. Disunity at the top and a loss of public backing were perceived by the majority to have played a large part in Moscow’s ultimate defeat in the first war in 1996.114 This time round, Putin was able to retain the support of the Moscow establishment, and of the main political parties; only Yabloko opposed Russian military intervention and suffered at the polls subsequently, partly as a result.115 Many argue that Putin’s control of the media was decisive in maintaining public support.116 No doubt this played a big part, but it is important to note that the state only really took control of the media after the second war had already started in 1999. The more independently minded NTV was taken over by the state-controlled energy giant Gazprom in April 2001, while the privately owned TV-6 went off the air in 2002. After these dates, there also remained a handful of other media outlets, such as Novaya gazeta, which sought to report the conflict more critically. Overall, the most important factor in gaining support for the second war was the fact that the majority believed Russian military intervention was justified. Yeltsin’s actions in 1994 had been viewed by many as precipitate, but after the rebel intervention in Dagestan and the series of bomb blasts across Russia in 1999, the public backed the second war. Although the brutality of Russia’s conduct in the war undermined the notion of justice in Western eyes, the Russian public knew little of the human rights violations and probably cared even less.117 Terrorist spectaculars, like Dubrovka and Beslan, did bring more publicity to the Chechen cause, but the result was revulsion amongst the vast majority of Russian people. The length of the conflict remained a concern for the Kremlin, however. Experience shows that public support can wane over time. While the willingness of the mainstream media to largely ignore the conflict clearly helped, the Kremlin sought to establish that progress was being made. Hence the importance of Moscow’s announcement on 16 April 2009 that military operations in Chechnya were finally at an end and that all security thereafter would be in the hands of the Chechen authorities.118

Who won the war? So is it possible to say if either side won the war in Chechnya? All the main texts stress how difficult it is to prevail in a terrorist or insurgency campaign.119 States have to be 267

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prepared for the long term whenever they get involved in such guerrilla warfare. As David Galula pointed out, insurgency is cheap and relatively easy to maintain; counterinsurgency, on the other hand, is difficult and comparatively more costly.120 It is even easier to maintain a terrorist campaign, and it only requires an occasional terrorist atrocity to establish that the conflict continues and the state has not won. Both Smith and English argue that there may never be what we might call a clear end to such conflicts, and English goes on to argue that modern societies may have to get used to a certain level of instability.121 Therefore, rather than thinking in terms of success or victory, English talks of containment and Smith of the management of a conflict.122 The conflict in Chechnya has certainly been long and drawn-out. Many would say it is one with roots that go back more than 200 years. It is clear that there is considerable popular support in the republic for independence and the brutal nature of the recent wars has simply added to the long list of Chechen grievances against Russia. Anti-Russian feeling elsewhere in the North Caucasus may be on the increase, but it still seems less intense and widespread than in Chechnya. This has made stabilising Chechnya particularly difficult, but it might suggest that the rising levels of instability elsewhere in the region may be more containable. Chechnya, however, is a small republic with a relatively small population. This allowed Russian and loyalist forces to swamp the area in a way that would be impossible in larger countries with bigger populations, even if the geography of Chechnya posed certain problems for the Russian authorities. Theorists may be right in warning against thinking in too absolute terms of victory and defeat in such conflicts. In any case, what would victory mean for either side? Russia can claim that its primary aim has been achieved through keeping Chechnya formally as a ‘subject’ of the Russian Federation. Moscow has also shown through its actions that it will not tolerate any further attempts by other republics in Russia to gain independence. Moscow believes that its uncompromising attitude has been essential in achieving these aims. However, the level of Russian destruction was so great that claims of victory can sound hollow. Audrey Kurth Cronin, for example, argued that Russia can only claim to have destroyed terrorism because it destroyed everything in Chechnya.123 James Hughes agrees when he argues that the wars might have saved Russia but at the expense of Chechnya.124 Even this pyrrhic victory is tainted, however, for many believe that Russian territorial integrity has been salvaged at the expense of Russia as a democratic state.125 As far as the rebels were concerned, they could claim that terrorism had served one of its general aims, that of publicity. Chechnya gained global attention and international sympathy but, in practice, no meaningful international support. No Western country recognised Chechnya as an independent state and, partly as a result, the rebels were forced to rely on Islamist groups to survive. Yet, there was far less support amongst the Chechen people for the goals and methods of the militant Islamists and their desire for an Islamic caliphate across the Caucasus. The rebel movement was ultimately undermined by the cross-cutting divisions between the natives and foreigners, the militants and the moderates, the Islamists and the secularists, the northerners and the southerners, the urban and the rural dwellers, among others. There are at least some Chechens who believe they have won the war.126 For Chechnya might formally remain a part of the Russian Federation, but as the former Russian army major Vyacheslav Izmailov has said, in every other sense it is independent.127 Most Russian civilians have left the republic and, with Kadyrov in charge, Chechens are at last fully 268

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in control of their own affairs. Critics, however, argue that Chechnya remains wholly dependent on Moscow for funds and rather than independence, Kadyrov has been licensed by the Kremlin to rule as ‘the rightful and personal master of Chechnya’.128

Conclusions All theorists acknowledge that there is a role for the military and the use of force to contain insurgencies and terrorist campaigns.129 Smith implicitly accepts that the Russian tactic of undermining popular support for the insurgents can be achieved through deterring civilians from supporting guerrillas through the mechanism of state terrorism. Swamping areas with state forces and depopulating areas, he agrees, can also be highly effective in preventing terrorists from operating. However, Smith dismisses such methods on the grounds of both morality and practicality.130 Theorists, therefore, tend to stress the dangers of state over-reaction and the reliance on coercion and militarisation. They are to be avoided not only because they are ineffective, but also because they play into the hands of the terrorist and generally prove to be counter-productive.131 Smith also makes the important point that a military victory can lead to an operational failure.132 For there is always a tension between using coercion whilst also seeking to win over hearts and minds.133 It is in this context too that English emphasises how important it is for states to remain within the law. It is important that the distinction remains, as he says, between the legal state and the illegitimate terrorist.134 However, neither the Russian nor the Chechnyan leadership has seemed much concerned over the issue of legitimacy. The emphasis has clearly been placed on power and the ability of the authorities to impose their will on the republic. Elections and referenda have been held in Chechnya and have been cited by the Russian authorities as legitimising both the political system and the ruling administration. They were criticised by international observers, and Moscow itself did not appear to put much emphasis on them either. For Putin came to the view that there was no possibility of finding a leader with majority support who could unite the republic. In that context, elections were only likely to polarise opinion and alienate minorities. In those circumstances, ‘winner-takes-all’ elections might be ill suited to societies like Chechnya.135 Putin clearly believed that in a divided society like Chechnya, a strong leader was required who was willing to use overwhelming force to restore some semblance of stability. On that basis, Putin personally appointed Ramzan Kadyrov to lead the republic. It was the restoration of stability combined with rapid socio-economic development, not election, that accorded Ramzan a level of legitimacy denied to any of his predecessors. Putin ignored calls for negotiation and compromise. He never seemed to believe that he could convince the Chechens to give up on the idea of outright independence. In that context, a policy to try and win over the hearts and minds of the Chechen public seemed futile.136 Instead, the Putin administration portrayed itself as determined to prevail at almost any cost. Russia’s authoritarian system was important in Putin winning this particular propaganda war. Moscow was strong, uncompromising and above all united in seeking to achieve its goals. Cornish has written that counter-insurgency is ‘very largely about promising something better – and achieving it’.137 In the last few years, the situation in Chechnya has visibly improved. As Galula has stated, at a certain point the people become more interested in security than the cause.138 The 269

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rebels could only offer further instability, they could not offer solutions to the real problems facing the republic. There is, therefore, an opportunity for the state to create a longer-term settlement. Yet Putin has indicated that while coercion has been important in creating this opportunity, it has a more limited role now that a certain level of stability has returned to the republic. For he has argued that ultimately the roots of terrorism lie in poverty and social deprivation.139 So, a continuation of the recent socio-economic development is required to reduce the likelihood of a return to violence in Chechnya or its spread across the North Caucasus. In the longer term, a more accountable system which could claim the loyalty of the people is clearly desirable, but there remains doubt that such a system would produce unity or stability or, indeed, support for the existing status quo.

Notes 1 Vremya Novostei, 20 July 2009, p. 1 2 See Anna Politkovskaya, ‘Dispatches from a Savage War’, The Guardian, 15 October 2004, p. 7. 3 On casualties, see: Institute of War and Peace Reporting quoted in The Guardian, 14 December 2002, p. 20; James Hughes, Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2007), pp. 81–2; Audrey Kurth Cronin, How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), p. 133; Human Rights Watch, ‘On the Human Rights Situation in Chechnya’, Human Rights Watch Briefing Paper to the 59th Session of the UN Commission on Human Rights, 7 April 2003, pp. 1–11. 4 Nezavisimaya gazeta, 13 July 2009, p. 2; Roland Oliphant, ‘Welcome back to arms: It will take political (not military) will to end the insurgency in the North Caucasus’, Russian Profile, 17 August 2009, #15-JRL 2009-152 Johnson’s Russia List; and for details on terrorist occurrences, see US Department of State, Country Reports on Terrorism: Russia, 30 April 2009, www. unhcr/org/refworld/docid/49fac69928.html (accessed 30 September 2009). 5 See Vladimir Putin, ‘Why We Must Act’, New York Times, 14 November 1999. 6 For example, David Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice (Westpoint Connecticut & London: Praeger Security International, 2006), and Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006). 7 US Army/Marine Corps (2007), US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007). 8 Gosudarstvennyi Komitet SSSR po Statistike, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12178721 (accessed 21 January 2015). The 1989 census shows that the majority of the Chechen population was made up of ethnic Chechens (57%), but a significant minority was Russian (23%) the majority of whom lived north of the Terek River and in the capital Grozny. 9 See for example Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, pp. 120–22; Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, pp. 44–5; Richard English, Terrorism: How to Respond (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 10 See for example Stephen M. Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Michael Waller, Russian Politics Today (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 11 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 131. 12 Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 5; English, Terrorism: How to Respond, pp. 102–4. 13 Smith, The Utility of Force, pp. 272, 290, 307. 14 Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 54; Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 277. 15 Paul Cornish, ‘The United States and Counterinsurgency – Political Last, Political Always’, International Affairs (London), Vol. 85, No. 1, 2009, p. 67. 16 Cornish, ‘The United States and Counterinsurgency’, p. 67; Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, pp. 115–16. 17 Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 63. 18 Ibid, p. 63; see also Cornish, ‘The United States and Counterinsurgency’, p. 65.

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19 Nezavisimaya gazeta, 25 September 1999, p. 1 20 President Vladimir V. Putin’s New Year’s Address, 30 December 2013, Russia Today (RT), http://rt.com/politics/official-word/putin-new-year-speech-021/ (accessed 21 January 2014). 21 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 154. 22 Ibid, p. 166. 23 Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 12–13. There are, of course, many different definitions of terrorism and counter-insurgency, see English, Terrorism: How to Respond, pp. 1–26; and Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 267. 24 Ibid, p. 290. 25 See the interview with Sergei Stepashin, then head of FSB, Moscow News, No. 50, 25–31, December 2002, p. 6. 26 See Nezavisimya gazeta, 3 September 1996, p. 3. 27 Lilia Shevtsova, Yeltsin’s Russia: Myths and Realities (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1999), p. 199; see also Ian Traynor, ‘Russian Generals’ “Personal War”’, Guardian, 6 November 1999, p 15. 28 Gordon M. Hahn, Russia’s Islamic Threat (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 33; and Hughes, ‘The peace process in Chechnya’ in Richard Sakwa (ed.), Chechnya: From the Past to the Future. Anthem Russian and Slavonic studies (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 281. 29 Gennady Chufrin, ‘Russia, Separatism and Conflicts in the North Caucasus’, SIPRI Yearbook 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 166. 30 Dmitri V. Trenin and Aleksei V. Malashenko with Anatol Lieven, Russia’s Restless Frontier: The Chechnya Factor in Post-Soviet Russia (Washington DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004), p. 111. 31 See English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 131; and Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 390. 32 Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, p. 106. 33 Boris N. Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000), p. 55. 34 Vanora Bennett, Crying Wolf: The Return of War to Chechnya (London: Pan, 2001), p. 313. 35 Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, p. 57. 36 Ibid, p. 59. 37 Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, p. 104. 38 Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 77. 39 Robert Seely, Russo-Chechen Conflict, 1800–2000: A Deadly Embrace (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 2001), pp. 233–5; and Anatol Lieven, Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 88, 108. 40 Leon R. Aron, Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 566. 41 Carlotta Gall and Thomas de Waal, Chechnya: A Small Victorious War (London: Pan, 1997), p. xii. 42 Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, p. 59. 43 Olga Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000: Lessons from Urban Combat (Santa Monica: Rand, 2001), p. 13. 44 Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 84. 45 Ibid, p. 85. 46 Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000, p. 17. 47 Quoted in Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 34. 48 Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000, pp. 23–4. 49 Ibid, p. 28. 50 Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, p. 23. 51 See Moscow News, 30 June – 6 July 1995, p. 3. 52 Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000, p. 29. 53 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 133. 54 Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000, p. 29. 55 Ibid, p. 31. 56 See Yeltsin, Midnight Diaries, p. 63. 57 Seely, Russo-Chechen Conflict, 1800–2000, p. 309; see also the interview with Sergei Stepashin, Moscow News, No. 50, 25–31, December 2002: 6.

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58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

See Stepashin’s interview in Nezavisimaya gazeta, 14 January 2000. Anatol Lieven, ‘Nightmare in the Caucasus’, Washington Quarterly, No. 1, Vol. 23, 2000, p. 9. Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000, pp. 38–9. For various theories concerning the bomb blasts, see Yuri Felshtinsky and Alexander Litvinenko, Blowing up Russia: The Return of the KGB (New York: Encounter Books, 2007), pp. 54–9. Bennett, Crying Wolf, pp. 546–7. Pavel Baev, ‘Chechnya and the Russian Military: A War Too Far’, in Richard Sakwa (ed.), Chechnya: From Past to Future (London: Anthem Press, 2005), p. 118. SIPRI Yearbook 2000 (Oxford: OUP, 2000), p. 44; Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 83; and Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, p. 121. Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, 1994–2000, p. 6. Ibid; see also Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, p. 121. Vladimir Putin, ‘Annual Address to the Federal Assembly’, 10 May 2006, http://www.kremlin.ru/eng/text/speeches/2006/05/10/1823 (accessed 15 June 2006), p. 8. Oliker, Russia’s Chechen Wars, p. 43. Ibid, p. ix. Moskovskie novosti, 9–15 February 2001, p. 1. Baev, ‘Chechnya and the Russian Military’, p. 119. Hughes (2005), ‘The peace process in Chechnya’, p. 286. Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 105. See Moscow News, 30 October–5 November 2002, pp. 2–3; and Moscow News, 8–14 September 2004, pp. 1–4. Timothy Phillips, Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1 (London: Granta Books, 2007), pp. 213, 242. See for example Baev, ‘Chechnya and the Russian Military’, p. 12. Charles Townshend, Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) wrote that terrorists have three principal aims: publicity, demoralising the enemy and mobilising the repressed, pp. 12–13. John Russell, ‘A War by Any Other Name: Chechnya, 11 September and the War against Terrorism’, in Sakwa (ed.), Chechnya: From Past to Future, p. 255. Sanobar Shermotova, ‘US Know-How Doesn’t Work in Chechnya’, Moscow News, No. 30, 6–12 August 2003, p. 2. Others who defected included Bislan Gantamirov who later led the attack on Grozny; see Baev, ‘Chechnya and the Russian Military’, p. 121. Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, p. 37. Moscow Times, 8 October 2003, p. 1. Sunday Times, 5 October 2002, p. 27. Russell, ‘A War by Any Other Name’, p. 253. See Phillips, Beslan: The Tragedy of School No. 1, p. 246. ‘Anna Politkovskaya’s Last Interview, 5 October 2006’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 9 October 2006 Liberty, http://www.rferl.org/articleprintview/1071908 (accessed 11 December 2009), p. 1. Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 136. Jonathan Littell, ‘Chechnya, Year III’, London Review of Books, 19 November 2009, p. 7. Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 136. Ibid. Nikolaus von Twickel, ‘Kadyrov says Chechnya More Secure’, Moscow Times, 17 September 2009, http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/383424.html (accessed 21 January 2015), p. 1. ‘Chechen Leader Denies Blame for Killings, Accuses West of Violence’, Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty, 9 August 2009, p. 3. Luke Harding, ‘Chechen leader did not order the killing: Medvedev’, The Guardian, 17 July 2009, p. 19. ‘Chechen Leader Denies Blame’, p. 3. Politkovskaya’s Last Interview, p. 1. Hughes (2007) Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 207; and Ivan Rybkin, ‘Direct Negotiations Needed to End Chechen War’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2002, pp 1–2.

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96 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, pp. 35–6. 97 See Levada center, September 2004 and September 2005, www.russiavotes.org (accessed 7 December 2009). 98 Hughes, ‘The peace process in Chechnya’, p. 282. 99 Russell, ‘A War by Any Other Name’, p. 255. 100 This common idea is discussed in English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 125; and Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 39. 101 Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 372; English, Terrorism: How to Respond, pp. 102–4. 102 Smith, The Utility of Force, pp. 6, 307. 103 Yevgeny M. Primakov, A World Challenged: Fighting Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century (Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 2004), pp. 118–19. 104 Moskovskie novosti, 36, 22–28 September 2004, p. 5. 105 Lord Frank Judd, ‘Afterword’, in Sakwa (ed.), Chechnya: From Past to Future, p. 291. 106 The Guardian, 28 October 2002, p. 1. 107 Lord Frank Judd, ‘Afterword’, in Sakwa (ed.), Chechnya: From Past to Future, p. 290. 108 See Russell, ‘A War by Any Other Name’, p. 253. 109 For details on the differences between the rebels, see Trenin et al., Russia’s Restless Frontier, pp. 71–104. 110 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 136. 111 Ibid, pp. 26, 201. 112 Luke Harding, ‘Suicide Bomber kills four Chechen officers’, The Guardian, 26 August 2009, p 7. 113 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 28. 114 For an overview of public opinion during the first years of the war, see Moskovskie novosti, 24 February–2 March 1995, p. 3; and Lieven (1998), Chechnya: The Tombstone of Russian Power, pp. 139–40 where he cites a poll of March 1996 when a majority favoured unconditional withdrawal. 115 S. Roy, ‘Dubrovka wasn’t enough’, Moscow News, No. 42, 30 October–5 November 2002, p. 3. 116 Theodore P. Gerber and Sarah E. Mandelson, ‘How Russians Think About Chechnya’, CSIS Policy Memo, nos 243 and 244: Programme on New Approaches to Russian Security, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC, January 2002, p. 6. 117 Ibid. 118 Vremya Novostei, 17 April 2009, p. 1. 119 English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 120. 120 Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 6. 121 Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 269; English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 120. 122 Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 373; English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 120. 123 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 137. 124 Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 201. 125 This is the fear of Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 201. 126 Littell, ‘Chechnya, Year III’, p. 9. 127 The Guardian, 17 April 2009, p. 15. 128 Arkady Babchenko, ‘A Soldier’s View: Will the struggle or killing stop? Probably not’, The Guardian, 17 April 2009, p. 15. 129 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 204. 130 Smith, The Utility of Force, pp. 272–3. 131 Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, p. 204; English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 120; Gail W. Lapidus, ‘Putin’s Chechnya Policies Contribute to Spread of Terrorism in Russia’, 8 September 2005, FSI Stanford News, Freeman Spogli Institute, http://fsi.stanford.edu/news/putins_chechnya_policies_contribute_to_spread_of_terrorism_in_russia_20050908/ (accessed 25 May 2014); and Anna Politkovskaya, ‘Dispatches from a Savage War’, The Guardian, 15 October 2004, pp. 6–7. 132 Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 390. 133 Ibid, p. 386. 134 English, Terrorism: How to Respond, p. 133; Cronin, How Terrorism Ends, pp. 24–5. 135 Martin Barber argues this in the case of Afghanistan, in ‘Afghanistan: What Now?’, World Today, Vol. 65, No. 10, October 2009, p. 17; see also Donald Horowitz on the benefits of a

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strong leader in a divided society like Chechnya, in ‘Democracy in divided societies’, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 4, No 4, 1993, pp. 18–38. Hughes (2007), Chechnya: From Nationalism to Jihad, p. 117. Paul Cornish, ‘The United States and Counterinsurgency – “Political Last, Political Always”’, International Affairs, Vol. 85, No. 1, 2009, pp. 61–79. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 8. Vladimir Putin in Rossiiskaya gazeta, 14 September 2004, p. 3; and Dmitri Medvedev, ‘Go Russia!’, 10 September 2009.

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19 GENOCI DE AND T H E END O F T H E OTTOMAN EM P I R E Uğur Ümit Üngör

Introduction In the process of Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian imperial collapse, roughly in the decade 1912–23, millions of soldiers were killed in regular military hostilities. But hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians were also victimized as a result of expulsions, pogroms and other forms of persecution and mass violence. The Balkan wars of 1912–13 erased the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans and marked a devastating blow to Ottoman political culture. The years 1915–16 saw the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians (and many Syriacs), organized by the Young Turk political elite, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). Lastly, the period 1917–23 is of great significance for the history of the Caucasus, both North and South, as it witnessed wars of annihilation and massacres of civilians. All three processes occurred amidst a critical depacification of inter-state relations and societal conditions, as well as a profound crisis of inter-ethnic relationships between and within states.1 In these processes, large-scale destruction and arson of villages, beatings and torture, forced conversions, and indiscriminate mass killings occurred. This chapter examines the roots and rationale of mass violence against civilians in this period. How and why was this violence committed? What caused the genocidal momentum during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? The chapter is organized in two parts that will address the Balkans in 1912–13 and Anatolia in 1915–18, respectively. The first section examines the persecution and expulsion of Ottoman Muslims in the Balkans by Serbian, Greek and Bulgarian forces, and sketches their ordeal as they were massacred and expelled to the rump Ottoman state. The second section reviews how the Ottoman government organized the destruction of its Armenian citizens. It investigates the nature and course of the genocide and examines the behavior of perpetrators, victims, survivors and bystanders.

Genocide against Ottoman Muslims The nineteenth century brought different developments for the Russian and Ottoman empires. Whereas the Russian Empire expanded territorially, the Ottoman Empire contracted, partly to the benefit of the former. As the Russian Empire industrialized and developed, the Ottoman Empire stagnated and remained an agricultural–military empire. These differential economic and infrastructural developments had a considerable impact on economic activity and living standards, but also defined the relations between ethnic and religious groups within the empires. For the purpose of this 275

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chapter, two long-term trends need to be highlighted. First, as the Ottoman Empire crumbled in the Balkans and the Caucasus, the vulnerability of the Muslims who stayed in those territories increased. Second, the Ottomans’ loss of power and territory generated strong pressures on the Ottoman Christians living in the empire. As a consequence, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, two impulses emerged: the victimization of Muslims in the Balkans and Caucasus, and the persecution of Christians in Anatolia. These developments were still relatively diffuse and episodic in the period 1870–1900, which saw violent uprisings coupled with massacres against Muslim civilians, followed by revenge murders against Ottoman Christians. Only in the context of the unlimited violence of the First World War would these explosive forces approximate genocidal dimensions. On 17 October 1912, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Bulgaria declared war on the Ottoman Empire out of discontent with its rule and in the hope of territorial expansion. Out-powered, demoralized, unprepared, and poorly equipped, the Ottoman army fought fourteen battles and lost them all, except for one. In November, the Bulgarian advance pushed the Ottoman army back to the trenches of Çatalca, 30 kilometers west of Istanbul. There, the onslaught was stopped and the imperial capital remained uncaptured. Warfare continued as two other important Ottoman cities were captured: the old imperial capital of Edirne was besieged and taken by the Bulgarian army, and on 9 November 1912 the Ottoman garrison surrendered the cradle of the Young Turks, Salonika, to the Greek army. The state of war lasted until the Treaty of London was signed on 30 May 1913, which dealt with territorial adjustments arising out of the conclusion of the war.2 After the cessation of hostilities, the Empire was heavily truncated for good. Although there were clear distinctions between combatants and non-combatants, as the skirmishes unfolded into total warfare none of the armies respected this distinction. Atrocities were committed by all sides in the conflict,3 but contemporary journalists and victims accused the Bulgarian army in particular of systematic maltreatment of civilian populations.4 The forces commanded by the Bulgarian generals Ivan Fichev (1860–1931), Vladimir Minchev Vazov (1868–1945), and Radko Dimitriev (1859–1918) committed acts of violence including large-scale destruction and arson of villages, beatings and torture, forced conversions, and indiscriminate mass killing of Ottoman Muslims.5 Leon Trotsky, at that time correspondent for the Russian newspaper Kievskaya Mysl, reported that the campaigns of ethnic cleansing and massacre were organized in particular by General Dimitriev, a man ‘deeply animated by those features of careerism including careless zeal and moral cynicism’. When his ambition to conquer as much territory as possible as fast as possible was frustrated by stubborn Ottoman defense, he ordered his troops to take prisoners no longer, and to execute all prisoners of war, including the wounded.6 His forays into the Thracian countryside and the Bulgarian occupation in general spelled persecution and terror, accompanied as it often was by the rape of women.7 The Serbian authorities, too, encouraged ‘local police officers, secret agents and lawyers, to terrorize the Muslims and to make a calm life for them impossible’.8 War crimes were another category of mass violence. According to one contemporary account, whenever Bulgarian forces captured Ottoman prisoners of war, they would frequently set the Christians free but execute certain numbers of the Muslims among them.9 Victimized groups who fled to their ‘ethnic brethren’ with their stories of terror kindled counter-terror against populations associated with their victimizers. Thus, whereas Bulgarian army units ignited 276

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the campaigns of terror and ethnic cleansing, the responses of Greek and Ottoman forces against Bulgarian villages were at least as violent.10 The territorial erosion of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans and in the Caucasus during the nineteenth century was a process that produced humiliation and refugee streams.11 The total and permanent loss of the Balkan peninsula in 1913, however, was a watershed that affected the very existence of the Empire. It is no exaggeration to state that the effect of the Balkan wars on Ottoman society was nothing short of apocalyptic. The loss of many major Ottoman cities, property, human lives, and prestige, was unbearable to a proud Ottoman elite who were dismayed at the helplessness of the imperial army. The shock of the war would have a severe and lasting impact on Ottoman society, culture and identity. From 1913 on, the hitherto viable umbrella of Ottoman identity was no longer seen as feasible by hardliners on either side of the political spectrum. Recent research on the Young Turk coup d’état of 23 January 1913 reveals a radical and activist Turkish nationalist core around Dr Bahaeddin Shakir (1874–1922), Dr Mehmed Nâzım (1872–1926), Mehmed Talaat (1874–1921), and İsmail Enver (1881–1922), who definitively gave up hope of the ideal of Ottoman unity and inclusive citizenship after 1913.12 The stories and trauma the refugees brought to the capital added fuel to the fire. The horror stories were met with disbelief and rage by the Ottoman press. One commentator on the refugees’ fate bewailed how ‘our motherland was trampled on by the muddy boots of the poorest enemies. Our coreligionist brothers and compatriots were slaughtered in the thousands like sheep.’13 The feminist and nationalist author Halide Edib (1884–1964) wrote: The spectacle of Moslem refugees, men and women and children, fleeing from the fire and sword of the enemy; the slaying of prisoners of war, their mutilation and starvation; atrocities and massacres perpetrated on the civil population – the first of their kind in twentieth century warfare – inflicted wounds far deeper than the defeat itself.14 The British consul in Salonika reported about the expulsions: The result of the massacre of Muslims at the beginning of the war, of the looting of their goods in the ensuing months, of the settling of Christians in their villages, of their persecution by Christian neighbors, of their torture and beating by Greek troops, has been the creation of a state of terror among the Islamic population. Their one desire is to escape from Macedonia and to be again in a free land . . . They arrive in Turkey with the memory of their slaughtered friends and relations fresh in their minds, they remember their own sufferings and the persecutions of which they have been victims, and finding themselves without means or resources, encouraged to some extent by their own government, they see no wrong in falling on the Greek Christians of Turkey and meting out to them the same treatment that they themselves have received from the Greek Christians of Macedonia.15 The effect on the Young Turks in particular was formidable as their families were overrepresented among the Balkan refugees. The Young Turk leadership predominantly originated from three areas: Salonika,16 the area from Monastir (Bitola) to Ohrid, and 277

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the area around Pristina in Kosovo, which were now under Greek and Serbian rule.17 Young Turk leaders such as Mehmed Talaat, Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda (1881–1957), Mehmed Cavid (1875–1926), the up-and-coming officer Mustafa Kemal (1881–1938), and many others now became refugees with their extended families. During the First World War, many of these men would become the main architects of the genocide of Ottoman Armenians. The wars had not only accelerated the long-term shift of the empire’s demographic composition in favor of Muslims. Their loss also bolstered the myth of the Christian ‘stab in the back’ (an Ottoman Dolchstosslegende?), as part of a general discourse of non-Muslim treason and disloyalty. Advocates of this emerging doctrine invoked crude generalizations of the conduct of non-Muslim Ottomans during the Balkan wars, against convincing evidence to the contrary.18 Revanchism was cast in the crucible of the Balkan wars. In a letter to his wife, dated 8 May 1913, Enver Pasha wrote, ‘If I could tell you of the savagery the enemy has inflicted . . . a stone’s throw from Istanbul, you would understand the things that enter the heads of poor Muslims far away. But our anger is strengthening: revenge, revenge, revenge; there is no other word.’19 In a personal letter to a German friend, he wrote: ‘Pour sentir plus amèrement toutes les blessures et se prépaper pour une vengeance plus cruelle, je veux que toutes les générations prochaines sentent les hontes que nous portons et se venge plus durément envers nos ennemis.’20 In a discussion with one of his confidants, the Pasha was even more outspoken: How could anyone forget the plains, the meadows, watered with the blood of our forefathers; abandon those places where Turkish raiders had stalled their steeds for a full four hundred years, with our mosques, our tombs, our dervish lodges, our bridges and our castles, to leave them to our slaves, to be driven out of Rumelia to Anatolia: this is beyond a man’s endurance. I am prepared to sacrifice gladly the remaining years of my life to take revenge on the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Montenegrins.21 The 1914 opening address of parliament was equally rancorous and emotional: ‘Do not forget! Do not forget beloved Salonika, the cradle of the flame of Liberty and Constitutional Government, do not forget green Monastir, Kosovo, İşkodra, Yanya and all of beautiful Rumelia.’ The emotional deputies exclaimed: ‘We shall not forget!’22 The emotions of Young Turk elites expelled from their ancestral lands included humiliation, helplessness, anger, loss of dignity, lack of self-confidence, anxiety, embarrassment, shame: a toxic mix that, combined together, contributed to the growth of collective hate and fantasies of destruction. Besides these objective effects, the subjective perception of the tragedy in the minds of the Young Turks merits perhaps even more attention. For them, the loss of power and prestige shattered the conventional myth of an Ottoman identity and Islamic superiority. One contemporary commented that for the Young Turks ‘it was especially difficult to be forced to live under the rule of their own former subjects after having been the dominant element for hundreds of years’.23 The fear of being ruled by historical enemies was a theme even before the Balkan wars, when the Young Turk press published widely read articles with a deeply defeatist tone: Serbia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Crete were lost. Right now the grand [dear] Rumelia is about to be lost and in one or two years 278

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Istanbul will be gone as well. The holy Islam and the esteemed Ottomanism will be moved to Kayseri. Kayseri will become our capital, Mersin our port, Armenia and Kurdistan our neighbors, and Muscovites our masters. We will become their slaves. Oh! Is it not shameful for us! How can the Ottomans who once ruled the world become servants to their own shepherds, slaves, and servants?24 After 1913, the Young Turk nightmare indeed came true as many of them became traumatized victims of ethnic cleansing. Their behaviour and political decision-making therefore was based on fear and resentment, and was aimed at gaining security for their families and, ultimately, for their nation and state. Istanbul was buzzing with newspaper articles, stage plays, and all kinds of political commentary denouncing both the Balkan nations and the ‘Christian West’ which kept its silence on the violence against Muslims. (The Archbishop of Canterbury, for example, had denounced the 1895 massacres of Armenians but failed to comment when the Balkan Muslims suffered a similar fate in 1912.25) The defeats were the talk of the day and their consequences were visible in daily life on the streets. The poet Cenap Şahabeddin (1871–1934) for example, wrote a call for ruthlessness: The reason for our loss of the Great Balkans is . . . because we cherish culture, and we are too courteous and sensitive in the fields of law, humanity, and civilization. The Bulgarian mode of action has taught us that any unit that sets off into the field needs to return to the days of barbarism. We need to internalize the desire for bloodshed. We must be harsh and insensitive in order to chop up children, women, the elderly, the weak. With no respect for the property, life and honor of others. If we follow this path, then we will be accepted in the civilized world, just like the Bulgarian hordes of King Ferdinand.26 The resentment expressed in these lines materialized very soon. A new readiness for violence emerged, one that was based on the transgression of existing norms of law, humanity, and ‘honor’. The ethical rule was now reversed: instead of ‘Do to others what you would like to be done to you’, the Young Turks were now, more than ever, prepared to ‘Do to others what they have done to you’. Chairman of the Ottoman parliament, Halil Menteşe (1874–1948), bitterly concluded at the end of the Balkan wars: ‘In international affairs there is no place for justice and morality. There, only an aggressive self-interest dominates. It was like this yesterday, today too, and tomorrow it will be like that as well.’27 The consequences of massacre and expulsion on the Balkans strained the relationship between Muslims and Christians at all levels. From the political elites down to the ordinary people on the ground, polarization sharpened as extremists were keen on driving the groups apart. Young Turk radicals broadcast propaganda to spread fear and hatred towards Ottoman Christians. Social interaction between Muslims and Christians decreased in major cities, provincial towns and villages. The extremists also targeted moderates, intimidating and silencing the political center.28 The war and ensuing violence in the Balkans released a wave of nationalist population politics coupling ethnicity to territory. The expansion of the nation-state system onto residual Ottoman lands produced multilateral homogenization campaigns such as forced migration and population exchanges between Bulgaria and 279

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the Ottoman Empire. Most of all, the Young Turks’ perception that the catastrophe of the Balkans should never be allowed to happen to the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire, especially the eastern provinces, would give birth to unprecedented forms of violence.29 One major outcome of these processes was a deep fear, or perhaps a complex, of loss. The fear of losing territory was a persistent phobia of both late Ottoman and Turkish political culture. Some Ottoman intellectuals foresaw the looming cataclysm. In his 1913 book on the Balkan wars, Aram Andonian (1875–1952) wrote with considerable concern that ‘the principle of nationality’ had spelled disaster in the Balkans and was utterly untenable in the eastern provinces, where most Armenians lived.30 Andonian had planned to write a second volume to his book. He was never able to do so.

Genocide against Ottoman Armenians The Balkan wars delivered a shock to Ottoman society that would transform these networks of paramilitary freebooters. A true watershed that marked a critical shift in the nature of paramilitary violence in this period was the Young Turk coup d’état. As Edirne, a former capital of the Ottoman Empire, was under siege and desperately in need of relief, the Ottoman high command held negotiations on 22 January 1913 that foresaw unconditional surrender of this important city to the Bulgarian government.31 The CUP was infuriated and a faction of hardliners embarked on a reckless raid on the ‘Sublime Porte’ (Bâb-ı Ali), as the cabinet was in session. The group included Talaat,32 Enver, the doctors Bahaeddin Shakir and Mehmed Nâzım, party orator Ömer Naci, and several irregulars including the short-tempered fedayi Yakup Cemil. On 23 January 1913 in the afternoon, the building was surrounded and occupied by 60 armed men. The group kicked in the door and immediately opened fire on the first men in sight: the Grand Vizier’s secretary Ohrili Nafiz, the War Minister’s secretary Kıbrıslızâde Tevfik Bey, and the veteran police commissioner Celâl Bey. Upon hearing shots, the cabinet members fled the building. In an attempt to straighten out the situation, Field Marshal and Minister of War Nâzım Pasha appeared on the balcony and yelled to the raiders: ‘What’s going on?’ But Yakup Cemil shot him in the forehead and Nâzım Pasha died instantly. Meanwhile, Enver Pasha ran into the central meeting hall and put his gun to Grand Vizier Mehmed Kâmil Pasha’s head, giving him the choice of either resigning or dying. The 80-year-old Kâmil Pasha tendered his resignation to the Sultan, and the CUP was now in charge. Outside, the raiders were shouting: ‘Long live the people! Long live the CUP!’33 The coup d’état was a success. In the months after the coup, the CUP, no longer wielding power from behind the scenes, would gradually impose a violent dictatorship upon the empire. Enver reconquered Edirne, promoted himself to general, and became Minister of War. The new cabinet stood under the auspices of Talaat, who went from party boss to Interior Minister. Slowly but steadily the political climate in Istanbul worsened to an extent unseen in the Abdulhamid era, with political violence becoming commonplace. These assassinations were carried out by the paramilitary gangsters loyal to factions around Talaat and especially Enver. Hüseyin Cahit (1875–1957), publisher of one of the most important newspapers of the period, witnessed one of these political murders as a hitman loyal to Enver Pasha shot a man in his presence for expressing criticism.34 The Young Turks became the propelling force behind state terror: 280

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To them politics was much more than a game and having seized power they meant to hold on to it. To do so they were willing to use all possible means, so that repression and violence became the order of the day. Nothing was sacred in the pursuit of power and those guilty of dissent must be prepared to pay with their lives.35 The paramilitaries who used to live as outlaws amidst civil war conditions now rose to state power. This lent them legitimacy and transposed the severely depacified political culture to Anatolia. Their experience of paramilitary warfare in the Rumelian countryside was transplanted into the offices of the Ottoman government. On 2 August 1914, one day after the German declaration of war against Russia, a written agreement foreseeing close cooperation and mobilization was signed between Germany and the Ottoman Empire. On 29 October 1914, without a formal declaration of war, Enver Pasha ordered the Ottoman navy to bombard the Russian shore, including the port city Sevastopol. Ottoman battlecruisers destroyed oil tanks and sank fourteen vessels.36 The fait accompli triggered declarations of war by the Triple Entente powers. From 11 November 1914 on, the Ottoman Empire was officially at war with Russia, France and Britain.37 The First World War was not something that happened incidentally to the Ottoman Empire. Powerful cadres in the CUP’s nationalist wing consciously headed towards armed confrontation, though not with one particular state. According to a recent study, the CUP entrance into the war was ‘part of a strategy to achieve long-term security, economic development, and, eventually, national recovery’.38 In other words, by participating in the war it hoped to solve the perceived problems of the Empire. The destruction of the Ottoman Armenians can be seen as a complex result of four important factors: the development of Turkish nationalism, the loss of war and territory in the Balkans of 1912–13, the Young Turk coup d’état of 23 January 1913, and the outbreak of the First World War. These political forces converged in sparking a severe radicalization of anti-Armenian policy by the Young Turk political elite. That policy consisted of a series of overlapping processes that geared into each other and generated an intended and coherent process of destruction. These processes were: mass executions of elites, expropriations, deportations, forced assimilation, artificial famine, and destruction of material culture. Decapitation of the Armenian community by mass executions of the economic, religious, political, and intellectual elite was the first pillar of the genocide. The great roundup in Istanbul of 24 April 1915 was to become a guideline for the arrests of the Armenian elites throughout the vast country. Almost all of these were men of middle or advanced age with influence, wealth and status. They were arrested, put in prison, often tortured, and finally murdered. For example, in the cities of Bitlis and Harput, all prominent Armenian men were arrested, transported to the suburbs, and shot dead. The bodies were thrown in trenches dug in advance. A well-documented example of the mass murder of Armenian elites is the south-eastern city Diyarbekir. On Sunday 30 May 1915, a dozen militiamen handcuffed 636 Armenian dignitaries including the Bishop, and transported them to the Tigris. On the banks of the river, the men were loaded on large rafts on the pretext that they would be moved to the south. Militia members sailed the notables downstream to a gorge where the rafts were moored. The victims were robbed of their money, taken away in groups of six, stripped of their clothes and valuables, and massacred by men recruited by the governor. The 281

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perpetrators murdered with axes, daggers and guns, and dumped the bodies in the river. The destruction of the Armenian intelligentsia was completed breathtakingly quickly: the entire top layer of the community was eliminated within weeks.39 Expropriation was a second pillar of the genocide. The Armenian genocide was one of the largest cases of capital transfer in modern history. Parallel to the deportation orders, the Young Turk government issued several decrees about the Armenians’ property. These pseudo-laws stipulated that Armenians would be dispossessed of their businesses and crafts. On 10 June 1915 the government set up the Committees for Abandoned Property (Emval-ı Metruke Komisyonu), which were assigned the daily implementation of the dispossession. This was a frontal attack on the Armenian economy, since all Armenian property was now officially transferred to the state. On 26 September 1915, the regime issued an additional decree that delegated the implementation of the seizures and record keeping to the Ministries of Interior, Justice and Finance. With these two laws, the Young Turks had robbed a huge economy of its owners for good: houses, farms, businesses, factories, workshops, ateliers, etc. According to Talaat’s private documents, a total of 41,117 buildings were confiscated throughout the Ottoman Empire. The Committees for Abandoned Property liquidated all possessions of the Armenians and sold them far below market value to Turks. This resulted in the mass impoverishment of the Armenian victims. Apart from the objective effects of material deprivation, the subjective experience of loss was unprecedented. Artisans who had often followed in their ancestors’ footsteps as jewelers, carpenters, tailors or smiths now not only lost their livelihood but also their professional identities. The famous Armenian manufacturer of percussion instruments, Zildjian, is an example of a one of these venerable artisan families.40 A third, central pillar of the genocide was the categorical deportation of the Armenian civilian population. In April 1915 some Armenians had already been deported from their homes, but the process was not yet on a national scale. The complete deportation of the entire Armenian population was officially ordered on 23 May 1915 by Talaat. His order foresaw, with minimal exceptions, the deportation of Armenians to the inhospitable Syrian desert, beginning with the north-eastern provinces. Talaat tried to camouflage the deportations as a legitimate measure and on 26 May manufactured the ‘Temporary Deportation Law’. Although the deportations had already begun, the law was ratified on 29 May. The army was assigned a considerable degree of authority to organize the deportations, but their daily management was transferred to the ‘Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants’ (İskân-ı Aşâir ve Muhacirîn Müdüriyeti). Talaat oversaw the process through telegraphic correspondence and with the assistance of local officials.41 The deportations covered the entire Ottoman Empire, a huge swath of land corresponding to current-day Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and Iraq. The most violent events occurred in the eight eastern Ottoman provinces where a substantial Armenian minority lived: Erzurum, Van, Trabzon, Sivas, Mamuret ul-Aziz, Adana, Diyarbekir and Aleppo. The genocide did not unfold equally in all of these provinces, but there was a significant regional variation in their intensity and development. Some moderate governors, such as Celal Bey in Konya, Hasan Mazhar Bey in Ankara and Rahmi Bey in İzmir delayed and hampered the process, whereas others including Mustafa Abdülhalik Renda in Bitlis, Cemal Azmi Bey in Trabzon, and Dr Mehmed Reshid in Diyarbekir intensified the genocide. In the former provinces Armenians were treated somewhat less violently, and they found slightly more opportunities 282

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to escape. In the latter provinces the general rule was complete destruction.42 For example, the 40,000 Armenians in the city of Erzurum were deported to Der el-Zor in early June 1915. The German consul in Erzurum reported that the deportation would amount to ‘an absolute extermination’ (eine absolute Ausrottung).43 Indeed, even before the convoy from Erzurum province had reached the provincial borders, the deportation convoy was already severely weakened. Near the city of Kemah, gendarmes butchered the remaining deportees and dumped them in the Euphrates. The number of Armenians from Erzurum that actually reached Der el-Zor was probably below 200, which corresponds to a destruction rate of 99.3%.44 A fourth important aspect of the destruction of the Ottoman Armenians was forced renouncement of one’s ethnic identity. Women and children in particular were forced to renounce Christianity and the Armenian language and to convert to Islam and speak Turkish. This was part of the broader attack on the Armenian culture. Although in the long run Talaat also deported the Armenian converts, large numbers of women and children were kidnapped and forced to convert. In some cities like Konya and Beirut Armenian children were taken to large orphanages, where they were given Turkish names and converted to Islam, in an attempt to make them into Turks. Many people forgot their Armenian identity and family. Armenians’ reactions to the conversion policy of the government was ambivalent and ranged from fearful acquiescence to unwavering opposition. For example, Henry Vartanian, an Armenian from Sivas whose father was murdered, was forcibly converted to Islam. A Turkish acquaintance demanded that Henry renounce Christianity and swear the Islamic oath ‘There is no God but Allah and Mohammed is his prophet’. The ceremony was performed in the presence of an imam, the young Henry was ritually circumcised, and was now known as Abdurrahmanoğlu Esad.45 This conversion policy pursued the dilution of the Armenian population and obliteration of their culture and collective identity. From an analytical perspective, the kidnapping of tens of thousands of women and children should be considered a mix between forced disappearance and cultural genocide.46 The construction of an artificially created famine region was another form of destruction. It must be noted that this facet of the genocide is under-researched. By the winter of 1915, the Syrian desert town of Der el-Zor began to resemble an outdoor concentration camp due to the ever-increasing influx of deportation convoys. There were no provisions in the Syrian desert for the new arrivals, and in early 1916 a famine broke out. This already was a crime of omission. But the available evidence also strongly suggests that the local Young Turk authorities took active measures against the deported Armenians by creating an ethnic hierarchy of food: the bread available in the city was not equally distributed but Armenians were denied bread. This only exacerbated the famine and led to many more deaths – a crime of commission.47 Finally, destruction of material culture was also a dimension of the genocide. The Young Turks wanted to erase the physical traces of Armenian presence in the country, through destruction or damage to churches and buildings and their Armenian inscriptions. Although the Armenians were gone, in a sense they were still too present. Besides the less ancient churches and cathedrals, the Young Turk regime destroyed many medieval Armenian monasteries, such as Narekavank, Varakavank, Arakelots Vank, Surp Garabed and Surp Khach. Today, very few traces remain of these former centers of Armenian cultural and religious life. The figures illustrate the magnitude of this process: in 1914, the Armenian community still owned 2,600 churches, 450 monasteries and 2,000 schools. The destruction of the architecture of the victim group 283

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served two purposes: it apparently proved that the victims never even existed in the area, and ensured that the survivors had nothing recognizable to return to.48 It was possible to escape the genocide in four ways: bribery, hiding, flight, and pure luck. First off, paying kickbacks to perpetrators was a way to delay deportation, to escape abuse, or to buy your life. Vahram Dadrian (1900–48) was 14 years old when he was deported from the Ankara region. In his diaries, he describes how time and again, bribes saved his family on the long journey to Der el-Zor. Upon arrival in Syria, the Dadrians had reached rock bottom and the once-wealthy family was destitute.49 A second, risky option was hiding and waiting for the persecution to cease. Many Armenian survivors survived the genocide under very difficult circumstances. Others were tracked down or betrayed, and killed. Hiding was also very risky for people who were helping the persecuted. The government had circulated a national instruction prescribing that ‘any Muslim who protects an Armenian will be executed in front of his house and his house will be burned’ (bir Ermeniyi tesahüp edecek bir Müslümanın hanesi önünde idam ve hanesi ihrak).50 Third, in the winter of 1914 approximately 130,000 Armenians fled to Russia and Persia. Among them was the expressionist painter Arshile Gorky (1904–48), who managed to flee with his mother, first to Russia and later to the United States. Anyone who did not flee was deported and/or killed, and after March 1915 flight was made impossible. Finally, perhaps the most common form of survival was luck. Several important Armenian intellectuals such as Aram Andonian (1875–1952) and Michael Shamtanjian (1874–1926) survived the mass executions mainly by a coincidence which they had no control over. And the editor of the liberal newspaper Zhamanag, Yervant Odian (1869–1926), survived the genocide because a Turkish police officer in Der elZor did not understand his deportation document and sent him back to Anatolia.51 At the end of the war, about 3,000 Armenian settlements (villages, cities, districts) had been depopulated and their inhabitants massacred. Today, outside Istanbul almost no Armenians live in Turkey any longer. The community now has six churches, no schools, and no monasteries. The genocide thus developed at a rapid pace: within a year, the Ottoman Armenian community had been beheaded, dissolved, displaced, and exterminated. What made the persecutions genocidal is that the destruction targeted the abstract category of group identity: eventually, all Armenians, loyal or disloyal, political or apolitical, were targets and potential victims. The victims of the genocide hailed from different classes, regions and backgrounds: highly educated intellectuals, middle class professionals, illiterate workers and peasants, liberal reformers, secular nationalists, conservative clergy. Their response to the genocide ranged from resistance to flight, docility and existential fear. The vast majority of ordinary people probably understood neither the cause nor the scale of the genocide. Only after the war did a profound awareness spread among the intellectuals and politicians.

Discussion Why was there so much violence against civilians during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? Explanations based on security and identity go a long way in accounting for the origins of violence against unarmed civilians. The relevance of competing national claims and ethnic security dilemmas amidst a failed imperial system was undeniable. Both the massacres and expulsions of Muslims in the Balkans and the destruction of the Armenians of Anatolia were part and parcel of this logic. As the First Balkan War destroyed the Ottoman Empire in South-East Europe it left embattled shatter 284

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zones, or large areas without order or clear state authority. The collapse of Ottoman state power in the lost territories left in its wake a host of Muslims (Albanians, Turks, Pomaks, etc.) who were now bereft of the protection that the Ottoman state had historically offered them. The advancing Balkan armies committed grave crimes against humanity in their attempt to establish homogeneous territories by clearing as much territory of minority populations as possible. The Serb political and military elite, for example, saw the Balkan wars not only as a struggle against external enemies, but also as an opportunity to reckon with internal enemies such as Muslims, Croats and Albanians. The Young Turk elite in its turn learned from their ‘success’ and pursued ethno-territorial homogenization as a major objective in the First World War. At least two explanations seem to account for the levels of violence. First of all, officers and nationalist politicians of all sides viewed the population of ethnic minority regions as inherently treacherous, hence threats to security against which the state and army personnel had to be permanently on guard. Their perception of ethnic minorities as a permanent ‘security risk’ created a climate of suspicion that was highly conducive to the harsh treatment of minority civilian populations and the committing of atrocities. Second, the Balkans had been in crisis since the 1860s and the Ottoman state had been in wars since 1911; combatants and civilians alike were brutalized by 1912 and even more so in 1915. The barbarization of warfare, manifesting itself in indiscriminate killings, was a legacy of the Balkan wars. These had been ethnic in scope and genocidal in military ethic: in the Rumelian theatres of war, battling the enemy had included massacring enemy civilians and destroying enemy villages. By 1915 this had become a customary practice and distinctions between combatants and non-combatants were hardly made. Inter-communal violence between opposed ethnic groups was no less common in the former Ottoman lands, since each side was prepared to ignore international law in order to take or protect national terrain.52 Finally, there are the ambivalences of violence. Studies of genocidal violence often draw sharp dividing lines between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ and lock these immutable roles at a particular segment in history. But humans’ potentially multiple roles in processes of collective violence are overlooked or ignored.53 In studies of the Armenian genocide and accounts of the killings, the perpetrators, from the organizing elites to the rank-and-file executioners, have too often figured as evil faceless killers, undifferentiated and unexplained. The paramilitaries and tribesmen appear in the killing fields of Anatolia ex nihilo and murder people for no apparent reason other than intrinsic (Turkish or Islamic) cruelty and malignance. This chapter has challenged this essentialist convention by problematizing the victimization of Ottoman Muslims and Young Turks in the Balkans, and arguing that two years later that victimization may have served as a motive for collective vengeance against Ottoman Christians. The roots of the Armenian Genocide can partly be traced in the loss of power and territory, war, and ‘honor’ in the Balkans. This victimization played a major role as the mobilization of rank-and-file killers depended on the manipulation of emotions of fear, hatred and resentment.54 The genocide emerged as a child of the fatal combination of an existential crisis of collective identity and group security.

Notes 1 For four recent and different attempts to situate the violence of the period between 1870 and 1923 within a broader framework of modern mass violence as a result of disintegrating European continental empires, see Benjamin Lieberman, Terrible Fate: Ethnic Cleansing in the Making of Modern Europe (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006); Donald Bloxham, Genocide, the World

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2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Wars and the Unweaving of Europe (Edgware: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008); Donald Bloxham, The Final Solution: A Genocide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Cathie Carmichael, Genocide Before the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For an analysis of the Ottoman involvement in the Balkan wars from a military perspective see Edward J. Erickson, Defeat in Detail: The Ottoman Army in the Balkans, 1912–1913 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003). Richard C. Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912–1913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 136–8. George F. Kennan, The Other Balkan Wars: A 1913 Carnegie Endowment Inquiry in Retrospect with a New Introduction and Reflection on the Present Record (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1993), pp. 109–35. Momchil Yonov, ‘Bulgarian Military Operations in the Balkan Wars’, in Béla K. Király and Dimitrije Djordjevic (eds), East Central European Society and the Balkan Wars (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987), pp. 63–84. Leon Trotsky, Die Balkankriege 1912–13 (Essen: Arbeiterpresse Verlag, 1995, transl. Hannelore Georgi & Harald Schubärth), pp. 296–7. Rumeli Mezâlimi ve Bulgar Vahşetleri (Istanbul: Rumeli Muhâcirîn-i İslâmiyye Cemiyeti, 1913), p. 49. Katrin Boeckh, Von den Balkankriegen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Kleinstaatenpolitik und ethnische Selbstbestimmung auf dem Balkan (München: Oldenbourg, 1996), pp. 165, 199. Ahmed Cevad, Balkanlarda Akan Kan (Istanbul: Şamil, n.y.), pp. 118–19. Elçin Kürşat-Ahlers, ‘Die Brutalisierung von Gesellschaft und Kriegsführung im Osmanischen Reich während der Balkankriege (1903–1914)’, in Andreas Gestrich (ed.), Gewalt im Krieg: Ausübung, Erfahrung und Verweigerung von Gewalt in Kriegen des 20. Jahrhunderts (Münster: Lit-Verlag, 1995), pp. 51–74. For an introduction see Justin McCarthy, Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922 (Princeton, NJ: The Darwin Press, 1995), pp. 1–22. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 173–81. Balkan Harbında neden Munhazim Olduk? (Istanbul: n.p., 1913), p. 95. Halide Edib, Conflict of East and West in Turkey (Delhi: Jamia Press, 1935), p. 80. Quoted in Mark Mazower, Salonika, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430–1950 (London: HarperCollins, 2004), pp. 338–9. Selim İlkin and İlhan Tekeli, ‘İttihat ve Terakki Hareketinin Oluşumunda Selanik’in Toplumsal Yapısının Belirleyiciliği’, in Osman Okyar and Halil İnalcık (eds), Türkiye’nin Sosyal ve Ekonomik Tarihi (1071–1920): Social and Economic History of Turkey (1071–1920) (Ankara: Meteksan, 1980), pp. 351–82. Erik-Jan Zürcher, ‘The Young Turks – Children of the Borderlands?’, International Journal of Turkish Studies, Vol. 9, 2003, pp. 275–86. Eyal Ginio, ‘Mobilizing the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars (1912–1913): Awakening from the Ottoman Dream’, War in History, Vol. 12, No. 2, 2005, pp. 156–77. M. Şükrü Hanioğlu (ed.), Kendi Mektuplarında Enver Paşa (Istanbul: Der, 1989), p. 242. Enver to a German friend, 2 April 1913, in Hanioğlu, Kendi Mektuplarında Enver Paşa, p. 237. Hüsamettin Ertürk, İki Devrin Perde Arkası, Samih N. Tansu (ed.) (Istanbul: Batur, 1964), p. 121. Tunaya, Türkiye’de Siyasal Partiler, Vol. 3, p. 465. Bayur, Türk İnkılabı Tarihi, Vol. 2, part III, p. 250. Quoted in: Nader Sohrabi, ‘Global Waves, Local Actors: What the Young Turks Knew about Other Revolutions and Why it Mattered’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2002, pp. 45–79, p. 64. Carmichael, Genocide Before the Holocaust, p. 76. Ahmed Emin Yalman, Yakın Tarihte Gördüklerim ve Geçirdiklerim (Istanbul: Pera Turizm ve Ticaret, 1997), Vol. 1, 1888–1922, p. 194. Halil Menteşe, Osmanlı Mebusan Meclisi Reisi Halil Menteşe’nin Anıları (Istanbul: Hürriyet Vakfı, 1986), p. 158. George W. Gawrych, ‘The Culture and Politics of Violence in Turkish society, 1903–14’, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, 1986, pp. 307–30. For a still useful overview, see Mark Levene, ‘Creating a Modern “Zone of Genocide”: The Impact of Nation- and State-Formation on Eastern Anatolia, 1878–1923’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1998, pp. 393–433.

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30 Aram Andonian, Balkan Savaşı (Istanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 1999, transl. Zaven Biberian). 31 Ibid, p. 502. 32 Edirne had a particular emotional significance for many CUP members including Talaat, who was born and raised there. According to his wife, the only instance when she saw Talaat cry was when his hometown fell. ‘Eşi Hayriye Hanım Talât Paşayı anlatıyor’, in Yakın Tarihimiz, Vol. II, 1962, p. 194. 33 For the inside story of the coup see Galip Vardar, İttihat ve Terakki İçinde Dönenler (Istanbul: Tan, 1960), pp. 104–19. 34 Hüseyin Cahit Yalçın, Siyasal Anılar (Istanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 1976), p. 170. 35 Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 163. 36 Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), p. 76. 37 John Keegan, The First World War (New York: Vintage, 1998), p. 217. 38 Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 191. 39 Taner Akçam, ‘The Chilingirian Murder: A Case Study from the 1915 Roundup of Armenian Intellectuals’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 25, No. 1, 2011, pp. 127–44. 40 Uğur Ümit Üngör and Mehmet Polatel, Confiscation and Destruction: The Young Turk Seizure of Armenian Property (London: Continuum, 2011). 41 Fuat Dündar, Modern Türkiye’nin Şifresi: İttihat ve Terakki’nin Etnisite Mühendisliği (1913–1918) (Istanbul: İletişim, 2008), pp. 248–348. 42 Raymond H. Kévorkian, The Armenian Genocide: A Complete History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), part IV. 43 Hilmar Kaiser, ‘“A Scene from the Inferno”: The Armenians of Erzerum and the Genocide, 1915–1916’, in Hans-Lukas Kieser and Dominik J. Schaller (eds), Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah: The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zürich: Chronos, 2001), pp. 129–86. 44 Ara Sarafian, Talaat Pasha’s Report on the Armenian Genocide (London: Gomidas Institute, 2011), p. 48. 45 Donald E. Miller and Lorne Touryan-Miller, Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 146. 46 Ara Sarafian, ‘The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide’, in Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Berghahn, 2001), pp. 209–21; Matthias Bjørnlund, ‘“A Fate Worse Than Dying”: Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide’, in Dagmar Herzog (ed.), Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Palgrave, 2009), pp. 16–58. 47 Hilmar Kaiser, At the Crossroads of Der Zor: Death, Survival, and Humanitarian Resistance in Aleppo, 1915–1917 (London: Gomidas, 2002). 48 Robert Bevan, The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), pp. 25–60. 49 Vahram Dadrian, To the Desert: Pages from my Diary (London: Gomidas Institute, 2003). This raises the question of survival rates during the genocide: did higher-class Armenians have higher survival chances because they could afford bribes, or did lower-class Armenians have higher survival chances because they knew the terrain and social life? 50 Takvim-i Vekâyi, No. 3540, 1919, p. 7. 51 Yervant Odian, Accursed Years: My Exile and Return from Der Zor, 1914–1919 (London: Gomidas, 2009). 52 Nicholas Doumanis, Before the Nation: Muslim–Christian Coexistence and its Destruction in LateOttoman Anatolia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 53 For a critical study see Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 54 For a study of this phenomenon, see Roger D. Petersen, Understanding Ethnic Violence: Fear, Hatred, and Resentment in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 17–84.

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20 P OL ICE F ORCE S A ND T H E HOL OCA US T German perpetrators and local collaborators1 Robby Van Eetvelde

Introduction On 29 September 1947, Dr Eduard Strauch was to give his opening statement in the trial in Nuremberg against the main perpetrators of the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units responsible for securing the back territory of the advancing German army after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Before Strauch could answer his name, he suffered an epileptic seizure and dropped to the floor ‘as if hit with a pistol shot’:2 a fate which befell the numerous Jewish men, women and children shot during executions by these units. As a member of Einsatzgruppe A, employed in the Baltic countries, Eduard Strauch played an important part in this initial implementation of the Nazi genocidal policy against the European Jewish population. The Einsatzgruppen were the mobile units of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) in Berlin, the security ministry founded in 1939 which put conventional police forces and SS branches under one institutional roof and leadership.3 Its foundation was the result of a power struggle within the Nazi movement over control of the German police, which had started almost immediately after the Nazi takeover of power in 1933. This struggle effectively ended in 1936, when Reichsführer-SS (RFSS) Heinrich Himmler was nominated as Head of the German police. He unified the German police in two branches: the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) or Order Police under Kurt Daluege, which merged the uniformed police, and the Sicherheitspolizei (Sipo) or Security Police, which brought together the political Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) and criminal Kriminalpolizei (Kripo), in other words the plainclothes policemen.4 Headed by the same man as the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence service of the SS, Reinhard Heydrich, they formed the Sipo-SD, which during the war became the perpetrator institution par excellence. From the executions in the East to the administration of the deportations in the West, a Sipo-SD officer was usually somehow involved. Following the career of Eduard Strauch, the involvement of these men, some of whom had a background in the Weimar police or administration, in the Holocaust will be reconstructed. With his prewar professional career in the SD, his membership of Einsatzgruppe A in Latvia, his deployment as commander of the Sipo-SD in Minsk, his activity in occupied Belgium and finally arrest and judgement in Nuremberg, Strauch was present at different stages

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and different locations of conceptualising and carrying out the Final Solution. In considering how the Sipo-SD implemented the Holocaust to solve the perceived Jewish problem in Poland, in the newly created Reichskommisariat Ostland (Baltic states and Belarus) and in the occupied western European countries (Belgium, France and the Netherlands), the myth of an all-seeing and all-powerful German police will be tackled by showing how much the latter depended on collaboration with local institutions and collaborators to carry out the actual apprehension and executions of its victims. What will not be covered is how the genocidal practice was implemented inside the borders of the so-called Altreich or Germany proper. As Michael Wildt has argued, ‘the RSHA as an institution was mobile and flexible; its central office was in Berlin, but it realised its full power and potential on the local level’.5 As will be shown, this was especially applicable to the Nazi occupied territories. Born in 1906 in Essen, located in the Ruhr area, Eduard Strauch was already involved with the Nazi movement during his student days. He first studied four semesters of theology before deciding to change to a study of law since ‘a religious study did not suit him’.6 Son of a factory labourer, his family was hit hard by the interwar economic crisis and Strauch had to work to supplement the family income. He received his degree from the University of Erlangen in 1930, passed both his junior and senior law examinations in 1934 and 1935 respectively, but decided not to embark on the government career this would have guaranteed. A member of the Nazi party, the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (SA) and the SS since 1931, he decided to start his professional career with the SD in Dortmund.7 With this early involvement in the Nazi movement and intellectual background, Strauch fits the pattern of a generation of young, highly educated men which headed the RSHA and subsequently the Einsatzgruppen, identified by Michael Wildt as a ‘generation of the unbound’ and personified by Werner Best, the architect of the Nazi legal system.8 Too young to have first-hand First World War experience and with an academic background in law and humanities, these men felt the need to combine their theoretical, radical ideology with practical success. A racial and völkisch antisemitism, a rejection of democracy and emotional coldness is what defined their ideology.9 The SD was the cradle in which these men rose to power. No longer just the SS intelligence service, Himmler used it to nourish these intellectuals and to merge the traditional police with his radical SS to form a new state security organisation or ‘Staatsschutzkorps’ to protect the German Volksgemeinschaft (people’s community).10 Joining the Gestapo, Kripo and SD meant putting together individuals with very different backgrounds, from old-timer Weimar republic policemen, to detectives convinced of the virtues of National Socialism, to SS members attracted to the cloak-and-dagger romanticism surrounding the early SD and avant-garde intellectuals who wanted to use the Sipo-SD to create a new world in the image of their radical ideology.11 The political enemies of the Gestapo (Jews and communists) were included in a new biological definition of criminality defined by the Kripo, and fought by the elite provided by the SD.12 By doing this, a mental boundary had been broken whereby law could be interpreted flexibly. It was the invasion of Poland in 1939, however, which facilitated the transition from theory to genocidal practice.13

Eastern Europe First in Poland, with its mixed Slavic, Jewish and ethnic German population, the Nazi occupier implemented a racial policy on a big scale.14 On 1 September 1939, 289

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the Wehrmacht attacked Poland. In accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact signed on 23 August 1939 the Soviet Union attacked and occupied the eastern parts of Poland.15 Nazi Germany integrated several areas along its eastern borders and renamed the territories that remained the Generalgouvernement or General Government, an area in which approximately 12,000,000 people lived.16 This territory was governed by a civil administration, headed by the infamous Hans Frank. Concerning matters of security and deportation, Frank was challenged by Friedrich Krüger, who as SS and Police Leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer or HSSPF) was Himmler’s highest representative regarding police and racial matters.17 During the invasion of Poland in September 1939, Einsatzgruppen had followed German armies. Their task, as given by Sipo-SD leader Reinhard Heydrich on 21 September 1939, was not only to liquidate the Polish elites but also to concentrate Jews in cities close to railway lines. A few days later, on 27 September 1939, the expulsion of Jews over the demarcation line which separated the Nazi from the Soviet occupied zones was added to these guidelines.18 Approximately two months later, on 20 November 1939, the mobile units were transformed into stationary Sipo-SD offices.19 An immediate problem the German police faced was a lack of manpower. For example, in 1943 the Sipo-SD only had 2,200 German officers at its disposal for the entire General Government.20 This is why quite early on Himmler authorised the recruitment of ethnic German collaborators in a ‘Selbstschutz’ or selfdefence unit. Directly controlled by HSSPF Krüger, these men would be used for all possible tasks in territories where SS men or German police officers were not available. Motivated by sympathy with the German occupier, antipathy towards Soviet Russia, economic opportunism or even fear, these men soon became known for their brutal behaviour, and, with the consent of Krüger, incorporated into the Sonderdienst or special service, the police force of Frank’s civil administration.21 As part of a broader plan of racial reshuffling in Germany’s new eastern Lebensraum, Jews and others were sent from the newly annexed territories to the General Government, their place taken by ethnic Germans.22 The striving of local German officials in the General Government to make the territories under their control judenrein led in October 1941 to Aktion Reinhard, the plan to exterminate all Jews in what remained of Poland. For this, the understaffed German police could not only count on ethnic German collaborators. Polish collaborators working for the Polish Police (Polnische Polizei) were active in maintaining law and order. The Polish Police were directly subordinate to the German police, and their task included not only fighting partisans but also participating in anti-Jewish operations, for example patrolling the walls of the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, tracking down Jews in hiding and providing assistance with deportations. Likewise, young Polish men working for the Polnischer Baudienst or Polish construction service, the compulsory labour service for male youth, also took part in the murder of Jews as helpers of the SS and German police.23 Collaboration by members of the public at large, working as agents provocateurs and informers giving the Germans information on Jews in hiding, should also not be forgotten. In Warsaw alone, no fewer than 1,000 such denouncers were active, some motivated by the prospect of material gain. This popular support of the German antiJewish policy only increased after the German invasion of the Soviet Union and was instigated by resentment against the former occupier and a shared hatred for Jews and communists alike.24 At the end of the war, Poland would prove not only to be a graveyard of Polish Jews but of the other Jews of Europe as well. Of the 3,300,000 Jews living in Poland in 1939, only 300,000 survived the war. At the extermination site of Auschwitz, almost 1,000,000 Jews perished.25 290

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Learning the possibilities of thinking on a grand scale was one of the influences the invasion of Poland had on the leadership corps of the RSHA. The invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 would transform the Einsatzgruppen from an instrument of political repression into an instrument in an ideological war of annihilation.26 Only after the start of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Operation Barbarossa, in June 1941 would Strauch become involved in genocidal practices. Having been active for four months in military duty on the Polish front, he was discharged and sent to the Gestapo in Königsberg, present-day Kaliningrad. On 4 November 1941 he received a message there from Heydrich, assigning him to Einsatzkommando 2, a subdivision of Einsatzgruppe A, which would be active in Latvia.27 Einsatzgruppe A was one of the four new mobile units drafted to carry out so-called ‘special measures’ in the rear of the land army, with the latter’s consent and cooperation. Consisting of 500 to 600 men each, their initial targets were the communists, but soon this expanded into the elimination of Jews in ‘party and state functions’, then all Jewish men and eventually the murder of entire Jewish families (August 1941 and beyond).28 A notorious example is the massacre carried out at Babi Yar, a ravine just outside Kiev, on 29 and 30 September 1941, during which approximately 30,000 Jews were killed. The mass execution had been carried out as retaliation for the sabotages in the capital of Ukraine that had slowed down the German military advance. For this, the Nazis blamed the Jews.29 Because the number of men at the disposal of the mobile units soon proved insufficient to carry out the genocidal plans of the Nazi leadership, Himmler quickly allowed the enrolment of indigenous collaborators. His first directives concerning their recruitment were issued on 25 July 1941, with more guidelines following in the summer and autumn of 1941.30 These native collaborators would soon be used in carrying out the Final Solution in the Baltic countries. The German occupier reorganised the Baltic region into a new territory under a civil administration led by Heinrich Lohse. It consisted of present-day Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and a newly created territory called Weißruthenien, made up of former Polish provinces and part of the Minsk region, now in Belarus. Existing from September 1941 until the invasion by the Red Army in 1944, it had a population of 8,500,000 and a large number of Jewish inhabitants concentrated in Belarus, Lithuania and southern Latvia.31 Counting on bitterness left over from the Soviet occupation, during which several Jews had been appointed to important functions, the German invaders expected that little encouragement would be necessary to incite the local population to start pogroms. Some atrocities took place, and by the middle of July 1941 Strauch reported the killing of 2,000 Jews, ‘partly by Latvian auxiliary police, partly by our own forces’. Mobilising the entire Baltic community, however, proved problematic.32 The German police had a serious shortage of manpower, but they found willing volunteers to assist them in their racial project. David Gaunt calculated that Hans-Adolf Prützmann, the HSSPF for Ostland until his replacement in November 1941, used 4,428 German officers in the liquidation of the Jews. They were supplemented by no less than 31,804 Baltic collaborators enrolled in several auxiliary units.33 In Latvia, one of these units was headed by Viktor Arājs, who met with Franz Stahlecker, leader of Einsatzgruppe A, on 1 July 1941. His unit would assist the Sipo-SD in Latvia with finding, arresting and shooting Jews. As the Sonderkommando Arājs, it was made subordinate to the German police there, headed by Dr Rudolf Lange, Kommandeur der Sicherheitspolizei (KdS). It consisted of hundreds of members who were motivated by a wide scope of interests, ranging from antisemitism to 291

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opportunism and economic interests. The apprehended Jews had been located using information stemming from the Latvian police or from denunciations by the public at large. By executing 20,000 to 30,000 Jews the command contributed to the fact that by September 1941 the Jewish question in Riga, which at the arrival of the German troops had still counted a community consisting of 30,000 people, was no longer considered an urgent matter.34 The cooperation between the German police and local collaborators was institutionalised the most in Estonia. Martin Sandberger, the local KdS, divided his service into a section for Germans and a section for locals, respectively Abteilung A and Abteilung B. Treating the local collaborators as equals, allowing them to wear Sipo uniforms, have SS ranks and draw up the political reports, were all elements of Sandberger’s strategy to win the hearts and minds of the population. Mobilising Estonians, motivated by nationalism and traditional values, the German occupation apparatus could be kept at a minimum.35 Regarding the persecution of the Jews, this meant that German Sipo officers orchestrated the actions, but Estonian policemen would carry out the actual arrests. While the latter apprehended them due to suspicions of communist activity, the Germans abandoned the legal smokescreen and focused solely on their victims’ racial qualities.36 As executioners, the German police employed members of the Omakaitse or Home Guard, a militia with roots in the Forest Brotherhood, a partisan movement fighting the Soviet occupation. Headed by wealthy peasantry, the number of its members quickly grew to 40,000. Their goal was to create an Estonia cleansed of communists and other hostile elements. By 10 October 1942 the German occupiers had deprived the Omakaitse of any police responsibility. By assisting in the shooting of Jews, they had, however, served their purpose. From 31 January 1942 onwards, Estonia was declared judenrein. Of the 4,000 Jews living in Estonia, 1,000 had been killed. The remainder had either fled to the Soviet Union or tried to hide. Despite being declared free of Jews, after New Year 1942 executions in Estonia would still continue.37 Collaboration between the German police and Lithuanian collaborators started even before the occupation. Lithuanian émigrés, having fled to Germany after the Soviet occupation, were recruited by the RSHA before the invasion to function as guides, translators or contacts.38 On 4 July 1941, two days after the arrival of Einsatzkommando 9 in Vilnius, systematic killings started. Lithuanian gangs, made up of partisans who had fought the Soviet occupation, gathered Jewish men who were killed on the spot or in the woods close to the city.39 Concerned to keep some kind of control over the situation, the Feldkommandantur, the local military headquarters in Kaunas, had already ordered their disarmament and disbandment on 28 June 1941.40 The problem of lack of manpower would not be solved by increasing the number of German officers but by forming collaborationist police battalions, like the Battalions for the Defence of National Labour (Tauto Darbo Apsaugos Batalionas) or the Lithuanian Security Police (Lietuvos Saugumo Policija), which assisted the Sipo-SD in various actions against Jews and other enemies of the Nazi regime. In 1942, 8,000 men were active in twenty such battalions, of which at least ten actively assisted in persecuting the Jews. Their membership consisted of deserters from the Red Army, partisans against the Soviet occupation and former soldiers of the independent Lithuanian army.41 Although the German police could also count on the cooperation of every type of Lithuanian police force (public police, security police, auxiliary police), collaboration going back to the interwar period when information had been exchanged with their German counterparts on communal political enemies, more specifically Jews 292

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and communists, these collaborationist battalions were the main partners in crime.42 To murder the Jewish population in the Lithuanian countryside, a German mobile special commando was created during the summer of 1941 under the leadership of Joachim Hamann. This ‘Rollkommando Hamann’, part of Einsatzkommando 3, carried out motorised actions throughout Lithuania. As the commando had only eight to ten German members, the actual actions depended very much on Lithuanian volunteers motivated by fascist ideology or antisemitism.43 And finally there was the passive or active support of many Lithuanians, who not only cheered on the initial, chaotic pogroms, but also assisted later with round-ups and arrests. These ordinary men and women were not only motivated by antisemitism, but also by the prospect of looting and material gain.44 More than half of the Jews murdered in Lithuania died at the hands of Lithuanian executioners. According to historian Arnunas Bubnys, a majority of the latter were motivated by the traumatic experience of the Soviet occupation, during which they had grown to identify Jews with Bolshevism.45 With the German occupation, the time for revenge had come. By the end of the occupation, respectively 80%, 65% and 24% of Lithuania’s, Latvia’s and Estonia’s Jewish population was dead.46 And although the German occupier was without a doubt the main instigator, without the willing cooperation of local collaborators and institutions this would have been a lot harder to achieve. Where the Jews of the Baltic states had been practically decimated by 1942, approximately 139,000 Jews had survived the initial wave of killings in Belorussia. A second sweep would be necessary to murder the remaining Jews.47 Present-day Belarus was divided into several German occupation zones. While the eastern parts, closest to the frontline, were administered by the military, and the south was integrated into Reichskommisariat Ukraine, a new territory called Weißruthenien was created out of the areas around Minsk.48 On 1 September 1941 the authority here was transferred from the military to a civil administration, headed by Wilhelm Kube.49 In February 1942, Eduard Strauch was sent here as KdS of Minsk. This is where he earned his macabre reputation.50 Almost every German service faced a severe lack of manpower. In Belarus the use of native collaborators was also the first solution at hand. Einsatzgruppe B, headed by the chief of the German criminal police Arthur Nebe, had already counted around 30 Belarusian exiles in its ranks. They were only the spearhead of the 10,000 collaborators active in administration and police in the course of the occupation.51 During the first wave of killing the Jews, the most murderous activities of Einsatzgruppe B were concentrated in the areas which were kept under military control and were carried out in cooperation with Wehrmacht troops.52 A cooperation between the German civil administration, Sipo-SD and Orpo (divided between the Schutzpolizei in the cities and Gendarmerie in the countryside) did not suffice to execute the remaining Jews. For this purpose, help was needed from native collaborators, organised in auxiliary police units known as Schutzmannschaften (Schuma).53 During the spring of 1942 there was a fluid transition between the first, chaotic killing spree, where Jews were executed due to the perceived security risk they posed, to a second, systematic killing spree.54 A major action launched on 8 May 1942 in the town of Lida marked the symbolic transition. It lasted for five days and resulted in the death of 5,670 Jews.55 The cooperation of the Schuma members was essential. Often, as part of the local communities, they were the only ones who could identify Jews. They were used to guard ghetto borders before actions, had explicit orders to shoot anyone resisting or attempting to evade arrest and rounded up escapees. 293

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Although it was small squads of German policemen who carried out the actual executions, occasionally Schuma members participated as well.56 Surprisingly, these men were not solely motivated by feelings of antisemitism. Before the war, collaborators and Jews had often lived together in the same community. This personal familiarity, however, did not stop them from persecuting their former neighbours with viciousness and brutality. Some men wanted to improve their personal material situation, or that of their families. Others wanted to prove their loyalty to the German occupier, who they expected to have a presence in the years to come. Yet others wanted to take revenge for or somehow compensate for losses sustained during the Soviet occupation. Inevitably, unsavoury characters, ambitious individuals and even criminals were attracted as well. In any case, there seem to have been geographical differences in the pattern of collaboration. According to Leonid Rein, whereas in the western parts of Belarus, nationalism played an important role in the decision to turn against the Jews, the inhabitants of eastern Belarus were more motivated by opportunism and the prospect of material gains.57 The face of collaboration with the persecution of the Jews also changed in time. As Martin Dean has argued, it is necessary to make a distinction between early volunteers and later conscripts, often recruited under duress, under threat of arrest or compulsory labour. The loyalty of these later recruits was of course rather half-hearted, if only due to the changing German military fortunes. These Schuma collaborators were not only there to fill German ranks. Letting them carry out the actual executions provided strained German perpetrators with some kind of moral relief. Because they had committed atrocities together collaborators had also involved themselves deeply with the German occupier. For them there was no way back anymore.58 By the end of the occupation, recruitment of Schuma collaborators, even if forced or unwilling, had become a necessity. To battle the rising activity of the partisans and unable to withdraw men from active duty on the front, the only option the German occupier had left was augmenting the number of members of the Schuma battalions. From July 1942 to the end of the occupation their numbers grew from 30,000 to 200,000 men. Simultaneously, the German police adapted a new strategy of fighting resistance activity. This included massive, violent actions which left villages depopulated and destroyed, never to be rebuilt.59 The growing fight against the partisans had an important influence on the political struggle over security and anti-Jewish policy which had been taking place among the different representatives of the German regime. Power shifted towards the SS and the police. This is best exemplified by the fact that after the sudden death of Wilhelm Kube after a resistance attack, it was HSSPF Kurt von Gottberg who replaced him. From that moment on, one man combined both administrative and police authority, making it easier to strike quickly against resistance groups.60 There were conflicts between the German civil administration and the Sipo-SD over actions against the Jewish population. However, these clashes were mostly inspired by unclearly defined institutional relationships and discussion over the methods used.61 The conflict culminated in Kube denouncing Strauch in an official complaint for using and allowing barbarous methods during executions, including, among other actions, pulling out gold teeth and bridges of Jews awaiting their death or burying individuals who were still alive. Strauch, in turn, denounced Kube for actively hindering Sipo-SD activity and questioned his commitment to the Final Solution. Neither Strauch nor Kube were recalled. The conflict ended abruptly after Kube’s sudden death.62 Despite these institutional conflicts, it was the Sipo-SD that both initiated and executed the mass murder in Belarus.63 294

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In total, 500,000 Jews would be killed in all of Belarus. The Sipo-SD in Weißruthenien, for roughly one year under the command of Eduard Strauch, was responsible for the death of 150,000 Jews.64

Western Europe In July 1943 Eduard Strauch was transferred from Minsk to the personal staff of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski. The latter was not only HSSPF for central Russia but also coordinated the activity of German units fighting the partisans all over occupied Europe. He was described by Hitler as ‘a man who could wade through a river of blood’.65 Personally recommended for this position by SS chief Heinrich Himmler, Strauch was praised by his superiors in Belarus as cold-hearted and ideologically persistent, but was also held responsible for the excesses perpetrated by the Sipo-SD in Minsk.66 Interpreting his transfer as a demotion, Strauch actively pushed for a new command. In June 1944 he was sent to occupied Belgium. A month later he was nominated as KdS of Wallonia, the southern, French-speaking area of Belgium. His task was to root out the fierce resistance movement which had developed here. Strauch’s reputation had preceded him. Constantin Canaris, Head of the Sipo-SD in Belgium and northern France, intervened in vain with his superior Ernst Kaltenbrunner to stop his appointment.67 In occupied Western Europe Strauch played no role of importance in the implementation of the Holocaust. By the time of his arrival, the majority of Jews had already been deported. The background of the German occupation in France, Belgium and the Netherlands was very different from the one to which Strauch was socialised in Eastern Europe. Although recent historiography has put into question the distinction between the barbarous occupation regime in the east and a more civilised one in the west, a clear distinction can still be discerned.68 Ranking higher on the Nazi racial pyramid, the inhabitants of western European countries were expected to administer the occupation themselves, albeit with minimal German supervision. The territories conquered in the east were considered by the occupier to be a blank slate in which the Nazi racial ideal could be brutally moulded.69 Jews were murdered there in a violent and direct manner with the witness or participation of the local population. The destruction of the Jews of western Europe was more hidden, organised through arrests and deportations and carried out in cooperation with native institutions and collaborators. Concerning anti-Jewish measures, the RSHA in Berlin treated the occupied countries in western Europe as a whole. Directives were issued in a similar timeframe and the decision to start deportations was taken at the same time, namely on 11 June 1942, during a meeting headed by Adolf Eichmann at the RSHA in Berlin and attended by his representatives in the three western countries in question.70 A question mark still hangs over the explanation for the huge differences in deportation rates and death toll of the Holocaust in Western Europe: 25% of the Jewish population in France was deported, compared to 40% in Belgium and a staggering 75% in the Netherlands.71 Several reasons have been put forward to explain this discrepancy, among others the local antisemitic tradition, background of the Jewish communities, the level of collaboration by local Jewish councils and the ability and willingness to provide help to the persecuted by the public at large. The most recent extensive comparative study by Dutch scholars Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller cites as the decisive factor the strength 295

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of the main German perpetrators and their ability to entice local police services and individual collaborators to assist with the Final Solution.72 The position of the German police appears to have been the weakest in occupied Belgium. Belgium and the two northern French departments Nord and Pas-de-Calais were for almost the entire duration of the occupation governed by the military and headed by Alexander von Falkenhausen. His politically cunning chief of administration (Militärverwaltungschef) Eggert Reeder managed to keep Himmler at bay. The Sipo-SD was allowed to operate in Belgium but was headed only by a ‘Beauftragter des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst’ or representative (instead of a Befehlshaber or commander) and made subordinate to military control. No HSSPF was appointed, although Himmler was present through his representative for Volkstumfragen (racial matters) Richard Jungclaus.73 Two men would head the Sipo-SD in Belgium for longer period: Constantin Canaris and Ernst Ehlers, the latter being Beauftragter during the period of the deportations. The Sipo-SD was not the sole German police force present and had to compete for authority with the military police forces, the Geheime Feldpolizei or Secret Field Police (GFP) and the Feldgendarmerie or Field Police (FG). Griffioen and Zeller claim that of all the western countries the German police in Belgium was numerically the weakest. While the military police had 1,500 men at their disposal, the Sipo-SD only counted 300 men.74 This was obviously too few to apprehend and deport the 70,000 Jews residing in Belgium on the eve of the occupation. The German police had to find partners in crime. This was especially urgent in Antwerp and Brussels, where no less than 90% of the Jews in Belgium lived.75 For this, the Germans looked first to the Belgian police forces. These still functioned in the occupied territory and were responsible for the enforcement of Belgian laws. The Hague treaty of 1907 which defined the rights and duties of occupied and occupier provided some legal framework for the cooperation between German police and their Belgian counterparts. At the beginning of the occupation, the treaty was interpreted in such a way that Belgian policemen could carry out German demands and in doing so could even circumvent Belgian legality as long as a Belgian interest was served. This Belgian willingness to cooperate was inspired by the experience of the German occupation during the First World War. Refusals to carry out German demands had then led to severe material destruction.76 At this stage responsibility for addressing German requests regarding Jewish matters shifted towards the local level. The stance local authorities took could make a big difference, as a comparison between Antwerp and Brussels proves. In Antwerp, the local administration and urban police cooperated with the distribution of the Yellow Star and assisted with round-ups during the summer of 1942. On three occasions, 15 August, 28–29 August 1942 and 11–12 September 1942, the Antwerp police helped with the apprehension of Jews. While during the first and last round-ups this support was indirect, during the second action it was Belgian policemen that apprehended 1,243 Jews autonomously and handed them over to the occupier for deportation. Compliance with the German demands was eased by the fact that these were all foreign Jews; most of the Jewish community was made up of recent immigrants and only 6% actually held Belgian citizenship.77 The case of Brussels proves that resistance by the local authorities did make a difference. Demands for help with the distribution of the Yellow Star or for assistance by the city police force were declined by the mayor of Brussels. While the Brussels authorities wanted to take a patriotic stance, their counterparts in Antwerp still wanted to appease the occupier and were probably somewhat 296

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influenced by New Order ideas. Another important aspect is the timing of the respective requests. Previous bad experiences with German requests regarding cooperation in the arrests of communists led to less compliance in Brussels.78 After the summer of 1942, the problem of Belgian–German cooperation in Jewish affairs became less urgent. On 30 September 1942 Eggert Reeder mandated that Belgian police no longer had to cooperate with the round-up of Jews.79 This directive coincided with a growing resistance on the part of the Belgian administration against German wishes, inspired by the introduction of compulsory labour (6 October 1942) and the changing German situation in the war. The situation of the Jews played only an insignificant part in this transition. Most had by now disappeared from the streets, having either been deported or gone into hiding. These two elements (the situation of Jewish victims and the stance of the Belgian administration) led to a change in the tactics of the German police. In Antwerp the Sipo-SD would initially use a group of collaborators, members of the Flemish SS, to scout the city looking for Jews in hiding. Controlling this group of men proved to be difficult and the occupier was not fond of their looting of Jewish property. The Germans wanted to keep assets stolen from apprehended Jews for themselves. This is why this group was brought down to a smaller number of more trustworthy men. Whereas the first group consisted of men with a rough past, who used the hunt for Jews to boost their ego and self-worth, the men in the second group did have a background in antisemitic organisations.80 This contrasts with the profile of other collaborators with the Gestapo in Antwerp, who were motivated by a wide range of incentives, ranging from ideology to opportunism.81 These so-called Jew hunters would apprehend and hand over the majority of their victims in small groups. Historian Insa Meinen has shown that this was a specific characteristic of the Holocaust in Belgium, where even during the summer of 1942 38% of the Jews brought into the transit camp in Malines were not arrested during big round-ups but alone or in small groups.82 For these small-scale arrests, the Sipo-SD collaborated with the FG; next to the declaration of anti-Jewish regulations this was another important contribution of the German military to the Holocaust in Belgium.83 Decisive for the role played by Belgian institutions was, however, the passive stance taken during the first two years of the occupation. The German promise to spare Jews with Belgian nationality, only a minority as already stated above, proved to be a lie.84 Regarding the German occupation regime, the situation in France was similar to that in Belgium. The armistice with Nazi Germany left France divided into four separate parts. As already mentioned, two French departments in the north were governed from Brussels. Alsace and Lorraine were ruled by a German civil administration and the Italians occupied some territories in the south-east. The most important division, however, was the one between the occupied zone in the north and the unoccupied zone in the south, ruled from Vichy, the city to which the French collaborationist regime owed its name. The highest German official was the Military Commander (Militärbefehlshaber) in Paris, initially Otto von Stülpnagel until his replacement by his cousin Karl-Heinrich in March 1942.85 Compared to the situation in Belgium, the Sipo-SD in France had more independence from the military government. Established on 4 October 1940 and headed by Helmut Knochen, the SS police in France was subordinated at the same time to the RSHA and the military, which it had to keep informed of its activities.86 The number of men at the disposal of the German police, 2,400 belonging to the Sipo-SD and 3,000 to the Orpo, was however not enough to keep order, let alone tackle the ‘Jewish problem’. Supplementing their troops by 297

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collaboration with French institutions was imperative. The Vichy regime was the first place where the Germans looked for this. The regime had not waited on a German initiative to start developing an anti-Jewish policy. In the mind of the collaborationist regime, to allow for a national regeneration, France had to be purified of Jews, who were blamed for, among other things, the traumatic military defeat of 1940.87 Already in March 1941 a General Commission on Jewish Questions (Commissariat Général aux Questions Juives or CGQJ) was founded. Headed by the French antisemite Xavier Vallat, its task was to coordinate the Vichy Jewish policy with German desires and simultaneously keep control over it in French hands. The commission also had an executive arm at its disposal, the Police for Jewish Affairs (Police aux Questions Juives or PQJ). Adolf Eichmann’s representative in Paris, Theo Dannecker, wanted to employ it during the upcoming deportations,88 but the PQJ would not be used for this. In June 1942, after the occupation of the Vichy zone by German troops, Carl Albrecht Oberg was nominated as HSSPF in Paris. Oberg had previously been posted in the General Government in Poland, but Heydrich explicitly gave him orders to implement a different policy in France than had been carried out in Eastern Europe. Swift collaboration with the French police was to be a cornerstone of this strategy.89 Oberg quickly realised his goal. In July 1942 an agreement was reached between the HSSPF and René Bousquet, Head of the French police. The accords meant the Germans could call on the 100,000 French policemen to arrest Jews. At the same time, the PQJ was abolished. The Germans had solved their problem of lack of manpower. Bousquet had conceded in an attempt to keep as much control as possible out of German hands. French policemen would not have to arrest Jews with French nationality. For the time being, Jews without French nationality would be the ones to pay the price.90 One of the most notorious round-ups carried out by the French police was codenamed Vent Printanier or Spring Wind but is more commonly known as the Vel d’Hiv round-up. On 16 and 17 July 1942 the French police arrested 13,152 stateless Jews in Paris, among them 5,919 women and 4,115 children, and sent them to a large indoor sport arena, the Vélodrome d’Hiver. Kept in wretched conditions, these men, women and children were eventually sent to the Drancy transition camp before being sent to Auschwitz in sealed freight cars. Despite the large number of arrests, Vent Printanier had not achieved the expected results. The arrests of stateless Jews were extended to the southern zone, with the French government’s agreement. By the end of 1942 approximately 42,500 Jews had been deported from France to Auschwitz.91 During this stage, the French wish to target only Jews without French citizenship was respected. Attempts by Dannecker to extend arrests to other categories of Jews were blocked. At this stage, maintaining a good relationship with the French police was paramount for the occupier. It allowed the Sipo-SD to limit itself to a purely coordinating role and it allowed Nazi Germany to govern France with a minimum of police and military resources. In turn, it permitted Vichy to keep administrative sovereignty and some sort of legitimacy.92 From 1943 onwards French policemen showed less and less willingness to cooperate with anti-Jewish actions. It was the introduction of forced labour for French men between the ages of 20 and 22 in February 1943 which muddied the German relationship with the French police. The German occupier threw political considerations overboard as resistance among French policemen grew. The circle of potential victims kept expanding: Jews of foreign nationality, French Jews, hospital patients, citizens of 298

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retirement homes and finally children. This led to more and more reluctance among the French police to cooperate. While the initial arrests had focused on groups targeted by the French police before the war – foreigners and communists – by 1943 this delusion could no longer be upheld. A complete halt of cooperation only took place in the spring of 1944. By this time, no Jew in France was safe any longer.93 The German occupier counterbalanced the loss of the services of the French police by giving more and more power to the Milice, an extreme-right militia. Its members, 25,000 to 30,000 in total, included virulent anti-communists, fanatical Catholics and young men trying to escape forced labour. Towards the end of the occupation, the Milice also attracted increasingly marginal and even criminal elements of society. During the eight months of 1944 before the liberation, 14,833 Jews were deported. A majority of them had been arrested by the Germans with the help of the Milice. In early 1944, the takeover of power by the Milice was institutionalised. Its leader Joseph Darnand replaced Bousquet as Head of the French police. Vichy France had officially become a police state.94 The last convoy left Drancy on 17 August 1944, eight days before the liberation of Paris. The majority of France’s deported Jews had been arrested by French policemen.95 Governed by a civil administration headed by Austrian Nazi Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the German occupation regime in the Netherlands differed from that in Belgium or France. Compared to the latter two, the Sipo-SD had the most freedom of action here. The civil administration consisted of four Generalkommissare or general commissioners working under Seyss-Inquart. One of them, Hans Albin Rauter, was not only general commissioner for security matters but combined this post with the function of HSSPF. As such, he controlled both the German and the Dutch police.96 The leadership of the Sipo-SD in the Netherlands was in the hands of Dr Wilhelm Harster, a 37-year-old lawyer and policeman, who had quickly transformed the mobile police units into stationary Sipo-SD offices, with headquarters in The Hague. The outposts in the major cities enjoyed a great deal of independence, something which was only increased under Harster’s successors, Erich Nauman in 1943 and Karl Schöngarth, former BdS in the General Government, in 1944.97 The limited number of German policemen, 700 belonging to the Sipo and 4,000 belonging to the Orpo, were supplemented by the occupier in the form of Dutch policemen. These would also take part in the persecution of the Dutch Jewish population.98 The nature of the Jewish community in the Netherlands differed greatly from that of the Jews in France and Belgium. While in the latter two countries a considerable part of the community consisted of foreign-born Jews, the majority of the Jews in the Netherlands were Dutch citizens. Most lived in the cities: no less than 50% of Dutch Jews lived in Amsterdam. Antisemitism existed among Dutch protestants and Catholics but did not lead to public intolerance.99 On the contrary, the anti-Jewish measures initiated by the general commissioners soon after their inauguration even led to public protest. The attempt to install a Jewish ghetto in Amsterdam and the violent arrest of hundreds of Jewish men in the streets of Amsterdam on 22 February 1941 even led to a small-scale rebellion on 25 February, known as the February strike. German repression soon put an end to it. The strike presented a fault line in the relationship between occupied and occupier. As Saul Friedländer has aptly put it: ‘The Dutch had learned that the Germans would not hesitate to pursue their antiJewish policy with utter ruthlessness, the Germans realized that converting the Dutch to National Socialism would not be an easy task.’100 The February strike also affected 299

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the power struggle over Jewish policy inside the German administration. From this moment Rauter took firm control over it. The Amsterdam city council was replaced by pro-German Dutchmen and the chief of police was replaced by Sybren Tulp. He was a member of the collaborating NSB movement and a former member of the Dutch army in the Dutch East Indies. This meant he was socialised in an environment where racial discrimination was already common practice.101 It was Tulp who Rauter contacted looking for reinforcements. Already in October 1941, Rauter had suggested setting up a Bureau voor Joodse Zaken or Department of Jewish Affairs inside the Amsterdam police, which would be responsible for tracking down offenders against anti-Jewish decrees. It started work on 1 June 1942, manned by roughly ten detectives, most of whom were National Socialists.102 Probably in April 1942 the German authorities in the Netherlands were informed that before the end of the year 15,000 Jews were to be arrested and deported. This more or less corresponded with the number of foreign Jews. The projected figure was rapidly increased to 40,000, which meant Jews with Dutch citizenship would have to be deported as well. In contrast to France, where the French administration temporarily defended Jews with French citizenship, the Dutch administration did not seriously protest.103 In a first phase, the German occupier tried to limit the resources devoted to the deportations. Jews were called up for obligatory labour and had to come to the train station of their own accord. The called-up Jews had been selected by the local Jewish council and it was Dutch policemen who had delivered the notifications. The first train left Amsterdam for the transit camp of Westerbork on 15 July 1942.104 This strategy was only successful for a short period of time. Fewer and fewer Jews responded to the notifications. The German police realised that the only way to reach the planned numbers was through large-scale police operations. Although in most parts of the country the Jewish communities were small enough for the German police to act autonomously, this was not the case in The Hague and Amsterdam.105 On 2 September 1942 the chief of police of Amsterdam, Tulp, received Rauter’s order to provide the necessary men to apprehend Jews. Tulp was eager to appease the Germans and complied. He personally informed his men of the task at hand, was present during the actions to show his burden of responsibility and kept Rauter informed on the progress of the operation. To carry out the actions, Tulp selected the most malleable individuals among the men he commanded. Generally they were recent recruits, working in the districts in which they were to apprehend Jews, relatively young and with no previous pro-German tendencies.106 Although these men were somewhat reluctant to carry out the orders, no serious problems arose until Tulp suddenly fell ill on 3 October 1942. His replacement could not motivate his men sufficiently and the planned round-up had to be cancelled. Tulp died on 22 October 1942. Clearly his personal charisma and authority had played an important role in motivating the Dutch policemen. Other explanations are the socialisation of these men in a police force in which disobedience or questioning orders was not part of the corporate identity and pressure from the group for refusers to comply.107 For the German occupiers, employing Dutch policemen meant an important enhancement of their efficiency. In one month no fewer than 11,000 Jews were arrested. Using native policemen also silenced public response. Public opinion would have been more negative if the round-ups had been carried out exclusively by German forces. In any case, the opposition of the Dutch population, as exemplified by the February strike, had by this time mutated into passivity. This also reflected on the Jewish population. Disobeying actions carried out by Dutch policemen went 300

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against their socialisation in the political climate of the Netherlands. Guus Meershoek worded this perfectly: ‘Victims were rounded up from their homes by representatives of an institution that they had been accustomed to trust. . . . [The Amsterdam policemen] often conveyed to their victims their reluctance. The victims could not but feel that resistance would be pointless. From the perpetrators’ point of view, these “all too human” policemen were the best executors.’108 The growing reluctance of Dutch policemen to cooperate with anti-Jewish measures meant the occupier looked for new collaborators. The task was taken over by special units under German command. Initially, these units were composed of members of the Politiebataljon Amsterdam or Amsterdam Police Battalion (PBA). Its men had received special police training in National Socialist spirit during the first months of the occupation. Due to mounting corruption, the PBA was replaced in February 1943 by the Vrijwillige Hulppolitie or Voluntary Auxiliary Police (VHP). As can be deduced from its name, it consisted of members of the NSB or Dutch SS who had volunteered for police training. Both the PBA and VHP members were motivated by antisemitism.109 It was also during this period that the German police paid Dutch collaborators to find and apprehend Jews in hiding. One example is the so-called Colonne Henneicke. Named after its leader, the group consisted of older men, usually strongly antisemitic, failed in their lives and motivated by opportunistic National Socialism and the financial reward for every Jew delivered.110 By 29 September 1943, Amsterdam was considered free of Jews.111 The assistance offered to the German occupier, first by the Amsterdam police force and subsequently by groups of collaborators, no doubt contributed a lot to this. But as British historian Bob Moore has correctly pointed out, the decisive moment which sealed the fate of the Jews in the Netherlands was the refusal of the Dutch administration to take an active stance against German demands. It meant the understaffed German police could outsource its task to their Dutch counterparts.112

Conclusion The period spent by Strauch in Western Europe was too short and came too late to have any real influence on the persecution of the Jews there. His socialisation in the different context in the east did however influence the German struggle against the resistance in Belgium. German repression culminated in the burning of houses and execution of hostages. Fuelled by alcohol abuse, Strauch’s fury also turned inwards, against his own men whom he accused of treason. Some collaborators were put to death after being tried in ad hoc trials in which Strauch acted as both judge and jury.113 Retreating from Belgian soil, the former KdS of Wallonia was relieved of his command and sent back to the Eastern Front for military duty.114 Rumours ran he had died or had gone into hiding in Russia. The latter was denied by one of his former subordinates, who stated that Strauch would be smarter than to hide in a country where he was sought for the murder of thousands of Jews; a statement that proves how well ordinary policemen were informed about the perpetuated atrocities, even when they were stationed in the west.115 In reality Strauch had been captured by British troops, kept in a POW camp until Christmas 1946 and released for medical reasons, more specifically his epilepsy. This did not prevent his arrest by Belgian security officials on 3 January 1947. Belgium wanted to prosecute him for the acts of violence he had ordered during the last months of the occupation there. An American request for 301

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extradition temporarily prevented this. On 29 July 1947 he was handed over to stand trial in Nuremberg.116 In the course of the eight-month-long Einsatzgruppen trial Strauch not once showed remorse for his actions or lost belief in the necessity of the Nazi racial policy. He was sentenced to death by hanging, but the sentence was never carried out. On 24 June 1948 he was transferred back to Belgium. Strauch never met his fate despite being convicted there to the death penalty in several separate cases.117 On 15 September 1955 he died in his prison cell in Brussels. The Holocaust was imagined and carried out by a group of men who were professionally in charge of the security ministry of the Third Reich. Strauch’s level of education, his professional background and his ideological racial determination was very similar to the men belonging to this cohort. With its territorial expansion Nazi Germany found itself with a growing number of Jews under its authority. This perceived problem only increased after the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. For the occupier, the Jews constituted the ideological and primordial racial enemy. Departing from the dictum that wherever was a Jew, there also was a partisan, the former were a perceived security threat which had to be dealt with. The Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing units controlled by the SS, were to deal with this hazard. Regarding institutional subordination and staff, these units had their roots both in the SS and in the conventional German police forces. The latter had since the Nazi takeover of power merged more and more with the SS. The ethos and racial ideology of Himmler’s elite guard was subsequently integrated into the corporate identity of the police. The ground had been laid there by the biological interpretation of criminality that had developed in Germany since the end of the nineteenth century. By enlarging the scope of targeted victims, from Jewish men to eventually entire families and villages, the initial executions radicalised into genocide. The killing practices were first structured and institutionalised and then transplanted to the western European occupied territories. There it was again the German police that administered and carried out the round-ups and deportations of Jews. Usually the implementation of the Final Solution is represented as very divergent in character between the east and west of the continent. Given the very different contexts and actual implementations this is not surprising. Eduard Strauch is, however, an illustration of how a very different strategy was implemented by the same men. Carl Oberg in France or Karl Schöngarth in the Netherlands are other such examples. In my opinion, the Holocaust should therefore be seen more as a single, Europeanwide phenomenon. The same analytical framework has to explain the context and the reason why the same men were able to carry out actions with a different character. Grassroots research on the background of German local perpetrators is necessary for this. Secondly, what certainly stands out is how the German occupier was nowhere sufficiently staffed to carry out the genocide against the Jews unaided. Due to the imperial overstretch of Nazi Germany, the Sipo-SD, characterised in the introduction as the perpetrator institution par excellence, was struggling with this problem everywhere. Not even cooperation with the Orpo, the Wehrmacht or its military police forces was an adequate solution. Willing collaborators had to be found everywhere. The brutal character of the executions in Eastern Europe made this necessary not only for reasons of manpower but also to provide German perpetrators with some temporary moral relief during the killing process. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler had to allow the enrolment of native helpers. The number of enlisted ethnic Germans did not suffice. What the Nazis perceived as Slavic Untermenschen became part of the pool 302

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of recruitment. It meant the Nazi racial mission was partly carried out by people who were considered by their German commanders as racially inferior. This was much less problematic in occupied Western Europe. Here German rule was to depend on selfrule by the national administrations. This initially allowed the occupier to use the local police battalions of France, the Netherlands and to a lesser extent Belgium in carrying out measures against the Jews. After the relationship between occupier and occupied changed, for example due to shifting German military fortunes or the implementation of forced labour, using native police forces became less and less of a possibility. Their place was taken by collaborating militias or individual collaborators. In every territory under consideration, Nazi Germany was however able to identify and employ these necessary collaborators. The Germans were the main perpetrators who planned and ordered the arrests, deportations and executions. However, on a grassroots level, every occupied population was somehow involved. In this way the Holocaust was a European project. Explaining it through a typical German ‘eliminationist antisemitism’, as Daniel Goldhagen famously did, is too restrictive.118 Local collaborators were motivated by a wide range of motivations. Surprisingly perhaps, antisemitism was not always the main incentive. Collaborators were often more inspired by the prospect of material gain or improving their personal circumstances than by ideological considerations. Also striking is the influence past events had on the decision to cooperate. The Belgian experience of the German occupation during the First World War, the lack of such an experience in the Netherlands and the traumatic experience of the Soviet occupation in the Baltic states may have been factors here. Finally, a more universal observation is the close connection both the main perpetrators and their collaborators had with the police. In the main German perpetrators had often risen through the ranks of some police force. In Western Europe initial collaboration came from the native police. This connection calls into question the ease with which individual policemen can somehow incorporate racial ideology into their daily practice and how apparently rapidly they transformed from ‘internal representatives of the monopoly of violence of the state’ into agents of genocide.119

Notes 1 I would like to thank the Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for providing me as a junior fellow with the time and resources to write this text. I thank Katharina Friedla, Elisabeth Gallas and Raul Cârstocea for their reading and suggestions. 2 Hilary Earl, The Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, 1945–1958 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 240. 3 Michael Wildt, Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003). 4 George C. Browder, Foundations of the Nazi police state. The formation of Sipo and SD (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1990). 5 Michael Wildt, Generation of the unbound. The leadership corps of the Reich Security Main Office (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2002), pp. 18–20. 6 ‘PV de l’audience publique’, November 30, 1950, Strauch et autres (STRA), 10, Archives military court (AMC); ‘Fragebogen’, n.d., Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt (RS), G68, Bundesarchiv Berlin (BArchB). 7 ‘Fragebogen’, n.d., RS, G68, BArchB; Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, pp. 132–3; ‘Lebenslauf’, November 25, 1934, SS-Personalakten (SSO), 075B, BArchB; ‘Durschl. für SS-Pers.H’Amt’, September 6, 1943, SSO, 075B, BArchB. 8 Michael Wildt, Generation of the unbound; Ulrich Herbert, Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989 (Bonn: Dietz, 1996).

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9 Ulrich Herbert, ‘Ideological legitimization and political practice of the leadership of the National Socialist secret police’, in Hans Mommsen (ed.), The Third Reich between vision and reality (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 95–108. 10 George C. Browder, ‘Die frühe Entwicklung des SD. Das Entstehen multipler institutioneller Identitäten’, in Michael Wildt (ed.), Nachrichtendienst, politische Elite und Mordeinheit. Der Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers SS (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), pp. 38–6; George C. Browder, ‘The SD. The significance of organization and image’, in George L. Mosse (ed.), Police forces in history (London: Sage, 1975), pp. 205–29. 11 Jens Banach, Heydrichs Elite: das Führerkorps der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1936–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), pp. 327–34. 12 Patrick Wagner, Volksgemeinschaft ohne Verbrecher. Konzeptionen und Praxis der Kriminalpolizei in der Zeit der Weimarer Republik und des Nationalsozialismus (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1996), p. 404. 13 Michael Wildt, ‘The spirit of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)’, Totalitarian movements and political religions, Vol. 6, No. 3, 2005, p. 343. 14 Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ‘Zusammenarbeit und Mittäterschaft in Polen 1939–1945. Skizze der polnischen Historiographie’, in Christoph Dieckmann, Babette Quinkert and Tatjana Tönsmeyer (eds), Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der ‘Kollaboration’ im östlichen Europa 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), p. 115. 15 Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010), p. 116. 16 Saul Friedländer, The years of extermination. Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945 (London: Orion, 2007), p. 12. 17 Bogdan Musial, ‘Die Verfolgung und Vernichtung der Juden im Generalgouvernement. Die Zivilverwaltung und die Shoah’, in Gerhard Paul (ed.), Die Täter der Shoah. Fanatische Nationalsozialisten oder ganz normale Deutsche? (Dachau: Wallstein Verlag, 2002), p. 188. 18 Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 30. 19 Klaus-Michael Mallmann, ‘Menschenjagd und Massenmord. Das neue Instrument der Einsatzgruppen und -kommandos, 1938–1945’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg. ‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), pp. 298–9. 20 Martyn Housden, ‘Security policing: A “successful” investigation from the Government General’, German History, Vol. 14, No. 2, 1996, p. 210. 21 Peter Black, ‘Rehearsal for “Reinhard”?: Odilo Globocnik and the Lublin Selbstschutz’, Central European History, Vol. 25, No. 2, 1992, pp. 204–26; Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 37. 22 Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 31. 23 Friedrich, ‘Zusammenarbeit und Mittäterschaft’; Klaus-Peter Friedrich, ‘Collaboration in a “land without a Quisling”: patterns of cooperation with the Nazi German occupation regime in Poland during World War II’, Slavic Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, 2005, p. 715. 24 Friedrich, ‘Zusammenarbeit und Mittäterschaft’, pp. 130–35. 25 Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 632; Raul Hilberg, ‘Auschwitz’, in Walter Laqueur (ed.), The Holocaust encyclopedia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 44. 26 Mallmann, ‘Menschenjagd und Massenmord’, p. 301. 27 Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, p. 133. 28 Guillaume de Syon, ‘The Einsatzgruppen and the issue of “ordinary men”’, in Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge history of the Holocaust (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 150; Andrej Angrick, ‘Zur Rolle der Militärverwaltung bei der Ermordung der sowjetischen Juden’, in Babette Quinkert (ed.), ‘Wir sind die Herren dieses Landes’. Ursachen, Verlauf und Folgen des deutschen Überfalls auf die Sowjetunion (Hamburg: VSA-Verlag, 2002), p. 112; Peter Longerich, Holocaust. The Nazi persecution and murder of the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 206–7. 29 Frank Golczewski, ‘Die Kollaboration in der Ukraine’, in Christoph Dieckmann, Babette Quinkert and Tatjana Tönsmeyer (eds), Kooperation und Verbrechen: Formen der ‘Kollaboration’ im östlichen Europa 1939–1945 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), p. 169. 30 Ruth Bettina Birn, ‘Collaboration with Nazi Germany in eastern Europe: the case of the Estonian Security Police’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 10, No. 2, 2001, p. 181.

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31 David Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, in Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge history of the Holocaust (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 210. 32 Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, pp. 210–12; Longerich, Holocaust, p. 196. 33 Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, pp. 212–14. 34 Katrin Reichelt, ‘Kollaboration und Holocaust in Lettland’, in Wolf Kaiser (ed.), Täter im Vernichtungskrieg. Der Überfall auf die Sowjetunion und der Völkermord an den Juden (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002), pp. 112–17; Longerich, Holocaust, p. 196. 35 Birn, ‘Collaboration with Nazi Germany’, p. 85; Ruth Bettina Birn, ‘Kollaboration und Mittäterschaft. Die Inkorporierung von einheimischem Personal in die Sicherheitspolizei in den besetzten Ostgebieten’, in Michael Wildt (ed.), Nachrichtendienst, politische Elite und Mordeinheit. Der Sicherheitsdienst der Reichsführers SS (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2003), p. 314; Ruth Bettina Birn, Die Sicherheitspolizei in Estland 1941–1944: eine Studie zur Kollaboration im Osten (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), p. 197. 36 Birn, Sicherheitspolizei in Estland, pp. 160–62. 37 Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, p. 214; Birn, ‘Collaboration with Nazi Germany’, pp. 183–4; Birn, Sicherheitspolizei in Estland, pp. 15, 160. 38 Konrad Kwiet, ‘Rehearsing for murder: the beginning of the Final Solution in Lithuania in June 1941’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1998, pp. 6–7; Michael MacQueen, ‘Einheimische Gehilfin der Gestapo. Die litauische Sicherheitspolizei in Vilnius 1941–1944’, in Vincas Bartusevicius, Joachim Tauber and Wolfram Wette (eds), Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2003), p. 103. 39 Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 221. 40 Kwiet, ‘Rehearsing for murder’, p. 14. 41 Kwiet, ‘Rehearsing for murder’, p. 14; Christoph Dieckmann, ‘Die Zivilverwaltung in Litauen’, in Wolf Kaiser (ed.), Täter im Vernichtungskrieg. Der Überfall auf die Sowjetunion und der Völkermord an den Juden (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002), p. 104; Arunas Bubnys, ‘The Holocaust in Lithuania: An outline of the major stages and their results’, in Alvydas Nikžentaitis, Stefan Schreiner and Darius Staliūnas (eds), The vanished world of Lithuanian Jews (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), pp. 210–11; Arunas Bubnys, ‘Die litauischen Hilfspolizeibataillone und der Holocaust’, in Vincas Bartusevicius, Joachim Tauber and Wolfram Wette (eds), Holocaust in Litauen: Krieg, Judenmorde und Kollaboration im Jahre 1941 (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2003), pp. 117, 119. 42 Knut Stang, ‘Das Rollkommando Hamann und die Vernichtung der litauischen Juden’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg. ‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), p. 470; Kwiet, ‘Rehearsing for murder’, pp. 6–7; Bubnys, ‘The Holocaust in Lithuania’, p. 211. 43 Stang, ‘Das Rollkommando Hamann’, p. 73; Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’‚ pp. 213–14. 44 Friedländer, Years of extermination, pp. 222–5. 45 Bubnys, ‘The Holocaust in Lithuania’. 46 Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, p. 62. 47 Eric Haberer, ‘The German police and genocide in Belorussia, 1941–1944. Part I: police deployment and Nazi genocidal directives’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2001, p. 23. 48 Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde. Die Deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungs- Politik in Weißrußland, 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Verlag, 2000), p. 13. 49 Martin Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust. Crimes of the local police in Belorussia and Ukraine, 1941–44 (New York: St Martin’s Press/United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2003), p. 41. 50 Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, p. 133. 51 Bernhard Chiari, ‘Deutsche Herrschaft in Weißrussland. Überlegungen zum lokalen und historischen Umfeld,’ in Wolf Kaiser (ed.), Täter im Vernichtungskrieg. Der Überfall auf die Sowjetunion und der Völkermord an den Juden (Berlin: Propyläen, 2002), p. 145. 52 Hannes Heer, ‘Killing fields: the Wehrmacht and the Holocaust in Belorussia, 1941–1942’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 11, No. 1, 1997, pp. 87, 92; Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, p. 79. 53 Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, pp. 1151–2; Eric Haberer, ‘The German police and genocide in Belorussia, 1941–1944. Part II: the “second sweep”: Gendarmerie killings of Jews and Gypsies on January 29, 1942’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 3, No. 2, 2001, pp. 211–13.

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54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

74 75 76 77

Haberer, ‘Part I’, p. 14. Haberer, ‘Part II’, p. 207. Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, pp. 78–9. Leonid Rein, ‘Local collaboration in the execution of the “Final Solution” in Nazi-occupied Belorussia’, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3, 2006, p. 399. Leonid Rein, The kings and the pawns: collaboration in Byelorussia during World War II (New York/ Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2011), p. 268; Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, pp. 66–7, 73. Dean, Collaboration in the Holocaust, pp. 119–22; Chiari, ‘Deutsche Herrschaft’, p. 151. Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde, p. 1140. Ibid, pp. 1151–2. Friedländer, Years of extermination, pp. 362–3; Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, p. 169. Eric Haberer, ‘The German police and genocide in Belorussia, 1941–1944. Part III: methods of genocide and the motives of German police compliance’, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol. 3, No. 23, 2001, pp. 397–8. Rein, ‘Local collaboration’, p. 382; Wolfgang Curilla, Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei und der Holocaust im Baltikum und in Weissrussland, 1941–1944 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2006), p. 502. Longerich, Holocaust, p. 384; Snyder, Bloodlands, p. 206; Gaunt, ‘Reichskommissariat Ostland’, p. 214. ‘Beurteilung’, April 1, 1943, SSO, 075B, BArchB; ‘Schreiben Generalkommissar Minsk’, October 21, 1943, SSO, 075B, BArchB. ‘Déposition de témoin’, January 6, 1947, STRA, 1, STRA, 3, AMC; ‘Déposition de témoin’, February 27, 1948, STRA, 1, 5B, AMC. Gaël Eismann and Stefan Martens (eds), Occupation et répression militaire allemandes 1939– 1945. La politique de ‘maintien de l’ordre’ en Europe occupée (Paris: Éditions Autrement, 2007). Mark Mazower, Hitler’s Empire. Nazi rule in occupied Europe (London: Allen Lane, 2008). Wolfgang Seibel, ‘The Holocaust in western Europe’, in Jonathan C. Friedman (ed.), The Routledge history of the Holocaust (Oxford: Routledge, 2011), p. 222; Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 374. Seibel, ‘Holocaust in western Europe’, p. 224. Pim Griffioen and Ron Zeller, Jodenvervolging in Nederland, Frankrijk en Belgiė, 1940–1945. Overeenkomsten, verschillen, oorzaken (Amsterdam: Boom, 2011). Albert De Jonghe, Hitler en het politieke lot van België (1940–1944). De vestiging van een Zivilverwaltung in België en Noord-Frankrijk (Antwerpen: Nederlandsche Boekhandel, 1972); Albert De Jonghe, ‘De strijd Himmler – Reeder om de benoeming van een HSSPF te Brussel (1942–1944). Eerste deel: de Sicherheitspolizei in België’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, No. 3, 1974, pp. 9–81; Albert De Jonghe, ‘De strijd Himmler – Reeder om de benoeming van een HSSPF te Brussel (1942–1944). Tweede deel: het voorspel’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, No. 5, 1976, pp. 5–151; Albert De Jonghe, ‘De strijd Himmler – Reeder om de benoeming van een HSSPF te Brussel (1942–1944). Derde deel: ontwikkeling van oktober 1942 tot oktober 1943’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, No. 6, 1978, pp. 5–178; Albert De Jonghe, ‘De strijd Himmler – Reeder om de benoeming van een HSSPF te Brussel (1942–1944). Vierde deel: Salzburg voor en na. Politieke ontwikkelingen van augustus 1943 tot juni 1944’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, No. 7, 1982, pp. 97–187; Albert De Jonghe, “De strijd Himmler – Reeder om de benoeming van een HSSPF te Brussel (1942–1944). Vijfde deel’, Bijdragen tot de Geschiedenis van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, No. 8, 1984, pp. 5–234. Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, p. 655. Dan Michman, ‘Research on the Holocaust in Belgium and in general: history and context’, in Dan Michman (ed.), Belgium and the Holocaust. Jews, Belgians, Germans (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1998), p. 25. Herman Van Goethem, ‘La convention de La Haye, la collaboration administrative en Belgique et la persécution des Juifs à Anvers, 1940–1942’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, Vol. 13, No. 17, 2006, pp. 117–97. Michman, ‘Research on the Holocaust’, p. 25; Rudi Van Doorslaer (ed.), Gewillig België. Overheid en Jodenvervolging tijdens de Tweede Wereldoorlog (Antwerpen/Amsterdam/Brussel: Meulenhoff/Manteau, 2007), pp. 1101–2; Lieven Saerens, Vreemdelingen in een wereldstad. Een geschiedenis van Antwerpen en zijn Joodse bevolking (1880–1944) (Tielt: Lannoo, 2000).

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78 Benoît Majerus, ‘Logiques administratives et persécution anti-Juive. La police bruxelloise et le registre des Juifs, 1940–1941’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, Vol. 10, No. 12, 2003, pp. 181–218. 79 Van Doorslaer, Gewillig België, p. 1103. 80 Lieven Saerens, ‘Gewone Vlamingen? De Jodenjagers van de Vlaamse SS in Antwerpen, 1942 (Deel 1)’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, Vol. 12, No. 15, 2005, pp. 289–313; Lieven Saerens, ‘Gewone Vlamingen? De Jodenjagers van de Vlaamse SS in Antwerpen, 1942 (Deel 2)’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, Vol. 13, No. 16, 2006, pp. 11–56; Lieven Saerens, De Jodenjagers van de Vlaamse SS (Tielt: Lannoo, 2007). 81 Robby Van Eetvelde, ‘De Sicherheitspolizei und Sicherheitsdienst (Sipo-SD) Aussendienststelle Antwerpen. Het politionele repertoire van een lokale Duitse politiedienst in bezet België’, Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Geschiedenis, Vol. 15, No. 19, 2008, pp. 135– 79; Robby Van Eetvelde, ‘De weg van Vlaamse “daders” naar de Gestapo: de tolken van de Antwerpse Sipo-SD’, Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, Vol. 124, No. 3, 2009, pp. 349–67. 82 Insa Meinen, Die Shoah in Belgien (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2009), p. 84. 83 Meinen, Die Shoah, pp. 83–110; Insa Meinen, ‘Face à la traque: Comment les Juifs furent arrêtés en Belgique (1942–1944)’, Les Cahiers de la Mémoire Contemporaine – Bijdragen tot de Eigentijdse Herinnering, Vol. 6, No. 6, 2005, pp. 161–203. 84 Van Doorslaer, Gewillig België, p. 1103. 85 Wolfgang Seibel, ‘The strength of perpetrators—the Holocaust in western Europe, 1940– 1944’, Governance, Vol. 15, No. 2, 2002, p. 225. 86 Michael Mayer, ‘“Die französische Regierung packt die Judenfrage ohne Umschweife an”. Vichy-Frankreich, deutsche Besatzungsmacht und der Beginn der “Judenpolitik” im Sommer/Herbst 1940’, Viertelsjahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 58, No. 3, 2010, p. 335. 87 Tal Bruttmann, Laurent Joly and Barbara Lambauer, ‘Der Auftakt zur Verfolgung der Juden in Frankreich 1940. Ein deutsch-französischen Zusammenspiel’, Viertelsjahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, Vol. 60, No. 3, 2012, p. 406. 88 Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, pp. 644–50. 89 Seibel, ‘Strength of perpetrators’, p. 226; Christopher Neumaier, ‘The escalation of German reprisal policy in occupied France, 1941–42’, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2006, p. 127; Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 377. 90 Bernd Kasten, ‘Zwischen Pragmatismus und exzessiver Gewalt. Die Gestapo in Frankreich, 1940–1944’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg. ‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), pp. 368–69; Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, pp. 650, 654–5. 91 Renée Poznanski, ‘Rescue of the Jews and the resistance in France. From history to historiography’, French Politics, Culture & Society, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2012, p. 13; Friedländer, Years of extermination, pp. 414–15. 92 Simon Kitson, ‘From enthusiasm to disenchantment: the French police and the Vichy regime, 1940–1944’, Contemporary European History, Vol. 11, No. 3, 2002, p. 375; Kasten, ‘Zwischen Pragmatismus’, p. 375. 93 Kasten, ‘Zwischen Pragmatismus’, p. 376; Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, p. 679; Poznanski, ‘Rescue of the Jews’, p. 14. 94 Kitson, ‘From enthusiasm to disenchantment’, p. 376; Julian Jackson, France: the dark years, 1940–1944 (Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 232, 361–2, 530–31; Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 554. 95 Jackson, The dark years, pp. 530–31; Kasten, ‘Zwischen Pragmatismus’, p. 376. 96 Seibel, ‘Strength of perpetrators’, p. 224. 97 Guus Meershoek, ‘Machtentfaltung und Scheitern. Sicherheitspolizei und SD in den Niederlanden’, in Gerhard Paul and Klaus-Michael Mallmann (eds), Die Gestapo im Zweiten Weltkrieg. ‘Heimatfront’ und besetztes Europa (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2000), p. 387; Marnix Croes, ‘Sicherheitspolizei en Sicherheitsdienst in Nederland. Straf georganiseerd of een gedecentraliseerd apparaat?’, in Henk Flap and Wil Arts (eds), De organisatie van de bezetting (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1997), p. 144. 98 Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, p. 655. 99 Friedländer, Years of extermination, pp. 121–2.

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100 Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, p. 646; Friedländer, Years of extermination, pp. 121–2, 178. 101 Guus Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police and the persecution of the Jews’, in David Cesarani (ed.), Holocaust (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 541–2. 102 Guus Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, p. 546. 103 Meershoek, ‘Machtenfaltung und Scheitern’, p. 397; Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, p. 545; Seibel, ‘Strength of perpetrators’, p. 224. 104 Meershoek, ‘Machtenfaltung und Scheitern’, pp. 397–8. 105 Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, p. 655; Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, p. 547. 106 Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, pp. 658–9; Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, pp. 547–8. 107 Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, pp. 549–50. 108 Meershoek, ‘Machtenfaltung und Scheitern’, p. 398; Meershoek, ‘Motive der niederländischen Beihilfe an der Deportation der Juden: Pflichtbewusstsein oder Habgier und Opportunismus?’, in Johannes Houwink ten Cate and Alfons Kenkman (eds), Deutsche und holländische Polizei in den besetzten niederländischen Gebieten. Dokumentation einer Arbeitstagung (Münster: Geschichtsort Villa ten Hompel, 2002), p. 123; Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, p. 538; Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 410. 109 Griffioen and Zeller, Jodenvervolging, pp. 658–9, 667–8; Meershoek, ‘The Amsterdam police’, p. 538; Meershoek, ‘Motive der niederländischen’, p. 112; Meershoek, ‘Machtenfaltung und Scheitern’, pp. 308–9. 110 Meershoek, ‘Motive der niederländischen’, p. 113; Ad Van Liempt, Kopgeld: Nederlandse premiejagers op zoek naar Joden (Amsterdam: Balans, 2002). 111 Friedländer, Years of extermination, p. 547. 112 Bob Moore, Slachtoffers en overlevenden. De Nazi-vervolging van de Joden in Nederland (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1998), p. 310. 113 ‘Sipo de Liège et d’Arlon – Exposé des faits’, n.d., STRA, Réquisitoire (REQ), AMC. 114 ‘Extrait du PV 835’, November 8, 1945, Gestapo Liège (GL), Documentation Générale 4 (DG4), AMC. 115 ‘PV 793/47’, March 31, 1947, STRA, 1, STRA, 3, AMC. 116 ‘WC-7-615’, July 28, 1947, STRA, 1, STRA, 2, AMC; ‘PV 9’, January 4, 1947, STRA, 1, STRA, 2, AMC. 117 Earl, Nuremberg SS-Einsatzgruppen trial, pp. 259, 283; ‘Déposition de témoin’, July 11, 1950, STRA, 2bis, 3, AMC. 118 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s willing executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). 119 Alf Lüdtke, Herbert Reinke and Michael Sturm (eds), Polizei, Gewalt und Staat im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag, 2011), p. 29.

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21 MASKING GE NOC I D E I N BO S NI A Kate Ferguson

Even before fighting began, the conflict in Bosnia was presented as a fractious civil war. This was because both internal actors and external observers either did not know how to properly describe the violence being perpetrated against civilians by apparently non-state military formations, or found it to their benefit to characterise it as civil war. The aggressor state-elites manipulated domestic and international prejudices, including perpetuating myths of paramilitaries and tribalism, to form part of an imagined exclusionary narrative that could not only explain the violence but went some way to justifying it. Thus, while the United Nations 1948 Genocide Convention theoretically provided a mechanism for international action in Bosnia, responses to the crisis were characterised by a refusal to interpret the situation as planned or rational, and therefore not genocide. From the outset, finding the appropriate language to explain what was happening in Bosnia and Herzegovina was problematic. The term ‘ethnic cleansing’ was used euphemistically by extreme nationalists and therefore initial understanding of exactly what that crime entailed was marred by the more fundamental misunderstanding of the violence in Bosnia.1 The very word ‘genocide’, coined by Raphael Lemkin to encompass the motives as well as the actions of racial, national, or religious mass murder became a much politicised debate that succeeded in obscuring the motives that lay behind the mass murder of Muslims in Bosnia. Firstly, there was a reluctance among policy makers, who sensed that if the word ‘genocide’ was used then the treaty obligations of the 1948 Convention would have to be upheld.2 Secondly, genocide as a word and as a concept had become imbued, inherently in the minds of many, with the destruction of Europe’s Jewry during the Holocaust.3 And on the face of it, the violence in Bosnia did not appear to resemble the ordered, systematic Nazi exterminations. Nor for that matter did the slaughter in Rwanda resemble the popular, and narrow, understanding of what exactly genocide looks like. Despite the adage of ‘Never Again’, scholarly lessons from the Holocaust were specifically not drawn in the case of the identity-based conflicts of the 1990s. Professor Steven Katz, elected by the US Holocaust Memorial Council as Director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in January 1995, described the crimes committed in Bosnia as ‘population transfer supported by violence’ and reduced the genocide in Rwanda to ‘a struggle for tribal domination’.4 Thus, the moral status of the Holocaust sometimes served to distance the Western public and political establishments from the assault on Bosnia’s Muslims rather than provide historical impetus for action. This was most graphically illustrated when the camps were discovered by journalists in the summer of 1992 and images of emaciated captives standing behind barbed wire 309

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emerged alongside stories of prisoners brought by cattle-trucks.5 There was no rallying cry for action, but a protracted debate began over whether the victimisation of Bosnia’s Muslims justified the label of genocide.6 German politicians were unique in describing the camps in Bosnia as genocide at that time.7 A third ‘script’ emerged, serving to reinforce the parallel discourse of the Realpolitik of policy makers and the role of the Holocaust among intellectuals. The violence in collapsing Yugoslavia, but particularly in Bosnia, was frequently viewed through a prism of orientalist prejudice, oversimplified Balkan history, and racial or religious stereotypes.8 This was encouraged by the Serbian and Croatian elites but reinforced by elements of the Western press and in parliamentary debate.9 The intentionality of the Serbian and Croatian campaigns against Muslim civilians was therefore misrepresented as spontaneous and characteristic of Balkan culture, therefore of lesser concern for the international community. As a result, the massacre at Srebrenica in July 1995, which has been found to adequately fulfil the requirements of genocide,10 is often considered to lie outside of the primary Bosnian conflict narrative. In reality, Srebrenica represented a larger-scale atrocity but was in keeping with the systematic nature of the targeted violence which not only dominated the war in Bosnia, but was its raison d’être. The attitudes we have today towards mass violence are in part a result of what happened in Bosnia in the 1990s. The consequences of the failure to act in Bosnia continue to have an impact upon our contemporary responses to peoples at risk of similar crimes and produced a broadening of the shared Western conscience towards the fate of strangers. Twenty years after Bosnia and Rwanda, among other tools, the world has better equipped itself with a broader lexicon to be able to describe acts of persecution without descending into the comparative analysis of suffering. The term ‘mass atrocity crimes’, though it brought about much discussion within a few scholarly journals, provides a useful non-legal catch-all for war crimes, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and genocide.11 In addition to using ‘mass atrocities’, I prefer to also use a still broader definition of ‘identity-based violence’, manipulating somewhat the definition of genocide coined by Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn which states that victims are identified as belonging to a target group by the perpetrator.12 Language matters. This short analysis of the violence that was perpetrated against Bosnia’s Muslims does not seek to contribute to the already extensive debate on whether their persecution constitutes genocide, whether in the eyes of certain schools of scholars, in international law, or to the victims themselves. The word ‘genocide’ has done no favours for the Bosniaks. Instead, these few pages will consider the manifestation of the exclusionary identities in Yugoslavia and expose how the organised violence against a group of people came to be seen as ambiguous. The decade between Marshal Tito’s death in May 1980 and the outbreak of violence in the summer of 1991 transformed Yugoslavia. The Federation suffered economic collapse, ideological bankruptcy, international alienation, and internal psychosis. As the social order of the communist system fragmented, its values and policies were discredited, not just in Yugoslavia but around the world. In their place, virulent and violent nationalisms took root. Yugoslavia was not the only crumbling communist state where ambitious politicians, a powerful state-controlled media nexus, and the postcommunist desire to reconnect with ‘lost identities’ collided. Unlike the Soviet satellite states, Yugoslavia’s communism had been ‘homegrown’, not imposed by Russian tanks. The disillusionment with communism’s failures was dangerously intertwined 310

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with the country’s federalist model. As Mark Thompson wrote, socialism and federalism in Yugoslavia were ‘Siamese twins’; if the two were to be separated, only delicate surgery could leave the state whole.13 Meanwhile, after Tito’s death the international spotlight of political and public interest in Yugoslavia began to dim. As communism waned in Eastern Europe and the Cold War cooled off, the unique geopolitical space Yugoslavia had occupied ceased to become important. By 1989, the dramatic events in Poland, Berlin and throughout the Soviet sphere had left Yugoslavia out of the spotlight. The developments in Yugoslavia were neither properly reported nor prioritised. Nationalist revivals were seen as an inevitable stage of the post-communist experience, and both Slobodan Milošević and Franco Tudjman had the well-manicured appearance of European statesmen fit for the new world order. Both men had cultivated networks of influential diaspora support in significant and often surprising positions that were able to carry out important PR on behalf of the nascent regimes. Milošević, for example, had the support of Maryland Congresswoman Helen Delich Bentley and New York University Dean, Radmila Milentijević.14 At the heart of the new Serbian and Croatian ethno-nationalist rhetoric was the vision of a new social order and the complete eradication of the communist legacy. Enlarged national borders, cleansed of ethnic undesirables, became the ultimate political goal but other drastic changes to the social order were at the forefront of the nationalist movements. Communist rights of equality, across ethnicity and gender, were strategically targeted and challenged. As the economic situation became increasingly precarious, fears spread by the media and reinforced by the elite successfully eroded tolerance, pluralism and compassion. The gender politics of Serbian and Croatian society was turned upside down in the 1980s to the detriment of women’s emancipation.15 Femininity and womanhood became intrinsically associated with the national projects, but also, especially in urban society, with the Western influences of consumerism and sexual objectification. Throughout the decade, a multitude of pre-communist national concepts were resurrected. What could be considered the organic celebration of religious and national spirit that spread across the republics as people experimented with what appeared to be a new freedom of autonomy, became intertwined with an elite fascist revival in Serbia and Croatia. Led from Belgrade, there was an intellectualisation of hatred. In 1981, Dobrica Ćosić, so-called father of Serbian nationalism, writer and national icon, called for the Titoist limitations on free speech to be lifted. The new freedoms enabled (if not encouraged) unrestrained nationalist discourse at the highest levels of the Serbian establishment. In the same year the Francuska 7 Tribunal was established, initially also associated with free speech, but quickly held a series of evenings ‘On Kosovo – For Kosovo’ where impassioned intellectuals, including Ćosić, spoke in the ‘defence of the Serbs’. In January 1986, 200 Serbian intellectuals, again led by Ćosić, signed the ‘Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences’, in which they declared that the Serbs were the most oppressed peoples in Yugoslavia, and accused the Kosovar Albanians of rape and ‘genocide’; Serbia was, they claimed, suffering its third genocide.16 Populist manipulation of emotion and memory characterised post-communist nation building not only in the Yugoslav states but across the Soviet bloc. This included symbolic reburial, the destruction and reconstruction of memorials, and reclaiming significant dates for either celebration or commemoration. However, while Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary reburied members of their national elites victimised by Soviet regimes, Croatia and Serbia politicised the deaths of ordinary and usually 311

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nameless victims who were distinguished only by their ethnic or national group. Television documentaries about the identity-based mass violence between Serbs and Croats during the Second World War were aired on state-run networks, consciously reviving memories – real and imagined – of grief and resentment.17 In Croatia, the museum honouring the victims of the Ustaša-run Jasenovac camp was dismantled, the currency was renamed the kuna as it had been in the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), and several streets throughout the country were renamed after Ustaša minister Mile Budak (to whom the policy of expelling one third of the Croatian Serbs, converting one third to Catholicism, and murdering the final third, is attributed).18 The new Croatian government sought too to present Croatian nationhood as part of the (Western) European experience, as opposed to the Islamic and Orthodox East, painting a national history as the ramparts of Christendom.19 Mark Thompson describes Croats in the early 1990s who had little experience of Western Europe, invoking its name like ‘white magic against the encroaching eastern darkness’.20 The chequerboard flag, associated with the short-lived NDH, became ubiquitous in the Croatian nation and Tudjman regime. Tudjman himself published an antisemitic and revisionist history, Wastelands of Historical Reality, in which he equated the crimes of the Ustaša and Partisans and minimised the number of deaths at the Jasenovac camp.21 Under Tudjman’s leadership, denial of the NDH genocidal policy against the Serbs and its complicity in Nazi crimes was consciously integrated into the new Croatian narrative. Similar populist processes took place in Serbia and for the benefit of the Serbian population in Kosovo. In 1989, the bones of Tsar Lazar, who died in 1389 in the Battle of Kosovo, toured parts of Kosovo and Serbia in the weeks before Milošević’s infamous speech at the battlefield itself to mark the 500-year commemoration. This neo-iconoclasm adorned Serbian national politics with a historical and pseudo-religious legacy of struggle, victimhood and Serbdom. Even as the League of Communists was collapsing, images of Lazar and Milošević were hung together on the walls of Serbian homes in Kosovo.22 Many parallel processes were taking place from ‘above’ and ‘below’ that sought to reconnect people to imagined communities of the past through reinvented tradition.23 Towards the end of the decade, these artificial processes had become entwined, forming ethnically specific strands that competed with one another – and thus reinforced the notion that ethnic enmity was a part of South Slavonic culture and historical experience. An (a)moral social order that visually dominated urban culture in Serbia and parts of Croatia – and in its own way, later in Sarajevo – reinforced in the eyes of outsiders what appeared to be historical, mythical and cultural roots of the violence. Yet despite the media hype surrounding the ancient ethnic hatreds discourse, South Slavonic inter-confessional relations had ‘never occasioned religious wars on the scale of those fought in Western Europe’.24 Communist Yugoslavia had not been the first expression of South Slavonic commonality; there were periods of inter-ethnic local particularism as well as broader experiences with notions of Yugoslavism and Illyrianism throughout the region’s history. Nevertheless, although it had been almost wholly artificially created, the new popular culture became very powerful. Its influence can perhaps be most crassly seen in February 1995, while the war in Bosnia was still ongoing, when Serbia celebrated the fairytale wedding of an infamous paramilitary leader and his Turbofolk pop princess; Željko ‘Arkan’ Ražnatović and Svetlana ‘Ceca’ Veličković. Arkan was well known for his vicious role in ethnic cleansing campaigns in Croatia and Bosnia, while Ceca, at 312

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the height of the Bosnian war, had a number one hit with ‘Kukavica’ (Coward). The wedding was given public, political, religious and national historical endorsement so as to become something of a mythical event. Orthodox bishops travelled from across Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia to preside over a fully mythologised ceremony where the groom was dressed as a Lazaresque hero and his bride the Maiden of Kosovo.25 The elevation of Arkan and Ceca was demonstrative of the extent to which Serbian society had changed since Tito’s death in 1980. It revealed the voluntary willingness by the state, the church and public to bask in the opulence of the couple’s ill-gotten glamour, and to celebrate Serbian nationalism and thus Arkan’s actions in Croatia and Bosnia. More importantly, it revealed many of the relationships and networks that existed between the perpetrators of para-institutional violence, the Orthodox hierarchy, the state and its media powerhouse. It showed too that society had become a willing collaborator. While it is important not to overemphasise the societal collaboration that accompanied Yugoslavia’s collapse, the Arkan-Ceca wedding is important because it makes clear that their union represented something more universal than wartime subculture. In terms of tackling identity-based violence in the future, understanding the complex and multiple dimensions of how exclusionary policies and dehumanising discourses are normalised and legitimised must be prioritised. The attack by a coalition of Serbian forces against the Muslims of Bosnia in spring 1992 represented a new kind of warfare. Not, as described in international relations theory, and as indicative of Mary Kaldor’s ‘new wars’ led by new actors with new objectives,26 but rather of old warfare in new sheep’s clothing: The objectives were, as with classical warfare, political, but the organisational military structures were derived from, not part of, national and regional state political structures. Serbian and Croatian leaderships adhered to Clausewitzian theory inasmuch as they sought to further their policy ambitions through other means. However, their ‘enemy’ was not the Bosnian state, or – when they were fighting each other – either Belgrade or Zagreb, but civilian groups who occupied land they desired for strategic or ideological reasons. And so the war in Bosnia was waged by states against populations. When setting out his thesis of genocide in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, Lemkin wrote that ‘genocide is the antithesis of the Rousseau–Portalis Doctrine . . . [which] holds that war is directed against sovereigns and armies not against subjects and civilians’.27 The military actors involved on all sides of the Bosnian conflict served to obscure the structures of command and control that governed the conflict. As well as state armies, coalitions of paramilitary and other irregular military groups operated together with different formations enjoying varying degrees of sponsorship and support from the state on national or local levels. Even those who were not under the direct control of state command acted under the protective umbrella of immunity and impunity promulgated by state authorities. The emergence of spontaneously created bands of civilians into national warriors appeared to fulfil the prophecies of the political leadership that the division of the Yugoslavs was driven by community based hatreds. Zvornik was one of the first towns to be attacked and can be seen as a template for how the coalition of Serbian forces collaborated. On 8 April 1992, two days after Bosnia’s independence had been recognised by the EC, units of the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) shelled the town of Zvornik across a river, from inside Serbia proper. Thousands of the town’s inhabitants attempted to flee. On 9 April the leader of Belgrade-based paramilitary group the Tigers, Arkan, issued Zvornik’s 60% Muslim 313

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population with the order to surrender. On 10 April the Tigers entered the town and carried out the first ethnic cleansing of the war. The Muslims had not surrendered, but they were not equipped to defend themselves. On the same day, by coincidence, the UNHCR’s most senior official in the region, José Maria Mendiluce, travelled through Zvornik on his way to Sarajevo, following a meeting with Milošević in Belgrade. He witnessed the JNA units along the Serbian bank of the Drina, the heavy artillery, and the smoking Serbian cannons.28 In the town he recalled seeing ‘trucks full of dead bodies. I could see militiamen taking more corpses of children, women and old people from their houses and putting them on trucks. I saw at least four or five trucks full of corpses.’29 Having escaped the besieged town, Mendiluce met the 5,000 refugees attempting to flee. Mendiluce witnessed the collaboration of JNA troops and trained paramilitaries of the Serbian Ministry of the Interior.30 It should have been clear that it was an operation, as paramilitary leader Vojislav Šešelj later boasted, that was ‘planned in Belgrade’.31 And it had been well planned. As the war in Croatia reached its crescendo in 1991, Belgrade had transferred Bosnian Serbs into JNA units across Bosnia and Herzegovina, mobilising them to key communications points and strategic positions along the border. The JNA, the army that still bore Tito’s collectivist acronym, coordinated with the Bosnian Serb leaders to incorporate local Territorial Defence Forces (TOs) into the JNA in Serb-dominated regions, ensuring that as the Muslim elements of the TOs were disbanded their weapons were redistributed to mobilised Serbs.32 When the Bosnian government questioned the deployment, the JNA leadership replied that its troops were ‘defending Yugoslavia’ and engaged in ‘peacekeeping’.33 This was the same strategic pattern, albeit a more sophisticated version, that had been carried out by the JNA in Croatia. Its implementation began in Bosnia before its declaration of independence on 1 March 1992. Simultaneously, the Serbian State Security Service (DB) established and in some cases hired secret units of paramilitaries and irregulars to carry out ‘special military actions’ in Bosnia-Herzegovina, just as they had in Croatia.34 The objective of what has become termed a joint criminal enterprise, between Belgrade, the Bosnian Serb leadership, the DB, special paramilitary units, and the VRS, was the forcible and permanent removal of the majority of non-Serbs, principally Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats, from large areas of Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, by commissioning the units to commit crimes of ‘persecutions, murder, deportations, inhumane acts and forcible transfers’.35 It was an effective devolution of command and accountability for the crimes against humanity that were an integral aspect of the strategy and indicative of the new symbiosis that now exists between the architects of atrocity crimes and the foot soldiers who commit them. The pattern Mendiluce witnessed in Zvornik was repeated across Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the summer and autumn of 1992. Hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians were expelled from their towns and homes, and thousands were killed. On 20 March 1993, the government of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina filed an application with the International Court of Justice, which initiated proceedings against the government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for their alleged violations of the Genocide Convention.36 On 8 April 1993, the court ruled that the government of the FRY should immediately take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of genocide.37 The UN General Assembly issued resolution 47/121, which confirmed that the actions of the Serbian forces should be regarded as genocidal, stating that they were 314

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[g]ravely concerned about the deterioration of the situation in the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina owing to the intensified aggressive acts by the Serbian and Montenegrin forces to acquire more territories by force, characterised by a consistent pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights, by a burgeoning refugee population resulting from mass expulsions of defenceless civilians from their homes and the existence in Serbian and Montenegrin controlled areas of concentration camps and detention centres, in pursuit of the abhorrent policy of ‘ethnic cleansing’, which is a form of genocide. The patterns of violence committed by Serbian troops were designed to destroy different aspects of Bosniak culture, community, and life. The Serbian paramilitaries drew up lists of prominent people – community leaders, imams, professionals, intellectuals, and the wealthy – to separate and execute them.38 British television journalist Michael Nicholson called this process ‘elitocide’.39 By ordering the deaths of as many educated Muslims as possible, the Serbian campaign could ensure that, whatever else happened, any future Bosnian Muslim state would be bereft of those who ensure that society can function; spiritual, political and cultural leaders. And the brave. By September 1992, Serb forces had executed 37 imams, sent 35 to concentration camps, and expelled 300.40 In towns and villages, VRS and paramilitary groups systematically destroyed Muslim symbols, mosques and cultural centres. After just six weeks of war, a Bosnian cultural affairs monthly, Behar, released an official list of 115 mosques and other cultural buildings that had been damaged or destroyed.41 In Zvornik, after the Serb paramilitaries destroyed all the mosques and any buildings associated with the Muslim community that had been expelled, the new Serb mayor declared: ‘There never were any mosques in Zvornik.’42 The siege of Sarajevo involved not only the daily shelling of the city’s inhabitants, but a strategic policy of cultural eradication. The National Library, the Oriental Institute and the National Museum were targeted specifically because of their cultural significance; they contained historical and religious texts and artefacts that represented Sarajevo’s ancient multicultural fabric. Both the Serbian and Croatian forces attempted to destroy all physical and symbolic evidence of Bosnian Muslim identity and of inter-religious life in Bosnia, and so erase Muslim existence from cultural memory.43 The systematic process demonstrated why Raphael Lemkin’s original definition of genocide included the assault of cultural monuments and buildings.44 Rape and sexual violence were used by Serb forces against Muslims.45 There were some examples of Croat or Bosniak combatants committing acts of sexual violence, but never in a systematic or strategic manner. Buildings were taken over by the Croatian army,46 VRS units and Serbian paramilitaries, in order to rape, gang rape, sexually abuse, torture and humiliate Muslim women and girls. In the Foča municipality, girls as young as 12 and 13 were kept as sexual slaves for months, and in some instances years.47 International aid organisations and journalists heard hundreds of stories similar to that of a nineteen-year-old girl interviewed in October 1992: ‘As they raped me they said they’d make sure I gave birth to a Serbian baby, and they kept repeating that during the rest of the time that they kept me there.’48 Estimates of the number of women raped in Bosnia vary, which initially led to some disagreement within the scholarship (and political debate) concerning its systematic implementation. In January 1993, the United Nations special report presented the conservative estimate that 20,000 Muslim women had been raped by Bosnian Serb forces.49 In 1996, Ruth 315

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Seifert put the total figure of female rapes in Bosnia during the war at 60,000.50 There are no figures available for the number of men who were victims of sexual violence, but evidence given at The Hague has revealed that the torture of prisoners in the camps often involved forcing men to perform humiliating sexual acts or sexual violence. One study carried out by the United Nations found that of the 6,000 male camp prisoners in the Sarajevo canton, 80% reported being raped during their detention.51 The rapes of Bosniaks became a focus of the international reportage, prompting influential feminist academics to lobby other states to take up the cause. This corps of intellectual activism was instrumental in ensuring the issue remained in the press, and that cases were prosecuted at The Hague, demonstrating again that the voices of academia and civil society were able to shape how the situation in Bosnia was portrayed. Almost half of those so far convicted by the ICTY have been found guilty of crimes involving sexual violence. Much of the identity-based violence, whether destruction of property, rape or murder, was carried out by paramilitary forces. Despite calls from the international community for moral equivalency between the Croat, Bosniak and Serb sides, the overwhelming majority of crimes were committed by Serbian forces. Assessment by the CIA estimated that 90% were perpetrated by Serbs.52 The strategy of assault against the Bosnian Muslims was conceptualised and planned by the political and military leaderships made up of the educated, intellectual elite. The crimes were implemented by foot soldiers who appeared to be acting independently. Ordinary men who beyond their military service were unlikely to have seen action before 1991 committed crimes against civilians, who in some regions of Bosnia were often their neighbours or classmates. It was this dimension of the Bosnian conflagration that further alienated so many of the external observers from the international community. The very visual imitation by the irregular Croat and Serb forces of Ustaša and Četnik uniforms served to vindicate the claims made by the belligerent political leaderships, bestowing exaggerated identities on both perpetrator and victim. Michel Sells described the masks worn by militiamen in Bosnia as metaphorical ‘masks of otherness’ that transformed the wearer’s identity.53 The costumes emboldened the statesponsored paramilitaries and their spontaneous imitators, imbuing their actions with a historical dimension that emphasised the national necessity of ethnic cleansing and thus implied impunity.54 And if we can recognise the impact dress can have on the attitudes and behaviour of men, it is reasonable to consider the ‘masks’ adopted by the women who were in relationships with these men and suppose that women also used their ‘uniforms’ to justify their own behaviour or inaction. Devolved structures of violence, whether or not they enjoy the sponsorship of the state, employ broader informal networks of support within communities and criminal enterprise. The role of the family and close-knit communities in endorsing the actions of irregular fighters, particularly in identity-based violence, is a much under-researched issue of contemporary conflict. Nevertheless, the supporting role played by the mothers, wives and girlfriends of irregular fighters is a crucial component in the processes of aggressive nationalism and dehumanisation. Maria Todorova has argued that it was precisely the ‘historicised’ character of the violence in Bosnia that shaped Western opinion of the conflict. It was as if, in Bosnia, ‘the mountaineers of the seventeenth century [had] re-entered the political stage of the twentieth, unmarked by any change’.55 The political discourse of a Balkan warrior ethos, and the significance of history, memory and hatred in the ‘Balkan’ psyche, 316

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purposely or not, framed these atrocities as the Balkan cultural and historical norm.56 The presumption that the Yugoslavs were strong and tough fighters, capable of effective guerrilla warfare, despite the lack of evidence during the contemporary conflict, reinforced a line of reasoning founded on cultural determinism rather than intelligence gathered from the field. The violence in Bosnia was discussed as if it was an unstoppable manifestation of Balkan culture. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger’s caution against foreign intervention was clearly based on such reasoning: ‘If people are intent on killing each other under conditions in which it is almost impossible for the outside world to do anything without losing itself many lives, then my answer is: “I’m sorry, but they are going to have to kill each other until they wear themselves out and have enough sense to stop”.’57 More than most conflicts, the Bosnian ‘war’ was shaped by international influences and developments. Europe and the US wanted peace but without military intervention, of any form. In early summer 1995, Gearóid Ó Tuathail noted that ‘to the elite foreign policy decision makers in NATO, the UN Security Council, and the various national military bureaucracies, Bosnia is persistently and relentlessly described as a potential “European Vietnam”, a “vortex”, “morass”, “sinkhole”, “bog” and “quagmire”’.58 Certainly the 1993 ICJ judgement appeared not to impact policy priorities. In addition, the legacy of the first Gulf War and the Falklands lay heavy in the minds of the British left, just as Vietnam and Somalia affected their American counterparts. Criticism is often levelled at the Conservative and Republican governments for allowing their policies in Bosnia to be dictated by these legacies, and perhaps rightly so. Nevertheless, the British and American left reacted strongly against military intervention from the political position of anti-imperialism, to the extent that action in Bosnia was never seriously considered. In July 1995, VRS forces, supplemented by Serbian and international paramilitaries overwhelmed Srebrenica, forcing the largely refugee population to split; about 20,000 sought protection from the UN base at Potočari and another 20,000 headed for the forests. The video footage of the UN soldiers working together with Mladić’s men, separating the Bosniak men and boys from their womenfolk and ushering the terrified men onto waiting buses, has become a defining moment in the United Nations’ history. The men and boys were driven to different locations and murdered. Many who had hidden in the forests were tracked down and shot. Over 8,000 were killed. Weeks later, VRS units attempted to conceal the massacre by reburying victims exhumed from mass graves in more isolated locations. The fall of Srebrenica has come to represent the failure of the United Nations and of the international community in Bosnia, just as the massacre came to overshadow the legal reckoning at the ICTY and international memory of the three and a half year conflict. Srebrenica could easily have been prevented, but so too could a majority of the 250,000 deaths of the Bosnian war. There simply was not the will to intervene. Only 7,000 UN troops of the estimated 34,000 needed to implement the safe haven protection policy were ever provided.59 When Ratko Mladić took the UN safe haven Srebrenica, he declared to a film camera, ‘This is revenge for the Turks.’60 It wasn’t, it was a military operation with a political objective; to cleanse the town and ensure that Bosnian Serb forces would be able to hold the entire region that borders Serbia proper. General Mladić succeeded. The town remains a part of Republika Srpska, as determined by the hurried Dayton Agreement that signalled the end of the Bosnian war in December 1995. The Dutch government commissioned a report into the failure to save Srebrenica that resulted in the entire government resigning in April 2002. The UN, Human Rights 317

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Watch and other organisations carried out their own investigations into the role of the UN and international community in the massacre. Srebrenica, like Rwanda, now features heavily in the public rhetoric of responsibility from the UN, Western governments and NGOs. The continued preoccupation with genocide means that it is usually ‘Srebrenica’ rather than ‘Bosnia’ that is mentioned, demonstrating the limit of the lessons learnt from the crimes committed against the Bosniaks. The crimes have led to important changes in international attitudes, including the adoption of the Responsibility to Protect initiative that reiterates, in broader terms than the Genocide Convention, the shared commitment to save the lives of strangers. The sad story of Bosnia reveals a disjuncture between the intentionality of the crimes committed against Bosniaks and the kaleidoscope of Balkan cultural determinism. This viewpoint represented the culmination of a conceptual collaboration between aggressor elites and international stakeholders that was manipulated in order to justify the violence and prevent international intervention. The significance of this disjuncture extends beyond mere academic disagreement over historical or criminal categorisation. The reluctance to see the persecution of Bosnia’s Muslims for what it was in international legal terms – genocidal – indicates a different post-Holocaust legacy: firstly, Bosnia revealed the serious limitations of political will for enforcement of the 1948 Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, a failing which was to mark an important step in the development and study of genocide prevention policy. Secondly, Bosnia made clear that Raphael Lemkin’s hope for his word ‘genocide’ to be powerful enough to shock the world into action had failed; the language and terminology of genocide, particularly of a European genocide, still belonged to the Holocaust, and therefore left the crimes against Bosniaks bereft of the very tool Lemkin sought to create. Finally, Western prejudices about Muslims in Europe and orientalist conceptions of the Balkans left the West vulnerable to manipulation by the criminal architects. And thus the violent collapse of Yugoslavia was placed outside the historical and cultural experience of ‘mainstream’ Europe, despite the fact that the roots of the dissolution were set firmly in the two ruptures of twentiethcentury Europe: the Second World War and the fall of communism.

Notes 1 Ethnic cleansing is now a better-defined concept and punishable in international law under crimes against humanity but this was not so in the 1990s. Furthermore, the concept of ethnic cleansing has since been used to define past crimes committed against identity groups, most notably by Ilan Pappe, in The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (Oneworld Publications, 2006). 2 On refusal to use the word ‘genocide’ in European parliaments see K. Smith, Genocide and the European (Cambridge University Press, 2010); Brendan Simms, Unfinest Hour, Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (Penguin Books, 2002); and for US debate over Rwanda see Samantha Power, ‘Bystanders to Genocide’, in The Atlantic, 1 September 2001. 3 This school was dominated by Stephen Katz but included many others including Deborah Lipstadt and Yehuda Bauer. The latter two have since moved away from theories of Holocaust uniqueness. 4 Alan S. Rosenbaum, ‘Is the Holocaust Unique?’, in Israel S. Charney and Alan S. Rosenbaum (eds), Is the Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Westview Press, 2008), p. 191. 5 In the UK tabloids ran front pages drawing direct comparisons with the Holocaust; the Mirror’s headline was Belsen ’92, 7 August 1992. 6 See the libel case between the Observer/ITN news and the journal Living Marxism in which LM accused the journalists who discovered the camps of falsifying news. LM was supported by a number of influential people such as Doris Lessing, Toby Young, John Simpson, Fay Weldon, Harold Evans and Noam Chomsky.

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7 Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Foreign Minister Klaus Kinkel frequently charged that Serbs were committing genocide against Muslims in Bosnia-Herzegovina; see Karen E. Smith, Genocide and the Europeans, pp. 112–13. 8 See Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford University Press, 2009), and ‘The Balkans, from discovery to invention’, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2, 1994; on Orientalism Edward Said, Orientalism (Vintage Books, 1979). 9 For discussions of the UK’s Bosnia policy see Carole Hodge, Britain and the Balkans, 1991 to present (Routledge, 2006), and Simms, Unfinest Hour. 10 See cases of ICTY, particularly Popović et al (IT-05-88) ‘Srebrenica’. 11 The term was introduced by David Scheffer in 2006 in order to avoid the legal and political complexities of ‘genocide’; see David Scheffer, ‘Genocide and Atrocity Crimes’, Genocide Studies and Prevention, Vol. 1, No. 3, December 2006, pp. 229–50. 12 Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies (Yale University Press, 1990). 13 Mark Thompson, A Paper House, the Ending of Yugoslavia (Pantheon Books, 1993), p. 7. 14 Both attended Milošević’s Gazimestan speech in Kosovo filed on 28 June 1989, and used their skills and influence to act as international ambassadors for the new president; see Paul Hockenos, Homeland Calling: Exile Patriotism & the Balkan Wars (Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 128. 15 For discussion of changes to the lives of Muslim women see Zilka Spahić-Šiljak (ed.), Contesting female, feminist and Muslim identities: post-socialist contexts of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo (Centre for Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Studies of the University of Sarajevo (CIPS), 2012). 16 The first being the First World War, where they lost one quarter of their population, the second at the hands of the Ustaša, and the third was being perpetrated through a supposed deliberate policy of rapid reproduction among the Kosovar Albanians. 17 Eric Markusen, ‘Genocide in Bosnia’, in Samuel Totten (ed.), Teaching about Genocide: Issues, Approaches, and Resources, 2004, pp. 199–200. 18 Marko Attila Hoare, ‘Whose is the Partisan movement? Serbs, Croats, and the legacy of a shared resistance’, The Journal of Slavic Militaries Studies, Vol. 15, No. 4, 2002, pp. 24–41; 37. 19 Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (Yale University Press, 2001), p. 29. 20 Thompson, Paper House, p. 286. 21 Ljiljana Radonić, ‘Croatia’s Transformation from Historical Revisionism to European Standards’, in Vjeran Pavlaković, Davor Pauković and Višeslav Raos (eds), Confronting the Past: European Experiences (Political Science Research Centre Zagreb, 2012), p. 167. 22 James Noyes, The Politics of Iconoclasm: Religion, Violence and the Culture of Image Breaking in Christianity and Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2013), p. 152. 23 See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (Verso Books, 1983). 24 Ivo Banac’s preface to Sabrina Ramet, Balkan Babel (Westview Press, 1992). 25 Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (eds), In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century (Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 187. 26 Mary Kaldor, New Wars, Old Wars (Stanford University Press, 2007). 27 Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, p. 80. 28 On Mendiluce’s testimony see Laura Silber and Allan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (Penguin Books, 1996), p. 223. 29 Silber and Little, Death of Yugoslavia, p. 246. 30 See ICT Y case Stanišić and Simatović IT-03-69, particularly Judgement, May 30 2013, p. 49918. 31 Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and Its Reversal (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 112. 32 James Gow, The Serbian Project and its Adversaries; A Strategy for War Crimes (Hurst & Co., 2003), p. 173. 33 Ibid. 34 From the Indictment against Serbian DB officials, Jovica Stanišić and Franko Simatović; Case No. IT-03-69. See http://www.un.org/icty/cases-e/index-e.htm for full details of the indictment. 35 Ibid.

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36 Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Yugoslavia (Serbia and Montenegro)), 20 March 1993, for full text see http://www.icj-cij.org/docket/files/91/7199.pdf. 37 Request for the Indication of Provisional Measures of 8 April 1993. 38 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, p. 54. 39 David Rieff, Slaughterhouse; Bosnia and the failure of the west (Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 113. 40 Ibid. 41 Roy Gutman, Witness to Genocide, the first inside account of the horrors of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Bosnia (Element, 1993), p. 79. 42 Michel Sells, The Bridge Betrayed; Religion and Genocide in Bosnia (University of California Press, 1996), p. 4. 43 Ibid. 44 Lemkin, Axis Power, p. 84. 45 In 1999, Serbian forces continued this policy, unrestrained, in Kosovo, where 30–50% of Albanian (Muslim) women of childbearing age were raped (Amnesty International, 1999). 46 By 1993, Croatian police units and paramilitary groups were all operating under central military command. 47 ICTY case Kunarac et al. – (IT-96-23) ‘Foča’. 48 John F. Burns, New York Times, 3 October 1992. 49 ‘European inquiry says Serbs’ forces have raped 20,000’, New York Times, January 9, 1993. 50 Ruth Seifert, ‘The Second Front; The Logic of Sexual Violence in Wars’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 19, Nos. 1/2, pp. 35–43, 1996, p. 35. 51 Lara Stemple, ‘Male Rape and Human Rights’, Hastings Law Journal, Vol. 60, pp. 605–45, p. 614. 52 For details on the CIA report and other similar analysis of Serbian responsibility see Thomas Cushman, Stjepan Meštrović (eds), This Time We Knew: Western Responses to Genocide in Bosnia (New York University Press, 1996), p. 15. 53 Michel Sells, The bridge betrayed, p. 77. 54 For role of costume, be it masks, warpaint or other symbolic garments of war see Barbara Ehrenreich, Blood Rites: The origins and history of the passions of war (Granta Books, 1997), particularly pp. 10–12. 55 Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, p. 137. 56 Ibid. 57 Quoted in K.E. Fleming, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan historiography’, American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4, pp. 1218–33, 2000, p. 1220. 58 Gearóid Ó Tuathail (Gerald Toal), ‘An Anti-geopolitical Eye: Maggie O’Kane in Bosnia, 1992–93’, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1996, p. 172. 59 Silber and Little, The Death of Yugoslavia, p. 345. 60 A Cry from the Grave, BBC, directed by Leslie Woodhead 1999.

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22 N UC L E AR WE APON S A ND G ENO C I D E Lessons from 1940 Richard C. Maguire

‘Owing to the spreading of radioactive substances with the wind the bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country.’ Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, Memorandum on the properties of a radioactive ‘super-bomb’, March 1940

Nuclear weapons and genocide In February 1940, while working at Birmingham University, the physicists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls wrote a succinct and brilliant memorandum in which they outlined, theoretically, the means by which ‘the energy stored in atomic nuclei’ could be liberated to produce a weapon that would explode with the same effect as ‘1000 tons of dynamite’.1 In this ground-breaking memorandum the two men did two things of huge historic significance. The first was to propose their idea on how the power of the atom could be used as the basis of a useable nuclear weapon and the basic ideas that needed to be worked on to turn their theory into practice. The second thing they did was to consider the implications – strategic, political and moral – of building the weapon. The concept of ‘genocide’ had not been explicated in 1940 and so the two physicists did not use it, but an integral part of the argument made in this chapter is that they would not have agreed with a suggestion that these weapons were ‘genocidal’. Instead, what will be suggested here is that, reading the document over 70 years later, it is clear that Frisch and Peierls understood that they were suggesting a type of weapon system so different in destructive potential to those that had preceded it, that they could not stop with an explanation of how it might work. Their memorandum shows that they understood that the moment of its first elucidation had also to be the moment at which discussion about its implications for warfare began. The implications Frisch and Peierls were concerned with were not, however, based on some idea that nuclear weapons were ‘doomsday’ weapons that were inherently genocidal. Rather, they were based on an almost instinctive understanding that the critical issue that had to be faced was not what weapon was being wielded, but who was wielding it. The questions and difficulties raised in that first memorandum of 1940 have never gone away. In the decades since then the issues raised by nuclear weapons, and the fact that they have not been used since 1945, have been the subject of intense debate and have been approached in myriad different ways. Historians have examined them 321

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through studies of the Manhattan Project and its many brilliant team members.2 The reasons behind the non-use of nuclear weapons after the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima have been debated extensively. Some have suggested that nuclear weapons have not been used again because of the development of a ‘taboo’ against their use as innately immoral; a taboo created by the ‘global antinuclear weapons movement’ and the activity of non-nuclear states.3 This approach has built upon others that have explored the idea of the creation of international ‘norms’ that militate against nuclear weapons usage.4 In contrast, others have seen this as a case of standard realism, the expression of normal self-interest on the part of state actors, and rational choices that have created conventions on non-use for reasons of self-preservation.5 The idea of deterrence, based on the concept that the threat of the use of a weapon can dissuade an adversary from starting hostilities, has been widely debated.6 This has been an especially strong thread in the discussion of British nuclear weaponry, and British nuclear history has also been especially interested in the symbolic power of nuclear weapons in international relations.7 This idea has also been discussed extensively in the analysis of the weapons programmes of the smaller nuclear weapons states such as India.8 The legality of nuclear weapons has also been the subject of extensive debate.9 The comment by the Russian president Vladimir Putin in 2014, that ‘it’s best not to mess with us . . . I want to remind you that Russia is one of the leading nuclear powers’ was a chilly reminder that the debate over the exact purpose of nuclear weapons remains unresolved.10 This chapter cannot cover this complex field of debate in full. Instead, it seeks to explore the basic issue that, one might argue, frames the point of entry to all discussion about nuclear weapons; the idea, eloquently expressed by John Amery, that because nuclear weapons are ‘capable of killing entire populations, including babies, young children, adults in their prime and old people, without any regard for guilt or innocence, the retention of nuclear weapons, with the intent to use them under some circumstances, must be seen as the intent to commit genocide’.11 This was an issue that Robert Oppenheimer wrestled with, even while he led the team that brought Frisch and Peierls’ theory to reality. As he stated in 1945: If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world, or to the arsenals of the nations preparing for war, then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima. The people of this world must unite or they will perish.12 This is a collection on the history of genocide, and to explore this core question this essay returns to the historical beginning, to 1940, and the first paper of Frisch and Peierls. While the aim here is not to go deeply into the physics of their suggestion, it is important to understand the basics of what they did. This is because without understanding the actual technical issue they were addressing and their solution to it, it is difficult to understand the consequences they foresaw, and in turn their ideas about the use of the weapons. Having looked at this, the chapter then explores in detail the points Frisch and Peierls made about the effects of the weapons and what they called their ‘strategic value’ – by which they meant their utility, purpose and the moral implications they raised. In view of their remarkable document, the suggestion made here is that the ideas on the issues of nuclear weapons and their use put forward by these two émigré scientists, both men of Jewish heritage who originated in what had by 322

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then become the Nazi empire, are of singular importance in thinking about nuclear weapons and genocide. The core idea presented here is that in the heart of this technical paper there is a key issue relating to ‘nuclear culture’ that is a crucial one for our understanding. It then relates the 1940 memorandum to subsequent discussion within the British government about how, or if, nuclear weaponry might be used, as a means of looking at the extent to which the thoughts of these physicists can inform our wider understanding of nuclear weapons and genocide. The premise for this approach grows first from the clarity of Frisch and Peierls’ exposition of the issues in their memorandum, which discussed the topic in few words and with a calm humanity that remains admirable many years later. Secondly, it seems a valid approach because of the fact that the writers of the very first memorandum on how to build a nuclear weapon were unable to write only about the physics and engineering of ‘the super-bomb’. Frisch and Peierls felt compelled, in the gloomy early months of 1940, to expand their discussion to cover the implications of the weapon they proposed. The focus here is on the British case, because it is largely thanks to the fact that Frisch and Peierls were working at Birmingham University that the British became involved in the design and construction of nuclear weapons at the beginning. In consequence of that twist of fate, for over 70 years British military thinkers, scientific advisors and civil servants have wrestled with questions about how, why, and if, these weapons could be used. What I have termed elsewhere the ‘nuclear weapons cultures’ of British government are, in many ways, a consequence of this memorandum, and looking at subsequent discussions of how Britain might use nuclear weapons allows a more general examination of the key issues in thinking about whether the ‘nuclear option’ is also the genocidal one.13

The physics The issue of whether it was possible to make a militarily practical weapon that used the forces of a nuclear chain reaction was something that had hung in the air throughout the intellectual odyssey in nuclear physics that had unfolded during the first four decades of the twentieth century. Alongside the potential peaceful applications dreamt of by those working in the field, there was always the apprehension that this work might somehow be used in warfare. Until Frisch and Peierls’ memorandum, however, the physics seemed to be against this outcome. The term ‘atomic bomb’ had been coined by the writer H.G. Wells in 1914 and it has been suggested that this early use highlights, perhaps, a feeling of disquiet relating to this field.14 Wells’ fictional weapon was not based on real nuclear physics, yet his description highlighted the basic military issue in respect of any vaunted ‘atomic’ weapon. Wells described the bomb as a ‘black sphere two feet in diameter’ that was to be thrown by hand from an aircraft.15 Wells understood the mechanics of war and knew that any ‘atomic bomb’ needed to be small enough to be delivered to its target, probably by that other new technology that dominated military thought in the interwar years, the aircraft. Before 1940, however, physicists could not see a means of creating a nuclear chain-reaction using a sufficiently small mechanism for it to be useable. Then, during 1938–9, the work of Otto Hahn, Fritz Strassman, Otto Frisch and Liese Meitner identified the process of fission in uranium. The initial interpretation of this in Europe and America was that while fission could release large amounts of energy in a chain-reaction, as Frisch and Peierls explained, ‘even in a large block of ordinary 323

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uranium no chain reaction would take place since too many neutrons would be slowed down by inelastic scattering into the energy region where they are strongly absorbed by 238U’.16 This was because the fissile part of uranium (uranium 235) only constituted 0.7% of its mass, while the rest was uranium 238. The consequence was that literally tons of uranium would be needed to produce an explosion. The idea of using water to assist in the chain-reaction had been examined, but made little impact and the issue still remained the question of the delivery of such an unwieldy device to any target. As Einstein had explained in his August 1939 letter to Roosevelt, even if a chain reaction could be created, then ‘such bombs might very well prove to be too heavy for transportation by air’ and so could not be used in a militarily effective manner.17 Einstein’s letter was couched in very general terms and offered no ideas of how this problem might be solved. The consensus was that this would remain the case. Frisch and Peierls made the intellectual jump necessary to solve this problem and show how a weapon could be made that would require ‘not a matter of tons, but something like a pound or two’ of uranium.18 They suggested that the use of ‘nearly pure 235U’ would change this situation and allow the creation of ‘an extremely efficient explosive’, and what they called a ‘super-bomb’. Frisch and Peierls warned, however, that ‘since all the theoretical data bearing on this problem are published, it is quite conceivable that Germany is, in fact, developing this weapon’.19 Because of this danger, they argued both that their paper had to be kept secret, and that a research and development programme should be initiated as a matter of urgency. Frisch and Peierls passed their paper to an Australian colleague at Birmingham University, Professor Mark Oliphant, who they knew had lines of communications with the British scientific war effort.20 Oliphant, who was working on the development of radar, brought the paper’s conclusions to the attention of Sir Henry Tizard, who chaired the government’s ‘Committee on the Scientific Survey of Air Defence’.21 Within three months Tizard had organised another committee to consider the issues, the ‘Committee for the Scientific Survey of Air Warfare’, which received the innocent codename of ‘MAUD’. The MAUD committee included some of the greatest physicists of the century, including the Nobel Laureates George Paget Thomson, James Chadwick, John Cockcroft and Patrick Blackett, along with Oliphant and Philip Moon. Frisch and Peierls’ ideas were deeply challenging and it took some time for them to be accepted. It appears that the MAUD committee membership was eventually convinced by the results of experiments looking at the cross section of uranium that took place at the Carnegie Institution in Washington. As Peierls wrote in March 1941, ‘The first test of this theory has given a completely positive answer and there is no doubt that the whole scheme is feasible’.22 Having concluded that the bomb was ‘practicable’ and was ‘likely to lead to decisive results in the war’, the committee also agreed that it was possible the Nazis might be seeking such a weapon and suggested work on the concept should ‘be continued on the highest priority’ and should involve cooperation with America.23 That cooperation developed into the Manhattan Project and the eventual development of the world’s first atomic weapons. Frisch and Peierls had achieved exactly what they had aimed to do with the technical section of their paper. They had explained in theory how effective nuclear weapons could be constructed and their scientific peers had agreed that their ideas were sound after the experimental data confirmed their suggestions. They had recommended that their report be kept secret, and it was. They had suggested a research 324

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and development programme should begin, and this happened. What happened with the other part of their paper is equally fascinating, for it reveals that, in a way, the physics was the easier issue to deal with than any other aspect of the new weapon.

‘The strategic value’ Frisch and Peierls did not dissemble when discussing the destructive potential of the weapon they were suggesting. Their opening paragraph stated that the weapon would produce temperatures ‘comparable to that in the interior of the sun’. They went on to explain that this was a weapon that could cause widespread devastation. ‘The blast from such an explosion’, they wrote, ‘would destroy life in a wide area. The size of this area is difficult to estimate, but it will probably cover the centre of a big city.’ The physicists made clear that the ‘radioactive substances’ produced would kill any person entering the area for many days after the explosion. They described how ‘these radiations’ would contaminate the site of the explosion and mean that anyone entering the area for days afterwards would be killed. Frisch and Peierls also explained that the ‘radiations’ would be carried away from the detonation site by the wind, what we would now call fall-out, and that once again the effect would be fatal.24 The basic causes of destruction common to all nuclear weapons – blast, fire and radiation – were, therefore, described from the onset. No reader could be left in any doubt that the ruin involved in using the new weapon would be dreadful. The scientists went further than this description of effects, however. Having stated that they did not ‘feel competent to discuss the strategic value of such a bomb’ they proceeded to lay out, in five pithy paragraphs, a sequence of conclusions about these very matters that remain unsurpassed for clarity to this day. The import of this action has, perhaps, not been sufficiently appreciated. The men could have written a memorandum that kept purely to the physics of how the bomb could be created and a description of the possible effects. Indeed, this was the manner in which the MAUD committee wrote about the issue; their report avoided any discussion of ‘strategic value’. Frisch and Peierls’ choice to move into the area of ‘strategic value’ was a consequence of their scientific approach to the issues they were writing about – how to build an atomic bomb. It was a scientific approach that was, nonetheless, framed by cultural values. Frisch and Peierls first pointed out a military fact. The super-bomb ‘would be practically irresistible’, by which they meant ‘no material or structure could . . . resist the force of the explosion’. For all the work on hardened shelters over the following decades, this remains the case – a direct hit from a nuclear weapon cannot be survived. Having said this, they pointed out that the residual radiation would prevent any forces from entering the area ‘for several days’ and, consequently, any military advantage from such an attack would go to the side which could ‘most accurately’ establish when it was safe to enter the irradiated area; they thought this was most likely to be the aggressor. This is an important section. Although it has been suggested that the memorandum shows that the men ‘considered the only undoubtedly legitimate purpose of atomic weapons would be to act as a deterrent’, in reality the message they were developing was somewhat more complex.25 Effectively, in this paragraph Frisch and Peierls had stated that this weapon was the ultimate destructive power on the planet, but they had also said it had very real military potential. They had even explored the scientific issues, in respect of radiation, that would need to be overcome to allow such 325

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military exploitation. They had, moreover, pointed out to anyone thinking of using the weapon as a means of enhancing actual war-fighting capacity that using it first was probably going to be advantageous. Having done so, they then looked to a core moral issue they had perceived to be pertinent both to this discussion and the decisions they were asking others to make. The men pointed out that because the weapon would spread radioactive substances it ‘could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country’. Read in the context of the message in the previous paragraph this view is striking. It was this: militarily this is a viable and useful weapon, but the fact is using it will cause civilian deaths and this ‘may’ be a problem. The nature of the problem they saw is the core subject of the rest of this analysis, for it is not simply a question of saying that civilian deaths were unacceptable. Indeed, this single line is one of the most perceptive written in respect of the theoretical discussion of nuclear weapons, and probably the most useful to help in understanding the issue of genocide and nuclear weapons. It is, probably, one whose significance is largely overlooked. This may be because this is a statement about ‘nuclear culture’ that lies in the middle of a highly technical document about how to build weapons of mass destruction. Its significance can be grasped if it is seen in this light, and also in the context of the historic moment in which it was written. The idea of ‘nuclear culture’ used here comes from a Weberian sense of ‘culture’ [Kultur] as the content of everyday lives – the frameworks of understanding that social actors use to provide meaning to their daily activity.26 In this sense ‘nuclear culture’ is shorthand we can use to describe the complex structures of explanation through which individuals (and other social actors) try to make sense of the issues raised by nuclear weapons. This sentence from 1940 is an example of such activity.27 Frisch and Peierls were here writing about something that no one had seriously considered before. Forty-five years later, Peierls wrote about the memorandum in his biography. He explained that ‘we knew the terrible responsibility it would impose on the political and military leaders who would have to decide whether and when to use it. We realised it was important to make certain that the decision makers understood the new situation.’28 They approached this task in a clear fashion. They realised that they were firstly trying to explain the theoretical physics of a ‘super-bomb’ both to their scientific peers and also to non-physicists – to politicians, civil servants and soldiers. They did so with an exemplary mixture of mathematics and non-technical English. They were, also, trying to explain the destructive capacity of this weapon to the same audience. The men were not turned away from their objective by their knowledge of this capacity for devastation. Nor did they argue that the weapon was too terrible to be used, as has been argued elsewhere. Rather, they were afraid that these terrible effects could mean that the weapon might not be used if required, or might not even be built. And for Frisch and Peierls, in the dark days of 1940, this prospect, and not the idea that these weapons were ‘genocidal’, was the vital issue. The views expressed by Frisch and Peierls were based on certain core cultural understandings of Britain that the events of 1939 and 1940 had thrown into clear view. If we look at these cultural understandings Frisch and Peierls can provide an interesting insight into questions of nuclear weapons and genocide. As Peierls made clear in his biography, where he devotes one page to its composition, the memorandum was written swiftly. There was, in consequence, little chance for the men to conduct elaborate philosophical discussions beforehand.29 The very swiftness of the process is the 326

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reason that the words of the two scientists were so uncluttered, and are so useful. The physics was something they did all the time and so understood instinctively. As they admitted themselves, the strategy was something they did not work with normally. In this circumstance, to help them think about the problem they drew on shared cultural understandings to build their argument. It has been argued that the key issue here was that the effects of nuclear weapons were such that the men saw it as ‘an indiscriminate weapon’ and, therefore, one that ‘the British government might not wish to develop’.30 Frisch and Peierls did not, however, refer to the British government. In fact, they stated that the potential for civilian casualties ‘may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country’. The government is not the country, although this truth is often overlooked in analysis. This points us towards an aspect that is also often overlooked in discussions of nuclear history, which because of the secrecy involved and governmental monopoly of the weaponry tend to be very focused on the machinations of the various ‘elites’ involved.31 The discussion of the potential for civilian deaths in the memorandum was dispassionate; it was something that would happen if the weapon was used in certain circumstances. The crucial aspect here is the suggestion that civilian casualties might be a problem in respect of ‘this country’ – Great Britain. What Frisch and Peierls were pointing toward is an intuition on their part about British cultural values. It is clear from the biographies of both men that they had integrated into British life and they appreciated the country in which the vicissitudes of war had lodged them. Their recollections of the history of the memorandum are embedded in warm descriptions of their lives in Britain, whether at university or in the local villages.32 In their choice of two words, ‘this country’, the scientists were drawing upon cultural markers and inherent understandings that they shared with the potential readers of the document. They did so to highlight, in their beautifully concise fashion, that Britain was, in their minds, a country that was inherently inimical to any process of normalising the idea of the deaths of civilians and that this might be problematic. As émigrés from a Europe torn by terrible strife they saw the culture of Britain with a clarity that matched their understanding of physics. The core element of this understanding was that the principles and ethics of the country in which they were sheltering from the Nazi storm were very different from those of the regime threatening it. Of course, in the terrible years of war that followed the British government did, as many have pointed out, become involved in directly targeting civilians, but this does not mean that Frisch and Peierls’ understanding was flawed. As Thomas Zeigler has recently explained in his masterful dissection of the horrors of the Second World War, Annihilation, the fact that at certain moments in a conflict that was about the future of global civilisation the Allied powers did some awful things does not mean those powers were intrinsically awful.33 Rather, it means that when the alternative was the complete destruction of a way of life then difficult choices had to be made. Frisch and Peierls understood this. Indeed, as Central European Jews they understood it all too well. So the men did not say that these new weapons were too dreadful to ever be used. Nor did they did say they were inherently genocidal or evil. They said that the western allies could make these weapons if they chose to put the resources to the task and that, given the nature of the enemy, then this would be a sensible thing to do. The difficulty they foresaw in 1940 was that the culture of their adoptive home was unlikely to be comfortable with the weapon and that this was a potentially fatal trait. This is 327

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where interpretations that talk of this being a document from a time when the bombing of civilians was ‘regarded with horror’ and before ‘the moral slide’ that would lead to area bombing and ‘Cherwell’s infamous “dehousing policy”’ are not clearly interpreting its message.34 Frisch and Peierls were under no illusions that nuclear weapons would be a frightful addition to the human arsenal. Peierls later wrote that there was no pride to be found in having had a part in a process that would lead to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, only ‘horror’.35 The key point is that Frisch and Peierls were not afraid that these weapons would be misused by ‘this country’, in the sense that they would be used in an aggressive war against innocents, because they perceived a culture around them that eschewed such actions. Their real concern was that they might not be used by ‘this country’ at all. This perception was the critical issue that underpinned the rest of their recommendations. In the difficult days of 1940, when the Nazi machine seemed unstoppable, they were concerned that the Nazi regime had no such cultural qualms. As they phrased it: ‘If one works on the assumption that Germany is, or will be, in the possession of this weapon, it must be realised that no shelters are available that would be effective and could be used on a large scale.’36 In other words, they accepted that Hitler would use atomic weapons if they were available. Yet, if their conclusion about British culture was correct, then using the weapon would be problematic for the British. Indeed, it might be impossible. This might have two potential consequences. The British might shy away from building the weapon, in which case they would be defenceless if the Nazis did build it. Or, the British might build the weapon, but when it came to a moment when they might have to use it, they might not be able to. It was this understanding of what British ‘nuclear culture’ might become that led Frisch and Peierls to propose an alternative, which might be acceptable. The most effective reply would be a counter-threat with a similar weapon. Therefore it seems to us important to start production as soon and as rapidly as possible, even if it is not intended to use the bomb as a means of attack.37 Peierls and Frisch offered a route through the moral impasse that they perceived might cause the British to pause, perhaps fatally, in this endeavour. If built, the weapon did not have to be used. The threat of it would be enough. Its construction could then be contemplated even by those who would not want to use it ‘as a means of attack’. As Rhodes has pointed out, this statement was the first exposition of deterrence theory.38 Arnold felt that this idea was ‘the fruit of clear and logical thinking in actual and urgent circumstances rather than of academic thinking’.39 Indeed, it was the result of rigorous scientific thought processes combined with the circumstances of the moment. It was also, as has been argued here, the result of a perception of nascent ‘nuclear culture’ reached by two scientists who stood on the boundary between differing cultures of warring nations. In 1940, the Jewish heritage of both men made such matters of prime importance and helped to illuminate the issues at hand. They wanted to make ‘the destructive powers of the bomb, and its radiation effects’ clear to all, but in the context of understanding that ‘in war death, suffering, and destruction are unavoidable’. Their aim was to ensure that ‘the decision makers understood the new situation’, which was that one aircraft with an atomic bomb could deliver the destruction that had previously required hundreds, without faltering in the task that needed to be undertaken.40 Frisch and Peierls knew it was inevitable that a country, 328

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somewhere, would make the weapon. The process of the human exploration of physics made this outcome inescapable. They feared that Nazi Germany might be that country, and knew that the moral issues raised by nuclear weapons would not stop the Nazis from using it. Faced with this prospect, they offered a means by which ‘this country’ might navigate the moral quandary its culture would face when deciding what to do.

The wider context The Frisch–Peierls memorandum offers a clear way into considering the issue of nuclear weapons and genocide. It covered both the physics of the weapon as well as consideration of the strategic and moral implications in a calm and detached manner. The clarity of its scientific rigour was enhanced by its immediate insight that the weapon was not the principal concern; the crucial question was who had control of it. This is the fundamentally important point that the memorandum highlights when considering the topic of nuclear weapons and genocide. If one posits an alternative history, where the Nazis had developed an atomic bomb, the outcome is not difficult to imagine. In the hands of a regime driven by a fundamentalist ideology which brooked no alternative, such as the Nazis, nuclear weapons would have become weapons of genocide. The fundamentalism of Nazi beliefs, the callous disregard for all human life at its core, would have led a nuclear-armed Nazi regime in only one direction. This would not have been, however, a function of the weapon. In the Holocaust the weapon that ended the lives of most of the victims of Nazi genocide was not highly technical. It was the simple rifle. The genocidal path was the function of the regime and its culture. Frisch and Peierls knew this. They understood that evil is a characteristic of humans, not of technology. They understood, moreover, that in the hands of the British, and by extension, the Americans, a similar path would not be followed. They also knew, either consciously or innately, that this different moral core, which was what mattered most in 1940, was both a source of strength for the Allies, and also a potential weakness. This is why they constructed the memorandum as they did, why they did not limit themselves to the physics and why they chose to speak about areas that they accepted they did not have obvious expertise in. This argument is contentious for all sorts of reasons. One of these is that it is suggesting that there is something inherent to British national culture that militates against genocidal activity; an idea with which many will disagree. Indeed, I would go further and argue that it applies to American culture and indeed, other ‘Western culture’ more generally, an argument akin to John Lewis Gaddis’ suggestion that moral considerations were the key factor in explaining why the United States did not use nuclear weapons after 1945, even when it possessed the monopoly of them.41 Of course, the objection that is immediately raised by this statement is the fact that the American government did use two atomic weapons against Japan, and did so with the knowledge of Churchill and his government. There are serious debates that remain undecided in respect of the military need for this decision. The key issue here, in respect of the idea of genocide and nuclear weapons, is that the use of atomic weapons in 1945 was not intended to be part of what Lemkin described as ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves’.42 The history of Japan after the war is testament to that fact. The attack in 1945 was, in reality, an 329

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extension of ever-more savage conflict in the Pacific that had pushed Americans on the battlefield and in Washington into a moral quagmire. As Peierls noted, again with calm logic, ‘the number of casualties in the atomic-bomb raids were no greater than in a big fire raid on Tokyo’.43 In this sense the atomic attacks on Japan were a manifestation of the brutal depths of the conventional war that had raged across the globe from 1939. While they were awful, however, they were not genocidal. The argument that has been advanced here is that nuclear weapons are not genocidal in themselves, but as with any other weapon from the machete upwards, they have the potential to be used in a genocidal fashion. The core reason that nuclear weapons have not been used since 1945, and even when they were used it was not in such a manner, is that the powers that first came to possess these weapons embraced a core set of cultural values that could not countenance such activity. The horrors to which they were driven in the war, in fact, strengthened this trait in the years after. So, even while the British developed nuclear weapons, huge tensions developed within the British government about them. Reading the papers that have been released in respect of the British nuclear programme, it is clear that the official targeting policy in respect of British weapons always accepted that the capacity to kill millions of Soviet citizens was critical to the threat that they posed to the Soviet Union. This might seem to suggest that deterrence was a policy that masked a willingness to engage in mass killing. The perception of British nuclear culture as laid out in the Frisch–Peierls memorandum leads us to a different conclusion, however, as is borne out in other documents. Time and again in these discussions, while at the planning level the destruction of civilians was discussed openly in the discussions of what Peierls called ‘the decision makers’, there is a very strong sense that this was a nearly unthinkable option, perhaps even if Britain suffered a nuclear strike that killed millions. The reason was cultural. In February 1960, as arguments ranged over the future form of the British deterrent and whether it was actually seen as a threat by the Soviet Union, the Chief Scientific Advisor, Solly Zuckerman, summed this up in a letter to the Minister of Defence. Zuckerman, a South African of Jewish extraction who arrived in Britain in the 1920s, was one of many involved in the British nuclear project who found the idea of the British using a nuclear weapon perplexing: In a democracy, one cannot conceive of a Government giving the order to fire first. That is why – apart, apparently, from those who were in the room with us yesterday evening – no-one in Whitehall believes an order to fire would be given until – as it is usually put – ‘a Russian mushroom rose above our heads’.44 In this letter his whole point rested on the idea that Britain was a democracy; in other words that the national feeling on this issue mattered, and that this meant using nuclear weapons was almost unthinkable. Zuckerman was continually probing the nature of the British relationship to the nuclear weapon and always saw it as something alien to the national culture, and he was far from alone in this view.45 This attitude permeated the higher echelons of the British government, where Treasury officials argued that the British nuclear force was ‘never a credible weapon’; and another Chief Scientific Office, Sir Alan Cottrell, described it in 1971 to be ‘a weapon of utter desperation and is (sic) known as such’.46 Indeed, so powerful was this sense that Britain was not a nation that would use these weapons, that those few who were involved in trying to drive nuclear weapons 330

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development forward in Britain appeared often to be baffled by it and felt themselves forced to extreme measures to keep it going. Time and again the commitment to retaining nuclear weaponry in the British government was lacklustre and half-hearted. For example, the Polaris improvement programme of 1967 to 1980 was consistently starved of resources and kept going only through subterfuge on the part of those involved. In 1971, Victor Macklen, the key civil servant behind the nuclear programme at that time, bemoaned the attitude that led to this situation, exemplified in his view by Zuckerman: Incidentally Solly does not seem to think that even a nuclear strike against the UK would result in retaliation in kind, because he suggests there will be nobody left to press the trigger. If this is true we are irretrievably lost and might as well apply to join the Eastern Bloc.47 Macklen’s plaintive cry was his response to a situation resulting from a British nuclear culture that Frisch and Peierls had foreseen; a culture that did not, in its core, feel comfortable with wielding weapons of mass destruction. For the physicists in 1940 this was both a reason for confidence – because such weapons needed to be in the hands of countries reluctant to use them – and a cause of concern, because it might mean the weapon would not be built or used if necessary. It was the idea of deterrence that made the weapon palatable, just as Frisch and Peierls had envisaged, and so ensured that the British worked with the Americans to ensure that they would build the weapon first. It is also an idea that has ensured that Britain retains nuclear weapons to this day and no one fears that its armoury will be used for genocidal purposes. Frisch and Peierls’ intuition that Britain could wield such responsibility has proven well founded.

Notes 1 Churchill Archives (hereafter CA), CKFT/10/1, MAUD Committee, Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls, ‘Memorandum on the properties of a radioactive “super-bomb”’, March 1940. The entire two-part document is available at online at http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/ Begin/FrischPeierls2.shtml. 2 See for example, Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb (New York: Overseas, 1986); Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (London: Random House, 2008). 3 Nina Tannenwald, ‘Stigmatising the Bomb: Origins of the Nuclear Taboo’, International Security, Vol. 29, No. 4, Spring 2005, pp. 5–49; Nina Tannenwald, ‘The Nuclear Taboo: The United States and Normative Basis of Nuclear Non-use’, International Organization, Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer 1999, pp. 433–68. 4 There is an extensive literature on norms for nuclear issues; a good start is Maria Rost Rublee, Nonproliferation norms: why states choose nuclear restraint (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2009); see also Thomas C. Schelling, ‘A Half-Century without Nuclear War’, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, 2000, http://www.puaf.umd.edu/IPPP/Summer00/ legacy_of_hiroshima.htm.; Thomas C. Schelling, ‘The Role of Nuclear Weapons’, in L. Benjamin Ederington and Michael J. Mazarr (eds), Turning Point: The Gulf War and U.S. Military Strategy (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994), pp. 105–15. 5 For example, Daryl G. Press, Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, ‘Atomic aversion: experimental evidence on taboos, traditions and the non-use of nuclear weapons’, American Political Science Review, Vol. 107, No. 1, 2013, pp. 188–206; Scott D. Sagan, ‘Realist Perspectives on Ethical Norms and Weapons of Mass Destruction’, in Sohail H. Hashmi and Steven P. Lee (eds), Ethics and Weapons of Mass Destruction: Religious and Secular Perspectives (Cambridge University Press,

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6

7

8 9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

2004), pp. 73–95; James D. Morrow, ‘The Laws of War, Common Conjectures, and Legal Systems in International Politics’, Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 31, Pt. 2, January 2002, pp. 541–60. For widely differing views on the utility of deterrence see, Kenneth N. Waltz, The spread of nuclear weapons: more may be better, Adelphi Paper no. 171 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1981) and Ward Wilson, Five myths about nuclear weapons (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). For example, Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1974); John Simpson, The Independent Nuclear State. The United States, Britain and the Military Atom (London: Macmillan, 1983); Nuclear Illusion, Nuclear Reality: Britain, the United States and Nuclear Weapons, 1958–64 (London: Palgrave, 2010); Losing an Empire and Finding a Role: Britain, the USA, NATO and Nuclear Weapons, 1964–70 (London: Palgrave, 2012). For example, Karsten Frey, India’s Nuclear Bomb and National Security (London: Routledge, 2009); Ramesh Thakur, ‘The inconsequential gains and lasting insecurities of India’s nuclear weaponization’, International Affairs, Vol. 90, 2014, pp. 1101–24. Legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons, advisory opinion, ICJ Reports 1996, available at: w.icj-cij.org/docket/index.php?p1=3&p2=4&k=e1&p3=4&case=95 (accessed 15 September 2014); Haralambos Athanasopulos, Nuclear Disarmament in International Law (Jackson, NC: McFarland, 2000); Laurence Boisson de Chazournes, Philippe Sands, International Law, the International Court of Justice and Nuclear Weapons (Cambridge University Press, 1999). The Daily Telegraph, 7 September 2014. John Scales Avery, ‘Nuclear Warfare As Genocide’, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation available at: http://www.wagingpeace.org/nuclear-warfare-as-genocide/; see also John Quigley, The Genocide Convention: An International Law Analysis (Exeter: Ashgate, 2013), pp. 211–14. Bird, American, p. 329. R. Maguire, ‘“Never a credible weapon”: nuclear cultures in British government during the era of the H-bomb’, The British Journal for the History of Science, Vol. 45, 2012, pp. 519–33. For example, Vincent Brome, H.G. Wells. A Biography (Cornwall: House of Stratus, 2001), p. 143; Lorna Arnold ‘The History of Nuclear Weapons: The Frisch–Peierls Memorandum on the Possible Construction of Atomic Bombs of February 1940’, Cold War History, Vol. 3, No. 3, April 2003, p. 112. H.G. Wells, The World Set Free (1914), p. 47. CA/CKFT/10/1, ‘On the Construction’, March 1940 Einstein to Roosevelt, 2 August 1939, courtesy of Argonne National Laboratory, http://www. ne.anl.gov/About/legacy/e-letter.shtml (accessed 8 August 2014). Otto Robert Frisch, What Little I Remember (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 126. CA/CKFT/10/1, ‘On the Construction’, March 1940. Frisch, What Little, p. 123. David Zimmerman, Top Secret Exchange: The Tizard Mission and the Scientific War (Stroud: Sutton Press, 1996), pp.149–53 and 188–9. Zimmerman, Top, p. 188. CA/ CKFT/10/1, MAUD Committee, Report by the M.A.U.D Committee on the Use of Uranium for a Bomb, 1941. CA/CKFT/10/1, ‘On the Construction’, March 1940. Arnold, The History, p. 115. See for example, Max Weber, Der Nationalstaat und die Volkswirtschaftspolitik. Akademische Antrittsrede (Freiburg and Leipzig: J.C.B Mohr, 1895). Maguire, ‘Never’, p. 520. Rudolf Peierls, Bird of Passage (Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 203. Peierls, Bird, pp. 153–4. Arnold, ‘The History’, p. 114. For example, see John Baylis and Kristan Stoddart ‘The British Nuclear Experience: The Role of Ideas and Beliefs (Parts One and Two)’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 23, Nos 2 and 3, 2012, pp. 331–46 and 493–516. See for example Frisch, Bird, p. 157. Thomas Zeiler, Annihilation: A Global History (Oxford University Press, USA, 2014). Arnold, ‘The History’, p. 114. Peierls, Bird, p. 203. CA/CKFT/10/1, ‘On the Construction’ March 1940.

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37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

Ibid. Rhodes, The Making, p. 325. Arnold, ‘The History’, p. 115. Peierls, Bird, p. 203. John Lewis Gaddis, ‘The Origins of Self-Deterrence: The United States and the Non-use of Nuclear Weapons, 1945–1958’, in Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Washington: Carnegie Endowment, 1944), p. 79. Peierls, Bird, p. 203. The National Archives (hereafter NA), DEFE/25/13, Solly Zuckerman to Harold Watkinson, 19 February 1960. Richard Maguire, ‘Scientific Dissent amid the United Kingdom Government’s Nuclear Weapons Programme’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 63, 2007, pp. 353–60. Maguire, ‘Never’ . . . ; NA/DEFE/19/129, Letter dated 28 July 1971. NA/DEFE/19/129 Victor Macklen to CSA, 19 August 1971.

333

I NDEX

Abkhazia 249 Aboriginal people 38, 42, 43–6, 49–50, 52n38, 189, 245 Ackworth, Henry 30 Acres, George 32 Aedui 11 Aegis Trust 192 AFDL 177–8 Africa 166–82 ‘album’ procedure 59, 60, 66 Alexeyeva, Ludmilla 265 Algeria 187–8 al-Khattab, Ibn 262, 266 al-Qaeda 257 Alvarez, Alex 230 Amery, John 322 Amfilohije of Montenegro 235 Andonian, Aram 280, 284 Anglicisation 26, 27, 31, 34 anti-alienism 91 antisemitism: ‘eliminationist’ 303; Holocaust denial 196–206; Nazi collaborators during the Second World War 293, 295–6, 297, 301, 303; neo-Nazis 211; New Right discourses 220; responses to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 90, 91, 92, 97; Sipo-SD 289; Tudjman 312; see also Jews apologies 191 App, Austin 200 Appian 17, 18 Appleby, R. Scott 231, 237 Arājs, Viktor 291 Araki, Sadao 111–12 archaeology 11, 12, 13–17, 18, 20 architectural destruction 246–7, 283–4 Argentina 195n40 Armenians 3, 49, 85, 194n27, 228, 232, 275, 280–5; Azerbaijan 250; Chechnya 257; cultural genocide 246, 247, 250, 283–4;

memory and memorialisation 186–7, 190, 191; religion 233, 234, 235, 236; Turkification of children 245; Young Turk leadership 278 Arnold, Lorna 328 arrests: anti-German operations in Ukraine 56–73; Great Ukrainian Famine 145; Jews during the Second World War 295–300 Artuković, Andrija 154 assimilation, forced 241, 242, 243, 244, 281, 283 Atkins, Stephen 199 atrocities 10; Baltic states during the Second World War 291; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 105–21; ‘mass atrocity crimes’ 310; Ottoman Empire 276, 277; Wehrmacht atrocities against Serbs 156–7; see also executions; massacres; torture Auschwitz 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 290, 298 Australia 190, 232, 245; forced transfer of children 38–9, 42, 43–6, 49–50, 52n38; immigration policy 91–2; ‘Sorry Day’ 191 Austria 41, 82, 187 auto-genocide 123, 128, 129, 132 Avturkhanov, Umar 259–60, 263 Azerbaijan 250 Bach-Zelewski, Erich von dem 295 Bagenal, Nicholas 32 Bagosora, Théoneste 174, 175 Bali 187, 190 Balitskii, Vsevolod 143–4 Balkans 235, 275–7, 279–80, 284–5, 310, 316–17, 318; see also Yugoslavia, former Baltic states 187, 291–5, 303 Balytskyi, Vsevolod 70 Bangladesh 232 ‘banzai charges’ 117–18, 119

334

INDEX

Bardèche, Maurice 199 Bardgett, Suzanne 192 Bari people 243 Barnett, Michael 97–8, 101n51 Bar-On, Tamir 216, 217 Barta, Tony 50 Bartov, Omer 170, 230 Bartrop, Paul 92, 228, 230, 231, 232 Basayev, Shamil 259, 261, 262, 263, 266 Bauer, Yehuda 318n3 Bauman, Z. 158 Bayly, Christopher 115 Beilis, Mendel 2 Belarus 291, 293–5 Belgium 169, 295, 296–7, 301, 303 Beneš, Edvard 79 Benoist, Alain de 209, 216, 217–18, 220 Bentley, Helen Delich 311 Beria, Levrentii 70 Berlin 4 Beslan School massacre (2004) 263, 264, 266 Best, Werner 289 Bevan, Richard 247 Bible 232–3 Biha, Leopold 172 Bilokin’, Serhii 55 biological purity 42–3 biological weapons 1 Bishop, Neil A. 13 Bismarck, Otto von 108, 109 Black, Don 210 ‘blind process’ concept 246 BNP see British National Party boarding schools 245–6 Bohemia 81 Bonney, Thérèse 40 books, destruction of 46, 248 Borneo 106 Bosnia 187, 191, 309–20; cultural genocide 246–7, 248–9; ethnic cleansing 84–5; Roma 163n17; war with Ottoman Empire 278; see also Yugoslavia, former Bourchier, George 33 Bourdieu, Pierre 244 Bousquet, René 298 Bowker, Mike 257–74 Boxer Rebellion 117 Brabazon, William 32 Bradlow, Edna 92 Braeckman, Colette 180n5 Branche, Raphaëlle 187, 188 Brandt, Willy 186

Breitman, Richard 90 Breivik, Anders 208, 209, 221–3 Brereton, Andrew 32 British National Party (BNP) 204, 213, 215 Brooke-Popham, Robert 97 BTH Report 46, 49, 50, 52n39, 53n40 Bubnys, Arnunas 293 Buckley-Zistel, Suzanne 190 Budak, Mile 154, 312 Buddhism 129, 188 Bugnion, François 122 Bulajić, Milan 163n19 Bulgaria: forced transfer of children 47; war with Ottoman Empire 276–7, 278, 279–80 Burchett, William 122–3 Burghley, Lord 29, 31 Burma 115 Burnet, Jennie E. 190 Burundi 166–74, 179–80 Bushido Code 107, 108, 111–12, 116, 119 Butler dynasty 31 Butz, Arthur 200 bystander studies 89–90, 99 Cahit, Hüseyin 280–1 Caldwell, Malcolm 128 Cambodia 122–34, 187, 188, 232 camps 81 Canada: cultural genocide 242, 245; immigration policy 91, 92 Canaris, Constantin 295, 296 cannibalism 144, 146 Carlson, John D. 229 Carmichael, Cathie 1–5 Carthage 10, 11–12 Carto, Willis 200 casualties: Burundi 166, 172, 173; Cambodia 126, 127, 128, 129–30; Chechnya 257, 261, 262; Croatia 159–61; Democratic Republic of the Congo 166; famines in Russia 147; Great Ukrainian Famine 135, 148n3; Holocaust denial 196; Jews in Eastern Europe 290, 293, 294–5; postwar expulsions 82; Rwanda 166, 174, 176; Second World War 39; Sino-Japanese war 112; Tudor Ireland 23, 25–6, 33 Catholicism: Croatia 154, 312; response to the Holocaust 236; Tudor Ireland 26, 30 Caucusus 257, 268, 275, 276, 277 Cavid, Mehmed 278 Cemil, Yakup 280

335

INDEX

Central Europe: complex identities in 79; Jewish displaced children 40; postwar expulsions 77, 83, 84 the Centre 125, 126–30 Cerro de la Cruz 14–16, 17, 18–19 Cesarani, David 90, 91 Chalk, Frank Robert 228, 230, 310 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 216 Chandler, David 130–1 Charny, Israel W. 230, 231 Chechnya 245, 257–74 chemical weapons 1 Chentsov, Viktor 55 children 38–54; anti-German operations in Ukraine 60; Armenians 283; Australia 42, 43–6, 49–50, 52n38; Croatia 160, 161, 164n42; cultural assimilation of 245–6; Great Ukrainian Famine 146; killing of 153, 160, 161, 179; Lemkin on 47–9 Chile 189, 190 China: Japanese war with 111, 112, 114, 117, 118; Jewish refugees in Shanghai 93, 95–6; Third Indo-China War 127 Chirko, Boris 55 Chorbajian, Levon 230 Chrétien, Jean-Pierre 181n19 Christianity 232, 233–4, 236, 283; see also Catholicism; Protestantism Christians 3, 233–4, 276, 277, 279, 285 Christophersen, Thies 200 churches 235, 236, 283 Churchill, Winston 79, 329 citizenship 64, 73 civilians 1, 9; Bosnia 313–14, 315; Chechnya 262, 263; Croatia 151, 152, 159–61, 162; Great Lakes region 177; nuclear weapons 321, 326, 327; Ottoman Empire 275, 276, 277, 284–5; Rwanda 179; Second World War 39; Tudor Ireland 33; Wehrmacht atrocities against Serbs 156–7; see also non-combatants Clarke, David 12 Clarke, Nicholas Goodrich 209 Clausewitz, Carl von 109 cleansing 223; see also ethnic cleansing Cleary, Albert 118–19 Clendinnen, Inga 49 Cohen, Herman 176 collaborators 289–303 collateral damage 10 collectivisation: Cambodia 128, 129, 131, 135; Kazakhstan 147; Ukraine 136, 137, 138, 139, 140–1, 142

Collins, Barrie 180n1 Colombia 243 colonialism: colonial responses to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 89, 91, 96, 97, 98, 99; cultural genocide 241; French 123; Rwanda 167, 169; see also imperialism Combat 18 group 207 combatants 9, 39, 188, 276, 285 communism: cultural genocide 241; fall of 318; Yugoslavia 83, 310–11 Communist Party of Kampuchea (Khmer Rouge) 122, 123, 124–31 concentration camps: Bosnia 315; children 40; Croatia 151, 156, 159–61; Holocaust denial 196, 197, 198, 203; postwar expulsions 81 confiscation of food 140–1, 142, 143, 147, 148n8 Confucianism 111, 114 Congo, Democratic Republic of the (DRC) 166–70, 173, 176–8, 180, 188, 232 Connacht 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 33 Conquest, Robert 55, 67, 136 Convention on the Rights of the Child 41 Copeland, David 213–14 Copenhagen School 152 Copsey, Nigel 215 Cornish, Paul 269 Cosby, Francis 32 Ćosić, Dobrica 311 Cottrell, Alan 330 counter-insurgency 257, 258, 266, 268, 269 Crease, Wally 118–19 Crete 278 Crimea 245 crimes against humanity 310; Balkan wars 285; Bosnia 314; Great Ukrainian Famine 148; Rwanda 178 Croatia 151–65, 187, 207, 245, 311–12; Bosnian war 310, 313, 315, 316; religious differences 233; Serbian military operations in 314; see also Yugoslavia, former Cronin, Audrey Kurth 268 cultural genocide 25, 38, 39, 46–7, 241–53, 281, 283–4, 315 cultural values 327 Curp, T. David 77 Czechoslovakia: forced transfer of children 47; postwar expulsions 78–80, 81, 82, 83; reburial of national elites 311 Dadrian, Vahram 284 dangerous speech 237

336

INDEX

Danilov, Viktor 147 Dannecker, Theo 298 Darfur 232 Darnand, Joseph 299 Daws, Gavan 113 De Forges, Alison 236 De Swaan, Abram 244 Dean, Martin 294 decolonisation 187 de-Gaelicisation 27, 30 dehumanisation 233, 316 democracy 330 Democratic Kampuchea 122–34 Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) 166–70, 173, 176–8, 180, 188, 232 Dempsey, Jack 215 denial: Holocaust 196–206, 212, 215; official narratives 186–7 deportation 9; anti-German operations in Ukraine 64, 65, 66; Armenians 281, 282–3, 284; Bosnia 314; Croatia 156, 159; Great Ukrainian Famine 141, 143, 145; Iron Age 12; Jews during the Second World War 295, 296, 298, 299, 300; see also expulsions Desmond war (1579-83) 23 deterrence 322, 325, 328, 330 difference, manufacture of 123, 129, 131, 132 Dimitriev, Radko 276 disabled people 39, 40 diversity 210, 244 Dominican Republic 93, 94–5, 98 Domobranstvo 156, 157, 158, 159, 162 Douglas, R.M. 77, 84–5 Drake, Francis 32 Dreyfus, Alfred 2 Drost, Pieter 242 Dublin 25, 26, 27, 29 Dubrovka theatre siege (2002) 263, 266 Dudayev, Dzhokhar 259–60, 261, 265, 266 Duke, David 212, 219 Dulić, Tomislav 151–65 Dupaquier, Jean-Francois 181n19 Đuretić, Veselin 162n2 Eagleburger, Lawrence 317 East Prussia 80, 82 East Timor 232 Eastern Europe: children 49; complex identities in 79; displaced people 51n5; forced transfer of children 47; German police and collaborators during the Holocaust 289–95, 302; postwar expulsions 77–88

Edib, Halide 277 education 243–4, 245–6 Edwards, David 23–37 Egypt 12 Ehlers, Ernst 296 Eichmann, Adolf 295, 298 Einsatzgruppen 288–9, 290–3, 302 Einstein, Albert 324 elderly people 153, 162 elections 263–4, 269 elites 153, 244, 310 Elizabeth I, Queen of England 23, 24, 25, 27, 30 Emperor, Japanese 109–10, 114 England: conquest of Tudor Ireland 23–37; Iron Age 13; see also Great Britain English, Richard 268, 269 Enver, İsmail 277, 278, 280 Ephraim, Frank 93, 94 ESD see ethnic security dilemma Estemirova, Natalya 265 Estonia 291, 292, 293 ethnic cleansing 9, 77, 85, 310, 318n1; Bosnia 309, 314, 315; Croatia 151, 156, 158, 162; Iron Age 11, 13; Ottoman Empire 276–7, 279; postwar expulsions 80; Yugoslavia 84–5, 237; see also cleansing ethnic security dilemma (ESD) 152, 161–2 ethnicity: Europe 221; Great Lakes region 167, 169–70, 172, 176; Ottoman Empire 285; Yugoslavia 312; see also race ethnocide 9, 241–2, 243–6, 250; Iron Age 11; postwar fascism 217, 218, 220, 223 eugenics 42, 43, 49 Europe: German police and collaborators during the Holocaust 295–301, 303; Islamophobia 220, 221; New Right discourses 216–17, 218–19, 220; postwar expulsions 77–88; see also Central Europe; Eastern Europe ‘evacuation’ 42 executions: anti-German operations in Ukraine 60, 61–2, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 72; Armenians 281–2, 283; Bosnia 314, 315; Cambodia 126, 127, 129, 130; Croatia 151, 156, 157, 159–61, 162; Great Terror 70, 71; Iron Age 19; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 105–6, 114, 116; Jews during the Second World War 291, 292, 293, 294–5, 302; Tudor Ireland 26; Ukraine 141; see also massacres expropriation 281, 282

337

INDEX

expulsions 77–88, 314, 315; see also deportation ‘extirpation’ 30, 32, 33 Falkenhausen, Alexander von 296 family 48 famine: Armenians 281, 283; Cambodia 123; Tudor Ireland 23, 27, 33–4; Ukraine 135–50 far right extremism 203–4, 207, 220; see also neo-Nazis fascism: anti-German operations in Ukraine 57, 69; conceptions of 208–9; Croatia 151; Holocaust denial 199; Istrian peninsula 83; Japan 111, 114; liberalism as antithesis of 94; Nazi collaborators during the Second World War 293; New Right 209, 216–20; postwar 207–26; ‘white genocide’ concept 207, 208, 210–16; Yugoslavia 311; see also neo-Nazis Faurisson, Robert 202 Fein, Helen 168, 181n7, 228, 237 Feingold, Henry 90, 93 Felton, Mark 105–21 Ferguson, Kate 309–20 Fichev, Ivan 276 ‘Final Solution’ 38–9, 77, 197, 199, 288–9, 291, 294, 302; see also Holocaust First World War 3, 248, 278, 281, 285, 296, 319n16 FitzMaurice, James 32 Fitzpatrick, Barnaby 31 Fitzwilliam, William 28 Fjordman 220–2 forced assimilation 241, 242, 243, 244, 281, 283 Formosans 113 France: colonialism 123; deportation of Jews from 295; Dreyfus trial 2; family as primary unit 48; Holocaust denial 199; homeless children 40; Islamophobia 220, 221; minority languages 245; Nazi collaborators during the Second World War 295, 297–9, 300, 303; New Right 216; official narrative 187; war with Ottoman Empire 281 Frank, Anne 201 Frank, Hans 196, 197, 201, 205, 290 Frank, Matthew James 79 Friedländer, Saul 197, 299 Friedman, Saul 90 Frisch, Otto 321, 322–31 gacaca courts 179 Gaddis, John Lewis 329

Gaelic Irish 24–34 Galula, David 258, 268, 269 Gao Bei 95–6 Garrett, T.H. 100n17 gas chambers 198, 199, 200, 202 Gatabazi, Félicien 175 Gatrell, Peter 51n5 Gaul 12 Gaunt, David 291 Geertz, Clifford 187 Gellately, Robert 230 Geneva Conventions 114, 115, 118 Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1924) 41, 51n22 Geneva Protocol 1 genocidal massacres 9, 10 genocide: aims of perpetrators 154; Bosnia 309–10, 318; Breivik’s manifesto 208, 222; Burundi 166, 167, 168, 171, 172–4, 179; Cambodia 123, 128, 129–30, 131, 132; concept of 9; Congo 166; controversies 49; Croatia 151, 154, 162; definition of 9, 24, 228–9; Democratic Republic of the Congo 167, 168, 176–8; expulsion compared with 77, 78, 83–6; fascist movements 207; Great Ukrainian Famine 142, 143, 147, 148; Holocaust denial 196, 197, 199–200, 204, 205; Iron Age 11–12, 13, 18; memory 185–95; New Right discourses 217; nuclear weapons 321, 322, 329, 330; Ottoman Armenians 278, 280–5; Ottoman Muslims 275–80, 284–5; postwar fascism 223, 224; religion and 227, 230–8; Rwanda 166–8, 169–70, 171–2, 174–6, 178, 179, 181n7, 227; Serb claims 311; Soviet anti-German operations in Ukraine 71; theories of 153; Tudor Ireland 24; use of the term 1, 3–4, 10; ‘white genocide’ 207, 208, 210–16; see also ethnic cleansing; executions; Holocaust; massacres Genocide Convention (1948) 1, 9, 167, 214, 228; Bosnia 309, 314–15, 318; cultural genocide 243; forced transfer of children 38, 46–7; protection of children 41–2; Romania 85 Gentile, Emilio 209 Georgia 249 Germans: British colonial view of 98; postwar expulsions 77–82, 83, 85, 86; Soviet anti-German operations in Ukraine 55–76; Yugoslavia 85–6

338

INDEX

Germany: abduction of children from 47; apology to Namibia 191; coming to terms with the past 186; Croatian agreement with 155; end of the war 4; family as primary unit 48; Holocaust denial 196, 198, 199; homeless children 40; migration of children from 39; New Right 216, 219; nuclear weapon potential 328, 329; Nuremberg Tribunal 1; police forces and collaborators during the Holocaust 288–308; postwar expulsions 78–80, 84; repression of Serbs 156–7; view of Bosnian camps 310; see also Holocaust; Nazism Gestapo 288, 289, 291, 297 Gigliotti, Simone 38–54 Gilbert, Humphrey 32 Glassheim, Eagle 77, 80 Glick, Leonard B. 234, 237 globalisation 217, 218 Goebbels, Joseph 248 Goldberg, Amos 195n46 Goldhagen, Daniel 303 Gorbachev, Mikhail 135, 266 Gorky, Arshile 284 Gottberg, Kurt von 294 Gourevitch, Philip 180n6 Grachev, Pavel 260 Gracia, Francisco 13 Graf, Jürgen 203 Gramsci, Antonio 216 Great Britain: anti-alienism 91; Dominions 91–3; imperialism 99; Malaya conflict 258; neo-Nazis 211, 213–14; non-recognition of Armenian genocide 191; nuclear weapons 322, 323, 324, 326–8, 329, 330–1; policy in Bosnia 317; postwar expulsions 81, 82; response to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 89, 90, 91, 96–8; war with Ottoman Empire 281 Great Lakes 166–82 Great Terror 55, 56, 64, 67, 70, 71–2 Greece: ancient 10, 11; forced transfer of children 47, 49, 53n56; Seymour’s photographic work in 41; war with Ottoman Empire 276 Greenberg, Jonathan 187 Grey, Leonard 32 Grey de Wilton, Lord 33 Griffin, Nick 204, 211, 215 Griffin, Roger 208–9, 212, 216, 220–1, 223, 224n6 Griffioen, Pim 295–6

Grynszpan, Herschel 3 Guichaoua, André 175 Gujarat 232 Gulag 67, 145 Gumz, Jonathan 157 Gutić, Viktor 155, 158 Guyer, Sara 188 Gypsies 49; see also Roma Habyarimana, Juvenal 174, 175, 180n5 Haebich, Anna 49 Häffner, Arthur 155–6, 157, 158 Hague Conventions (1899/1907) 1, 114 Ham Hill Fort 13 Hamann, Joachim 293 Hanson, V.D. 18 hara-kiri 118, 119 Harper, Tim 115 Harpole, Robert 32 Harster, Wilhelm 299 Harwood, Richard 200, 202 Hashimoto, Kingoro 110 Hayes, Peter 201 ‘hearts and minds’ 258, 266, 269 Helvetii 11 Heng Samrin 127 Henry VIII, King of England 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30 Herero genocide 189, 195n40 Heydrich, Reinhard 288, 290, 291, 298 Hiberno-English people 24, 26, 29–30, 31, 33 Hill, Ray 205 Himeta, Mitsuyoshi 112 Himmler, Heinrich 197, 198, 288–9, 290, 291, 295–6, 302 Hinton, Alexander 185 Hirohito, Emperor 110, 114 Hiroshima 322, 328 Hitler, Adolf 3, 56, 157, 164n32, 198–9, 202, 214, 222, 295, 328 Ho Chi Minh 123 Hobbs, Mark 196–206 Hoffman, David L. 55 Hofmann, Franz 248 Holmgren, Felix 181n6 Holocaust 1, 228, 232, 309, 310, 318; Australian forced transfers compared with the 49, 50, 54n70; Breivik on the 222; clergy response to the 236; denial 196–206, 212, 215; ethnic cleansing compared with the 85; expulsions of Germans compared with the 77–8, 86; as ‘ideal type’ of

339

INDEX

genocide 238; memorials 192, 195n46; police forces 288–308; responses to Jewish refugees during the 89–101; Shoah Foundation 46; see also Nazism; Second World War Homer 10 Horowitz, Donald 169 Horstenau, Glaises von 155, 156, 157 Hou Yuon 124, 126 Howard, John 45, 49 Hu Nim 124, 126 Hughes, James 268 human experiments 106 human rights: Bosnian war 315; children 48, 50; cultural protection 242; diffusion of norms 185; discourses 191; Great Lakes region 179, 180 humanitarianism 89, 91, 96, 97–8, 99 Hun Sen 127, 130 Hungary: postwar expulsions 81, 82, 83; reburial of national elites 311; Seymour’s photographic work in 41 Huttenbach, Henry R. 231 Hutus 166–77, 179, 181n6, 190, 227, 234, 235, 236 Huxley, T.X. 43 Iagoda, Genrikh 139–40, 143 Iberian Peninsula 10, 11, 12–20 ICC see International Criminal Court Ichiki, Colonel 118 ICTR see International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda ICTY see International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia ‘identity-based violence’ 310, 312, 313, 316 ideology 4; Cambodia 123, 129, 131, 132; Croatia 159; fascist 208, 223; Holocaust denial 199; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 116; Nazi 289, 302; racial 303; religious 238; theories on mass violence 153 Ieng Sary 123, 125, 126, 130, 132 IHR see Institute for Historical Review imperialism 98, 99; Japanese 110, 114; Western 111; see also colonialism imprisonment: anti-German operations in Ukraine 66; Bosnia 309–10; Cambodia 126–7; Chechnya 264; Great Terror 67, 71; Rwanda 179; Ukraine 141, 142, 145 India 187, 322

indigenous peoples 232, 246; ‘alchemic’ humanitarianism 97, 98; Cambodia 130; languages 244–5; legal rights for 189 indiscriminate violence 151, 152, 153, 158–9, 275, 276, 285 Institute for Historical Review (IHR) 200, 201 institutions: cultural 241, 242, 243, 248–9, 315; religious 232, 236–7 intelligence 259 intent 9, 12 internally displaced persons (IDPs) 171 International Criminal Court (ICC) 180 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 166, 179 International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) 84, 85, 237, 316, 317 international law 10 internment 97, 98 Inukai, Tsuyoshi 112 Iraq 232, 249 Ireland 23–37 Iron Age 9–22 Irving, David 198–9, 201, 202–3 Islam 233, 234, 236; Bosnia 249; Chechnya 257, 259, 264, 265, 268; forced conversion of Armenians 283; see also Muslims Islamophobia 209, 220–1, 222 Israel 91, 95, 187, 196, 267 Italy 41, 83, 220 Itucci 17–18 Ivnitskii, Nikolai 147 Jackson, Paul 207–26 Jacobs, Steven Leonard 230–1, 232 James V, King of Scotland 26 Japan: atomic weapons used against 329–30; military brutality during the Second World War 105–21; response to Jewish refugees 95 Jasenovac Concentration Camp 159–61, 312 Jaulin, Robert 243 Jensen, Peder 220–2 Jews: Australian forced transfers compared with the Holocaust 49; Baltic genocide museums 187; burning of Jewish books 248; Croatia 151, 154, 158, 159, 162, 164n39, 164n42; displaced children 39–41; fascist ideology 208; German police and collaborators during the Holocaust 289– 303; Holocaust denial 196–206; ‘Jewish Holocaust’ concept 86; Nazi drive for biological purity 42–3; neo-Nazi views on 210, 212, 213; New Right discourses 219,

340

INDEX

220; pogroms 235; postwar expulsion of Germans compared with the Holocaust 77–8; responses to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 89–101; Romania 85; Russia 1, 2–3; Shoah Foundation 46; Sipo-SD role 288, 289; wearing of the Star of David 127; see also Holocaust Jinks, Rebecca 185–95 JNA see Yugoslav People’s Army Jonassohn, Kurt 228, 230, 310 Jones, Adam 86 Jordan, Colin 206n39, 209, 211, 214–15 Judd, Frank 266 Judd, Tony 199 Juergensmeyer, Mark 231 Jungclaus, Richard 296 Junge, Mark 55 justice 178–9, 180, 191 Kabila, Laurent 176–7, 178 Kadyrov, Akhmad 263–4, 266 Kadyrov, Ramzan 264–5, 268–9 Kagame, Paul 167–8, 170, 175, 176, 177 Kaganovitch, Lazar 136, 137, 138, 139–40, 141–2 Kaing Kek Iev 126 Kaldor, Mary 313 Kallis, Aristotle 207, 223–4 Kalyvas, Stathis 152, 162 Kampuchea 122–34 Kaneko, Anji 110 Kaplan, Marion A. 94 Katsura, Taro 109 Katz, Steven 309, 318n3 Kawakami, Soroku 109 Kayibanda, Grégoire 171 Kazakhstan 147 Keitel, Wilhelm 156 Kemal, Mustafa 278 Kemp, Arthur 215 Kenya 96–7 Khataievych, Mendel’ 57 Khieu Samphran 124, 126 Khmer Rouge 122, 123, 124–31, 188 Khrushchev, Nikita 62, 67, 71, 135–6 Kiernan, Ben 130–1, 230 Kinkel, Klaus 319n7 Kinsale, Battle of (1601-2) 24 Kita, Ikki 111 Klatsch, Hermann 43 Knochen, Helmut 297 Knüsel, Christopher 13 Knuth, Rebecca 249

Kohl, Helmut 319n7 Komar, Debra 16 Kondrachin, Viktor 147 Konoe, Prince 112, 116 Korea 111 Kosovo 235, 311, 312, 320n45 Kossior, Stanislas 137, 138, 144, 147 Kössler, Reinhart 189 Kotlowski, Dean 93 Kovalenko, Lidia 143 Kranzler, David 95 Kraut, Alan 90 Krebbs, Pierre 216, 218, 220, 225n34 Krstić, Radislav 84 Krüger, Friedrich 290 Kuban 135, 136, 138, 142, 145 Kube, Wilhelm 293, 294 kulaks: anti-German operations in Ukraine 58, 63, 67, 69, 72; Great Ukrainian Famine 136, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144 Kulcytsky, Stanislas 142, 143, 145 Kulischer, Eugene 39 Kundera, Milan 173 Kurds 245 Kuromiya, Hiroaki 55, 57 Kurtagić, Alexander 219–20, 222 Kushner, Tony 89, 90, 91, 99 Kvaternik, Eugen 154, 155–6, 163n28 La Almoina 19 La Hoya 13–14, 15 Labitolosa 19–20 Lane, David 207, 209, 210–12, 213, 215 Lange, Rudolf 291 Langenbacher, Eric 77 language: cultural genocide 46, 242; ethnocide 244–5; minority education 244; religious 234–5; Tudor Ireland 29; Ukraine 142 Laos 123, 125 Latvia 291–2, 293 Laxa, Vladimir 158 Lazar, Tsar 312 League of Nations 1, 41, 169 Lebed, Alexander 261 Ledgerwood, Judy 188 Lemarchand, René 166–82 Lemkin, Raphael 1–3, 4, 210, 228–9, 309, 313, 318, 329; children 41, 47–9, 50; cultural genocide 46, 47, 241, 242, 243, 247–8, 315; family 44; Great Ukrainian Famine 147; Ukraine 55

341

INDEX

Leplevs’kyi, Israel’ 70, 76n49 Leuchter, Fred A. 201–2 Levi, Neil 54n70 Levi, Primo 99 Lewis, Vinita A, 41 liberalism: New Right rejection of 217, 218; responses to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 89, 91, 93, 94, 96, 98 libraries, destruction of 241, 242, 248–9, 315 Lieberman, Benjamin 77–88 linguistic genocide 245 Lippman, Matthew 242 Lipstadt, Deborah 199, 202, 203, 318n3 Lithuania 292–3 Little, David 234 Living Marxism 318n6 Lohse, Heinrich 291 Lomax, Eric 106 Lon Nol 124, 125, 126, 128, 129 London, Louise 90 London Naval Treaty (1930) 112 Longman, Timothy 236, 237–8 Lugard, Lord 96 Macardle, Dorothy 41 MacDonald, Malcolm 97, 98 Mace, James 135 Macedonia 47, 277 Mack, Phyllis 230 Macklen, Victor 331 Macklin, Graham 215 Mackworth, Humphrey 32 Maguire, Richard C. 321–33 Malaya 258 Malby, Nicholas 28, 32, 33 Mali 249, 250 Mamdani, Mahmood 232, 235 Manhattan Project 322, 324 Maniak, Volodymyr 143 Mann, Michael 223 martial law 26, 27 Martin, Terry 55 Mary I, Queen of England 25, 26, 27 Maskhadov, Aslan 259, 260–2, 263, 266, 267 ‘mass atrocity crimes’ 310 mass violence, theories on 152–4 massacres: Armenians 281–2, 284; Croatia 156; Democratic Republic of the Congo 177; genocidal 9, 10; Iron Age 12, 13, 17, 18, 20; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 105–6, 115; Jews 291; Ottoman Empire 276, 277, 284, 285;

Rwanda 167, 175, 179; Srebrenica 84–5, 310, 317–18; Tudor Ireland 24, 32, 33; see also executions material culture 241, 242, 246–50, 281, 283–4 Mattogno, Carlo 203 MAUD committee 324, 325 McCalden, William 200 McGregor, Russell 50 McNutt, Paul 93–4 McVeigh, Timothy 213 Meckel, Klemens Jacob 108–9 media 258, 267 Meershoek, Guus 301 Meiji Restoration 108 Meinen, Insa 297 Melians 11, 232 Melson, Robert 182n24 memorials 185, 188, 192, 311 memory 185–95, 249 Mendiluce, José Maria 314 Menteşe, Halil 279 Merrie England – 2000 (Jordan) 206n39, 214–15 Middle Ages 4 Milentijević, Radmila 311 Miles, William 192 Milice 299 military power: Japan 108–9; Russia 258, 260, 262–3 military training 109, 112–13, 118, 119 Milošević, Slobodan 311, 312, 314, 319n14 Mindanao Plan 94 minority protection 244–5 missionaries 243 mixed-race people: Australia 42, 43, 44; Nazi Germany 43 Mladić, Ratko 247, 317 Moeller, Robert 78 Molotov, Vyacheslav 70, 136, 137, 139–40, 141, 143, 146 Moltke, Helmut von 109 Montenegro 276, 278 Moore, Bob 301 Moravia 80, 81 Morawska, Ewa 51n5 Mordaunt, Nicholas 32 Morse, Arthur D. 89 Moryson, Fynes 23 Moses, Dirk 47 Mosse, George 209 Mountjoy, Viceroy 23, 24 Mugesera, Leon 235

342

INDEX

Mulele, Pierre 173 Mullaghmast, massacre of (1577) 24 multiculturalism 222 Munro, David 123 Munster 23, 27, 32, 33–4 museums 185, 187, 188, 190, 192, 195n46 Museveni, Yoweri 177 music 25 Muslims: Bosnia 84–5, 163n17, 309, 313–14, 315–16, 318; Breivik’s manifesto 208, 222–3; Cambodia 129; Chechnya 265; contemporary Islamophobia 220–1; Croatia 159; cultural genocide 250, 315; genocide against Ottoman Muslims 275–80, 284–5; Kosovo 235; New Right discourses 217; rape of women 315–16, 320n45; theological warrants 233; Yugoslavia 237; see also Islam Mwambutsa, King of Burundi 172 Mworoha, Emile 173 Naci, Ömer 280 Nagasaki 322, 328 Naimark, Norman M. 55, 71, 168 Nakano, Seigo 111 Nama genocide 189 Namibia 187, 189, 191 Nanking, Rape of (1937) 111, 112 narratives 186–8, 249 national unity 188 nationalism: American 90; Cambodia 130; Croatia 151; cultural genocide 241; cultural policies 243; education and 243–4; fascist ideology 223; global-cosmopolitan 243; Holocaust denial 196; Japanese ultra-nationalism 107, 108, 110, 111, 119; Namibia 187; Nazi collaborators during the Second World War 294; Ottoman Empire 279, 281, 285; Serbia 313; South Africa 92; Ukraine 135, 141; Yugoslavia 311 Native Americans 245 Nauman, Erich 299 Nâzim, Mehmed 277, 280 Nazism: anti-German operations in Ukraine 57; Baltic genocide museums 187; biological purity 42–3; Breivik on 222; colonisation of Poland 41; cultural genocide 246, 248; Einsatzgruppen 288–9; ‘Final Solution’ 38–9, 77, 197, 199, 288–9, 291, 294, 302; Germanisation of Polish children 245; Great Ukrainian Famine 135; Holocaust denial 196–206; intellectual and

artistic victims 251; migration of children 39; New Right discourses 217–18, 219; nuclear weapon potential 328, 329; postwar fascism 207, 209; Stalinism compared to 136; treatment of prisoners-of-war 107; US responses to the Holocaust 89–90; see also Germany; Holocaust; Second World War Ndabemeye, Thomas 173 Ndadaye, Melchior 174 neo-Nazis 200, 207, 208–9, 210–16, 217, 220 Netherlands 295, 299–301, 303 Neville, A.O. 44 New Right 209, 216–20 Ngirumpatse, Mathieu 175 Nicholson, Michael 315 Nietzsche, Friedrich 220 Nikol’s’kyi, Volodymyr 55, 67 Nkurunziza, Pierre 173, 179 NKVD 55–76, 146 Non Suon 122 non-combatants 9; Chechnya 257; Ottoman Empire 276, 285; Tudor Ireland 33; see also civilians non-material culture 241, 242, 243–6 Norris, John 32 Ntare, King of Burundi 172 Ntaryamira, Cyprien 174 Nubian Culture 12 ‘nuclear culture’ 323, 326, 328, 331 nuclear weapons 321–33 Numantia 12 Nuon Chea 124, 125, 126, 129 Nuremberg Laws (1935) 42, 44 Nuremberg Trials 1, 199, 288, 302 Nzirorera, Joseph 175 Ó Tuathail, Gearóid 317 obedience 109, 110, 112, 113–14, 118 Oberg, Carl Albrecht 298, 302 Odessa 66, 69, 140, 142 Odian, Yervant 284 Odintsov, Alexandre 144 official narratives 186–8, 249 O’Hare McCormick, Anne 82 Okawa, Shumei 111 Okhotin, Nikita 55 Oliphant, Mark 324 Olynthus, siege of 12 O’Meara, Michael 216, 218–19, 220, 226n35 O’Neill, Hugh 31 O’Neill, Kevin Lewis 185 O’Neill, Shane 31

343

INDEX

Oppenheimer, Robert 322 Ormond, ‘Black Earl’ of 33 Ottoman Empire 1, 3, 275–87; see also Turkey Pakistan 187 Palestine 91, 98, 187 palingenesis 208–9, 212, 220–1 Pape, Ilan 318n1 Parsons, William S. 230 Patterson, David 237 Pavelić, Ante 151, 155–6, 158, 164n39 Paxton, Robert 203 peasants 135–6, 138–47, 148n6; see also kulaks Peierls, Rudolf 321, 322–31 Pelham, William 32–3 Peloponnesian War 10, 11 Perry, Marvin 202, 203 Petlura, Symon 3 Petrovski 137 Philippines 93–4, 98, 106 Phillips, Gary A. 237 Pickard, Terry 179 Pierce, William 206n38, 210, 212–13 Pilkington, Doris 46 pogroms 1, 2–3, 171, 235; see also massacres Pol Pot 122–32 Poland: cultural genocide 248; expulsions from 77; forced transfer of children 47; German police and collaborators during the Holocaust 289–91; ghettos 39; Nazi colonisation of 41; pogroms 1; postwar expulsions 78–9, 80, 81, 85; reburial of national elites 311; Seymour’s photographic work in 41; Soviet relations with 139 Poles: cultural genocide 246; Nazi Germanisation of Polish children 245; postwar expulsions 82–3; in Ukraine 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 66, 72 police, German 288–308 policy: British colonial 96, 97–8; Chechnya 263–5, 269; Great Ukrainian Famine 141–2; Tudor Ireland 25, 26, 27, 31 Politburo 56, 57, 66, 70, 136, 139, 140, 142, 145 Politkovskaya, Anna 264, 265 Polybius 10 Ponomarev, Lev 257 Portugal 27 Posen, Barry 152 ‘positivist fallacy’ 12, 17 postwar expulsions 77–88

Potsdam Agreement (1945) 80, 81, 82, 85 power: memory linked with 185, 186; Rwanda 176; symbolic violence 244 Primakov, Yevgeni 266 prisoners-of-war (POWs) 1; anti-German operations in Ukraine 59–60; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 105–6, 107, 110, 111, 113, 114–19; Nazi treatment of 107 propaganda: antisemitic 1, 92; Cambodia 128; German 80, 248; Holocaust denial 199; Japanese 112, 115, 119; religious institutions 236; Rwanda 235; theories on mass violence 153; Ukraine 61, 69; Young Turks 279 Protestantism 25, 27, 30, 236 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 198, 202 Prussia 107, 108, 109 Prützmann, Hans-Adolf 291 psychosocial dissonance 123, 129, 131 Purges (Stalinist) 70, 71, 74n11 Putin, Vladimir 257–8, 262, 264, 265–7, 269–70, 322 Quesada-Sanz, Fernando 9–22 race: anti-alienism 91; Australia 43–4; British colonial policy 97; forced transfer of children 39; Japanese ideas of racial superiority 109, 110, 111, 114, 115, 119; Nazi ideology 302, 303; New Right discourses 216–17, 218, 219, 220; postwar fascism 223, 224; responses to Jewish refugees 89, 96; Rwanda 176; South Africa 92–3; ‘white genocide’ concept 207, 208, 210–16; see also ethnicity racial identity 95–6 racialism 29, 30 racism: Australia 43; Burundi 171; Cambodia 129–30; Japanese perception of Western 111, 112, 114, 119; Pan-Asianism 114; postwar fascism 209; South Africa 92; Tudor Ireland 29; see also xenophobia Radcliffe, Henry 32 Radcliffe, Thomas 32 radiation 325–6 Raleigh, Walter 32 rape: Bosnia 315–16; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 106, 110; Kosovo 320n45; Ottoman Empire 276; postwar expulsions 82 Rape of Nanking (1937) 111, 112

344

INDEX

Rassinier, Paul 198, 199, 200 Ratcliffe, Alexander 198 Rathlin Island massacre (1575) 32 rationalist models 153–4 Rauter, Hans Albin 299, 300 Ražnatović, Željko ‘Arkan’ 312–14 Read, Peter 44 Reeder, Eggert 296 Reeve, Jennifer 89–101 refugees: Armenians 284; Bosnia 315; Cambodia 122, 128; Chechnya 264; Eastern Europe 51n5; forced transfer of children 47; German 80; Great Lakes region 167, 169, 170, 171, 176–7, 181n18; Great Ukrainian Famine 142–3; Ottoman Empire 277; responses to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 89–101 Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) 288, 289, 291, 292, 295, 297 Rein, Leonid 294 religion 227–40; alterity 232, 233–4; cultural genocide 46; definition of 229–30; genocide studies 230–1; religious figures and institutions 232, 236–7; rhetoric 232, 234–5, 237; theological warrants 232–3; Tudor Ireland 25; see also Christianity; Islam Renda, Mustafa Abdülhalik 278 residence permits 64 Responsibility to Protect 318 retribution, genocide by 168 revenge 278, 285, 294 revisionism 198, 203 Reyntjens, Filip 182n25 rhetoric 237 Rhodes, Richard 328 Riedlmayer, András 247 rights: children 41–2, 47, 48, 50; cultural protection 242; Weber on 234; see also human rights Ristaino, Marcia Reynders 95 Roesler, Hermann 109 Roginskii, Arsenii 55 Roma: Croatia 151, 154, 159, 160–1, 162, 163n17; Nazi Germany 40, 42 Romania: destruction of Jews in 85; forced transfer of children 47; postwar expulsions 79 Rome, ancient 10, 11, 13, 14–20 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 324 Ros Nhim 126 RPA see Rwandan Patriotic Army

RPF see Rwandan Patriotic Front RSHA see Reichssicherheitshauptamt Rubenstein, Richard L. 233, 237 Rubenstein, William 90 Rudasingwa, Théogène 175 Rudd, Kevin 45, 191 rules of engagement 10 Russell, William 28, 29, 31 Russia: Armenian refugees 284; Chechnyan war 257–74; Free Love conception 48; Japanese war with 111; Jews in 1, 2–3; nuclear weapons 322; relations with Ukraine 147; Russian Empire 275; war with Ottoman Empire 281; see also Soviet Union, former Rwanda 166–72, 174–6, 181n7, 227, 232; Gourevitch’s fiction on 181n6; Katz’s ‘struggle for tribal domination’ view 309; memory and memorialisation 187, 188, 190, 191, 192; religion 233, 234, 235, 236; victor’s justice 178–9 Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) 175, 176, 177, 178 Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) 167, 171–2, 174, 175, 179, 188, 190 Rwasa, Agathon 173 Rwuri, Joseph 173 Şahabeddin, Cenap 279 Saidi, Adnan bin 115 Sakamoto, Pamela Rotner 95 Samuelson, Lennart 55 samurai 107–8, 110, 116, 117, 118 Sandberger, Martin 292 Sarajevo 248–9, 312, 315, 316 Sarkisov, Sarkis 57 Schabas, William 50n2 Scheffer, David 319n11 Schöngarth, Karl 299, 302 Schuma 293–4 Schwartzbard, Sholom 3 Schweitzer, Frederick 202, 203 scorched-earth strategy 33, 112 Scotland 26, 28 Second World War 1, 80, 224, 318, 327; Australia 50; children 39–40, 48; civilian/ combatant distinction 39; end of the 77; fascist movements 207; forced migration 79; Holocaust denial 196–206; Japanese military brutality during the 105–21; Serbs and Croats 312; see also Holocaust; Nazism Sells, Michael 235, 316

345

INDEX

Sémelin, Jacques 228 Semystyaha, Volodymyr 55–76 seppuku 108, 118 Serbia 187, 311–12; Bosnian war 312–16, 317; postwar expulsions 79; rape of women in Kosovo 320n45; religious differences 233; Serbian Orthodox Church 237; war with Ottoman Empire 276, 278; see also Yugoslavia, former Serbs: Balkan wars 285; Bosnian war 84–5, 310, 312–16; Croatia 151, 154–6, 157–60, 162, 245; cultural genocide 246, 248–9; genocide museum 190; German repression of 156–7; Kosovo 235; religion 233, 237; Second World War 312 Servilianus, Quintus Fabius Maximus 18 sexual violence 315, 316 Seymour, David ‘Chim’ 40–1 Seyss-Inquart, Arthur 299 Shakir, Bahaeddin 277, 280 Shamtanjian, Michael 284 Shanghai 93, 95–6 Shapoval, Yuri 55 Sharf, Andrew 89 Sharinian, George 230 Shaw, Martin 85, 228 Sherman, A.J. 90 Shibura, Albert 173 Shields, James 217 Shintaro, Uno 112, 118 Shoah Foundation 46 Shpigun, Gennadi 262 Siberia 147 sieges 12 Sienkiewicz, Henryk 1–2 Sihanouk, Norodom 123, 124, 126 silences 187, 192 Simbananiye, Artémon 172, 173 Sin Song 125 Singapore 106, 115 Sinti 42 Sipo-SD 288–303 Skeffington, William 30, 32 Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove 244–5 slavery 10, 47, 106 Slavs 233–4, 249 Slovakia 83 Smith, Bradley 202 Smith, Jonathan Z. 229 Smith, Rupert 266, 268, 269 Smith, Steven 176 Smith, T.O. 122–34

Snodgrass, Anthony 12 Snyder, Timothy D. 55, 72, 135 Social Darwinism 43 social security dilemma (SSD) 152–3 socialism 69, 70, 71 Son Sen 126, 127 Sook Ching Massacre 106 South Africa 91, 92–3, 185, 212, 219 Soviet Union, former (USSR): anti-German operations in Ukraine 55–76; Armenian genocide 194n27; border with Poland 79; collapse of the 191; cultural genocide 242, 245, 248; forced transfer of children 47; German invasion of 291, 302; German refugees 80; Great Ukrainian Famine 135–50; homeless children 40; Molotov-Ribbentrop pact 290; nuclear deterrence against the 330; postwar expulsions 81, 82, 83; see also Russia Spain 26, 27 speech, dangerous 237 Spenser, Edmund 23, 30 Spigel, Natan 251 Srebrenica 84–5, 189–90, 192, 247, 310, 317–18 SS 197, 198, 200, 288, 289, 290, 294, 297, 302 SSD see social security dilemma Stäglich, Wilhelm 200 Stalin, Joseph: anti-German operations in Ukraine 56–8, 60, 66–7, 70, 71–2, 74n11; Great Ukrainian Famine 135, 136, 137–43, 145, 147, 148; Polish border change 79 Stanek, Tomáš 79–80 Stanley, George 32 Starčević, Ante 151 Stepashin, Sergei 262 sterilisation 42 Sticpewich, Bill 113 Stolen Generations 44–5, 49–50, 189, 190, 191, 245 Stone, Dan 185 Stover, Eric 191 Strauch, Eduard 288, 291, 293, 294–5, 301–2 Straus, Scott 174, 175–6 Stülpnagel, Otto von 297 Sudan 232, 233 suicide 114, 117, 118 surrender 115, 116–17, 118 surveillance 65 Sweden 242 symbolic violence 244 symbols, destruction of cultural 241, 242, 247, 315 Syria 249–50

346

INDEX

Ta Mok 126, 127 Tacitus 18, 20 Takamori, Saigo 108, 111 Talaat, Mehmed 3, 277, 278, 280, 282, 283, 287n32 Taliban 249 Tanzania 170 Tarston, Robert 55 Tatarinov, Igor 55–76 Tchoubar 137, 138 Tehlirian, Soghomon 3 Tekinay, Alev 218 Temoney, Kate 227–40 terrorism: Chechnya 257, 258, 261–3, 265–7, 268, 269; postwar fascism 213, 222, 224; religion and 231; roots in poverty 270 Terry, Nick 203 Thompson, Mark 311, 312 Tibet 232 Tizard, Henry 324 Todorova, Maria 316 Tojo, Hideki 116 Torrès, Henry 3 torture: Bosnia 316; Cambodia 127; Iron Age 15, 19; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 118–19 Totten, Samuel 228, 230, 232 Tou Samouth 124 TRC see Truth and Reconciliation Commission Treaty of Versailles (1919) 111 Treblinka 203 Tremayne, Edmund 30 Trenin, Dmitry 260 troikas 60, 68, 75n11, 75n20 Trojans 10 Trotsky, Leon 276 Trotskyists 70 Trujillo, Rafael 94, 95 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) 179–80, 185 Tudjman, Franco 311, 312 Tudor Ireland 23–37 Tulp, Sybren 300 Tuol Sleng 126–7, 128, 130, 188 Turkey 3, 185, 190, 191, 194n27; cultural genocide 246, 247, 250; denial of Armenian genocide 186–7; religion 234, 235; Turkification of Armenian children 245; see also Ottoman Empire The Turner Diaries (Pierce) 212–13, 215 Tutsis 166–77, 181n6, 190, 227, 234, 235, 236

Uganda 166, 169, 170, 171, 172 Ukraine: Civil War 3; cultural genocide 248; Great Famine 135–50; massacres of Jews in 291; Nazi collaborators during the Second World War 293; postwar expulsions 82–3; Soviet anti-German operations 55–76 Ulrikh, Vasili 74n11 Ulster 23, 24, 27, 28–9, 31, 32, 33 Umarov, Doku 267 UN Declaration of Human Rights (UNDHR) 42 UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959) 42 UNESCO see United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Ünğör, Ugur Ümit 241–53, 275–87 UNICEF see United Nations Children’s Fund United Kingdom see Great Britain United Nations (UN): Ad Hoc Genocide Committee 242; Bosnian war 314–15; Great Lakes region 177–8; Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide 237; Srebrenica massacre 317–18; ‘white genocide’ concept 212, 214, 215 United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) 41 United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948) 1, 9, 167, 214, 228; Bosnia 309, 314–15, 318; cultural genocide 243; forced transfer of children 38, 46–7; protection of children 41–2; Romania 85 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) 40, 41 United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) 39–40, 41 United States (US): assimilation of immigrants 94; children’s rights 41; counter-insurgency 257; cultural genocide 242; family as primary unit 48; imperialism 99; invasion of Iraq 249; Japanese banzai charges against US troops 117–18; Jewish refugees settling in the Dominican Republic 95; neo-Nazis 210–12; nonrecognition of Armenian genocide 191; nuclear weapons 329; policy in Bosnia 317; postwar expulsions 81, 82; response to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust 89, 96; Vietnam War 124 UNRRA see United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration The Uprising (Jordan) 215

347

INDEX

Urban, Thomas 77 Uspens’kyi, Oleksander 70, 71 Ustaša 151–2, 154–9, 161–2, 207, 245, 312, 316, 319n16 Uwilingiyimana, Agathe 175

Wildt, Michael 289 Williams, J.M. 106, 115 women: Armenians 283; Croatia 160, 161; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 106; postwar expulsions 82; rape of Bosnian Muslims 315–16; rape of Kosovar Muslims 320n45; Srebrenica 189–90; wives of arrested Ukrainian Germans 61, 63; wives of irregular fighters 316; Yugoslavia 311 World War One see First World War World War Two see Second World War Wyman, David S. 89–90

Valencia 19 Vallat, Xavier 298 values 327 Van Eetvelde, Robby 288–308 Van Krieken, Robert 49, 50 Van Pelt, Robert 202, 203 vandalism 242, 246–50 Vartanian, Henry 283 Vazov, Vladimir Minchev 276 Veličković, Svetlana ‘Ceca’ 312–13 Venezuela 243 Vichy regime 297–9 Vickery, Michael 130–1 victimisation 285 Vietnam 122, 123–5, 127, 130 Vietnam War 124, 125 violence, theories on mass 152–4 Viriathus 17–18 Volga 147 Vyshynskii, Andrei 70

xenophobia: Cambodia 122, 124, 125, 127, 129–30, 131, 132; Japan 114, 119; Soviet Union 56

Walsingham, Francis 29 war 4; ancient 10–11, 17; Bosnia 309–20; Chechnya 257–74; Ottoman Empire 275, 276–7, 281, 284–5; Rwanda 176; Tudor Ireland 23 war crimes 10, 310; Japanese military brutality during the Second World War 115–16, 120; Ottoman Empire 276 wars of extermination 4 Wasserstein, Bernard 90, 96 Weber, Mark 200, 202, 203 Weber, Max 234 Wehrmacht 156–7, 162, 289–90, 293, 302 Weitz, Eric 170 Wells, Allen 94 Wells, H.G. 323 Werth, Nicolas 135–50 ‘white genocide’ 207, 208, 210–16 White Genocide Manifesto 207, 211 whiteness 93, 97 Wild, Cyril 115 Wilders, Geert 209, 220

Yamagata, Aritomo 108–9 Yanda, André 173 Yeltsin, Boris 257–8, 259–61, 262, 265, 267 Yezhov, Nikolai 56, 58, 59, 61, 65, 68, 71, 73 Yokusankai, Taisei 116 Young Turks 275, 276, 278–9, 280–2, 285; cultural genocide 246, 247, 250, 283; famine manufactured by 283; leadership 277–8 Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) 313–14 Yugoslavia, former 190, 232, 310–11, 318; cultural genocide 246–7, 248–9; ethnic cleansing 84–5; ethnic Germans in 85–6; postwar expulsions 80, 81, 83; religion 233, 237; see also Bosnia; Croatia; Serbia Zahra, Tara 48 Zakaev, Akhmad 266 Zayas, Alfred Maurice de 78 Zeigler, Thomas 327 Zelenin, Ilia 147 Zeller, Ron 295–6 Zietek, Jerzy 80 Zinnemann, Fred 40 Zionist conspiracy theories 198, 199, 203, 204, 211 Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) 204, 206n38 Zuckerman, Solly 330, 331 Zündel, Ernst 201–2 Zvornik 313–14, 315

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