Edward Kissi. World at Risk: A Global Issues Sourcebook. 2nd Edition, CQ Press, 2010.
Genocide is a twentieth-century term describing an ancient crime. In the minds of many people, genocide is any kind of morally objectionable killing of people. We could describe this view as the “popular-moral” discourse on genocide. The existence of this type of discourse—the use of the word genocide and the imagery of annihilation that it conjures to draw public attention to mass killing—should not obscure the actual meaning of genocide or the specific crime it describes. To scholars who study genocide, the word genocide means the intentional destruction, which includes killing, of particular groups of people by a perpetrator, often a state, and in recent years, by organized and armed non-state groups or militias. We could describe this view as the “academic-legal” discourse on genocide. Genocide, thus, describes a specific crime against humanity, which must be understood within a historical and legal context. A great deal of effort has been made by the United Nations, individual states, and scholars to define genocide as a crime against humanity punishable under international law. Yet genocide persists in many forms, and the perpetrators often escape the grasp of the law in their own countries and internationally.
Historical Background and Development
The origin of the word genocide can be attributed to Raphael Lemkin (1900-1959). He coined the word from the Greek word genos (“race, nation or tribe”) and the Latin word cide (“to kill”). As Lemkin later articulated in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, genocide meant “a coordinated plan of different actions” undertaken by a state or government to destroy the “essential foundations of the life of an ethnic group” as part of completely annihilating the group. Thus, Lemkin’s original idea of genocide emphasized the physical destruction of groups as well the deliberate destruction of the culture or identity (the essential foundations of the life) of the target group. Lemkin tried, but failed, in 1933 at the Fifth International Conference for the Unification of Criminal Law in Madrid, to convince the participants to declare the destruction of what he called “racial, religious or social collectivities” a crime under international law.
An aspect of what Lemkin characterized as genocide actually took place during the course of World War II in the deliberate and systematic attempt by Nazi Germany to exterminate European Jews in what is now called the Holocaust. After the war, with the images of the Holocaust still fresh in public memory and through Lemkin’s lobbying efforts, the new postwar international body, the United Nations, passed a unanimous resolution on December 11, 1946, to label as a crime under international law the forms of killing that Lemkin had described as genocide. This nonbinding resolution pointed to the many instances in history in which racial, religious, political and other groups had been partially or totally killed by governments. The resolution condemned the crimes committed during World War II by the governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan in an effort to legitimize the Nuremberg trials. Despite its nonbinding character, the resolution criminalized any form of killing of people because of their political beliefs.
However, the victorious Allied powers—Britain, France and the United States—wanted the protection of political groups to be stipulated in a UN-backed international law against genocide; such a stipulation would serve as a condemnation of the mass murder of communists and social democrats by the Nazi government. In the end, political groups were excluded from the eventual United Nations convention on genocide adopted in December 1948 due to politics. During the debate on the convention, delegates from Iran, Poland, and the Soviet Union opposed the inclusion of political groups; they argued that political groups have no stable, natural, or permanent characteristics as do racial and religious groups. On the other side, France and Haiti supported their inclusion. The French delegation pointed out that past genocides had been committed on racial and religious grounds and therefore it was likely that future genocides would be committed on political grounds. In hindsight, the delegation was correct in its arguments. Today, it is very likely that, in the name of national security and political stability, governments will convert particular ethnic, national, racial, and religious groups into “political enemies” or “terrorists” and target them for annihilation, thus disguising their intent to destroy these groups as such.
The U.S. delegation argued that the inclusion and protection of religious groups in an international law against genocide made the inclusion and protection of political groups necessary and consistent. The delegation had accurately noted that what bound religious and political groups together was their belief in a set of ideas. However, in the face of opposition from the Soviet Union, the U.S. delegation relented. Clearly, the Soviet delegation wanted to limit the meaning of genocide to the racial supremacy theories and imperialist ideologies that had characterized national socialism in Germany. The U.S. delegation’s lack of conviction on this point highlighted, in part, its fear of Congress’s reaction to an international treaty such as this. The Senate had previously rejected U.S. membership in the League of Nations after World War I, showing Congress’s distrust of internationally binding agreements that might restrict U.S. sovereignty.
On December 9, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (hereafter called the Genocide Convention), The broad scope of the Convention, which came into force on January 12, 1951, is consistent with Lemkin’s original view of genocide (see Document 1). Although a product of ideological compromise, the Genocide Convention is, today, the only internationally accepted document that defines genocide.
Current Status
Despite nearly universal condemnation of genocide as a crime against humanity, there is a lack of unanimity on the policies or actions required to prevent or punish those who commit this grave crime against humanity.
Research
Research on genocide has progressed steadily since the academic study of the legal concept began in the 1970s with the examination of the Holocaust as a type of genocide. And since the 1990s, there have been some notable shifts in research and scholarship on genocide. There is a continuing movement away from specialization in the study of particular cases of genocide (the case study approach) to comparative studies of multiple cases of genocide (the comparative approach) that identify and analyze their similarities and differences. Legal scholar David Scheffer has called for a new terminology (atrocity crimes) and a new field of international law (atrocity laws) to allow scholars and the general public to use this common and easily understood term (atrocity) to describe a wide range of crimes that include genocide. His concept of atrocity crimes is the most recent and significant attempt to change the way scholars and analysts discuss genocide.
Despite this notable change in the academic discourse on genocide, the UN Genocide Convention continues to set the standards for the determination of genocide. Article 1 of the Genocide Convention declares that, whether it is committed in a time of war or peace, genocide “is a crime under international law” that all members of the United Nations should pledge to “prevent and punish.” According to Article 2, “genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:” “killing members of the group,” “causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group,” “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group,” and “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
The Genocide Convention continues to generate controversy. For example, the phrases in whole and in part, the word intent and groups declared “racial,” “religious,” “ethnical,” and “national” are not clearly defined. The convention also fails to resolve the following questions: How many of the target group must be killed by the perpetrator for the group to be recognized in international law as a victim of genocide? Does the extermination of an ethnic group by members of the same group constitute genocide? What should be the standard of proof of intent to commit genocide? When is a group a group? These questions point to a key problem. If the success of prosecuting and punishing perpetrators of genocide depends on proving the intent of the perpetrator to destroy a type of target group identified in the genocide convention, then genocide may be a crime that is hard to prove and prosecute because few perpetrators of genocide reveal their reasons for targeting a group for extermination. And if genocide is hard to prove and also detect, it would be equally hard to make public policy aimed at preventing genocide or mobilizing the general public to stop genocide while it is occurring, either in wartime or peacetime. Scholars and other analysts who study genocide have provided some answers to these important questions and concerns. Many of them have called for a redefinition or rethinking of the concept of genocide in the light of recent mass murders.
Social scientists who study genocide fall into two overlapping categories. The first group includes those who seek a narrow or restrictive concept or definition of genocide out of concern that a broader concept might lead to frivolous use of the word. Those who seek a restrictive definition of genocide, such as sociologist and legal scholar Leo Kuper, historian Frank Chalk, and sociologists Kurt Jonassohn and Helen Fein, argue that genocide should not be a cliché or buzzword to be used recklessly in political and social activism to label every form of violence. To make it so would distort the meaning of genocide and minimize the gravity of acts that are truly genocidal in nature. The second group comprises scholars who seek a broad definition of genocide that makes any act that leads to the killing of human beings on a substantial scale an act of genocide. This group includes psychologist Israel Charny and political scientist Rudolph J. Rummell. They argue that every human life matters, and it would be morally absurd to exclude some instances of mass killing from recognition as genocide as if those human lives destroyed were undeserving of protection. Herein lies the outline of the characterization of the academic-legal versus popular-moral discourses on genocide.
For Leo Kuper, the search for an appropriate definition of genocide is less important than the establishment of a strong genocide-prevention mechanism in the form of an international court of justice to prosecute and punish the perpetrators of genocide. In Genocide: Its Political Uses in the Twentieth Century, Kuper focuses on the social conditions that produce genocide, arguing that societies with rigid ethnic hierarchies and in which minority groups are always viewed with suspicion have a greater capacity for mass violence. Under such social structures, the rise of minority groups to prominent economic, social, and political positions generates intense hatred of them by the majority and often-dominant ethnic group.
In the History and Sociology of Genocide, Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn address the largest loopholes in the genocide convention, arguing that the United Nations made a mistake by excluding the protection of political groups—the key victims of state-organized genocide—from legal protection under the convention. Although Chalk and Jonassohn criticize the omission of these groups, they agree with the provision in the convention that, for any killing to be considered a genocide, it must be part of a deliberate attempt by a perpetrator to destroy a particular group of people, an action that the United Nations labels “acts committed with intent.”
Chalk and Jonassohn see the intent of a perpetrator to destroy a group as an essential identifier of genocide; this view, also held by other analysts and observers, exclude cases in which genocide was the outcome of an action that was not originally intended to achieve that result. They criticize the failure of the framers of the Genocide Convention to draw a clear distinction (in the list of five actions that constitute genocide) between violence intended to destroy a group and nonviolent attacks on members of the group. Chalk and Jonassohn argue that violent acts intended to destroy a group, such as killing members of the group, should not be considered the same as nonlethal or nonviolent acts, such as transporting members of the group to another group that could ultimately cause the physical destruction of the group or alteration of aspects of its culture and identity, when destruction was not the original intent. For example, Chalk and Jonassohn exclude from their conception of genocide civilian deaths resulting from military actions, such as aerial bombardments of enemy territory in times of war, no matter how morally objectionable those actions are, including, for example, the U.S. bombing of Japan in 1945 with nuclear weapons. They argue that in war civilians are often considered combatants or part of the group or nation that is at war—that, in effect, civilians become collateral targets of military actions.
Chalk and Jonassohn have, therefore, proposed a research definition that classifies genocide according to the motives of the perpetrator: “a form of onesided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group, as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator.” They argue that genocides have occurred throughout history and that in all cases the perpetrators have been states and governments, or armed groups working on their behalf, acting on the basis of one or more of four motives: to eliminate a real or potential threat; to spread terror among real or potential enemies; to acquire economic wealth; or to implement a belief, a theory, or an ideology. In all four categories, the killing must be one-sided to constitute genocide. One-sided mass killings are killings in which the victims lack the means to defend themselves against annihilation or in which they may possess the means but are still powerless to avert extermination because of the preponderant power of the perpetrator. Chalk and Jonassohn’s definition of mass killing also includes killings in which all the members of a group are targeted for extermination even though the perpetrator does not succeed in eliminating the entire group.
A major contribution of Chalk’s and Jonassohn’s research definition of genocide is the view, as previously mentioned, that the perpetrator of genocide defines the characteristics of a target group. For example, it was the racist ideology of Nazi Germany that defined Jewishness in strict racial terms and that provided no room for escape. In Cambodia in 1975, it was the Pol Pot regime’s revolutionary ideology of racial and ideological purity that turned a diverse group of humanity—educated people, traders, and urban dwellers—into “impure” Khmers to be destroyed. That is, the intellectuals, traders, and Western-educated Cambodians that the Khmer Rouge killed in Cambodia from 1975 to 1979 became a group because they were defined as such by the Pol Pot regime; their identity as a group was fabricated by the Khmer Rouge because the regime saw them as posing a threat to its revolutionary ideology. Thus, according to Chalk and Jonassohn, in situations of genocide, the perpetrator’s ideology can convert particular ethnic, national, racial, and religious groups into political enemies or ideological opponents to be destroyed with impunity. This is one reason why Chalk and Jonassohn consider the exclusion of political groups from legal protection in the genocide convention as a mistake.
Political scientists Barbara Harff and Ted Robert Gurr have coined the term politicide to distinguish the deliberate destruction of political groups from intentional racial killings or genocide. As they admit in “Towards Empirical Theory of Genocides and Politicides,” however, it is difficult to differentiate genocide from politicide because the racial or ethnic victims of genocide are often politically active and, therefore, targeted on grounds of their political beliefs as well.
Sociologist Helen Fein addresses the issue of proving intent in her research on genocide. Fein suggests that the intent of a perpetrator to destroy a group can be proven by establishing an identifiable pattern that ultimately leads to the destruction of a significant number of the victim group. She cites three patterns of purposeful actions for identifying an ongoing genocide: sustained attacks on a target group by an organized entity such as a state or armed political groups, selection of victims on the basis of their membership in a group, and persecution of the victims regardless of whether they resist or surrender.
Political scientist Robert Melson focuses his work on identifying contexts or situations that encourage genocide. Melson sees revolution and war as providing such situations and contexts. He argues in Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust that it was extreme nationalist ideologies that led the Young Turks regime of the Ottoman Turkish Empire to kill 1.5 million Armenians during World War I and the Nazis to murder some 6 million Jews during World War II. In each of these cases, revolution and war provided the contexts for the extreme ideologies to be turned into instruments of genocide. Melson is careful to note, however, that not every revolution leads to genocide and not every genocide is the consequence of revolution and war.
A pertinent illustration of Melson’s cautionary arguments can be found in Edward Kissi’s 2006 Revolution and Genocide in Ethiopia and Cambodia. Kissi argues that, although genocide actually occurred in the course of Cambodia’s social revolution, the specific crime did not occur in Ethiopia’s revolution because the members of armed political groups were the main targets of organized and indiscriminate killing in a protracted power struggle in revolutionary Ethiopia. The Ethiopian government and antigovernment armed groups were responsible for the estimated 2 million deaths. Kissi does not see these deaths, despite their extent, as constituting an attempt on the part of the Ethiopian government or its armed opponents to destroy, in whole or in part, the ethnic groups from which the targeted political opponents came. In contrast, he contends that in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge carried out extensive genocide against ethnic and religious groups. He also argues that not regarding a particular form of violence as a genocide does not mean one condones murder. Rather, genocide risks losing its meaning if it becomes a generic word for any objectionable atrocity committed by individuals or governments and insurgent groups in power struggles and counterinsurgency actions, which may have nothing to do with an intention to destroy particular ethnic, racial, religious, or national groups.
A critical attempt to reconcile the competing popular-moral and academic-legal discourses on genocide has been made by legal scholar David Scheffer. In his 2006 article “Genocide and Atrocity Crimes,” Scheffer suggests the use of a new term, atrocity crimes, to allow scholars, governments, and the general public to “identify precursors of genocide” without being constrained by the legal requirements that the Genocide Convention imposes on the description of a particular atrocity as a genocide. He describes atrocity crimes as “a grouping of crimes that includes genocide but is not confined to that particular crime.” Scheffer’s call for a terminology that everyone can agree on stems from what he calls the “confusion and garbled terminology” that scholars, governments, and activists reach for when describing what is taking place in an atrocity zone such as a domestic war or in a struggle for political power. The struggle among the United States, the United Nations, and scholars who study genocide over how to describe the atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region highlights Scheffer’s frustration.
What is innovative about Scheffer’s attempt to fundamentally shift thinking and research on genocide is that atrocity crimes provides an all-embracing and simplified term that governments and the general public can use to describe, condemn, and also mobilize a response to atrocities occurring in war zones when anyone is uncertain that an actual genocide is occurring in that conflict situation. The ongoing war in Darfur, Sudan, and the conflicting public and academic perspectives on the nature of the atrocities taking place there indicate that determining accurately what is actually happening in an armed conflict between government and insurgent groups is often difficult. The way Scheffer simplifies the debate on such a moral issue as saving and protecting lives in an atrocity zone represents the most compelling recent attempt to change the way analysts should discuss genocide.
Policies and Programs
Since 1990, humanitarian interventions and international criminal tribunals have become the most popular genocide-prevention policies and programs. Intervening to stop genocide before it occurs and prosecuting perpetrators of genocides that could not be prevented affirm the readiness, amid some occasional hesitation, of the world’s family of nations to do something about this persistent problem. However, both options are fraught with legal and political complexities.
Examples of intervention since the mid-1990s are telling. In June 1999, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) led an armed intervention to save ethnic Albanian Muslims in Kosovo after more than a hundred thousand of them had been killed by the Serbian government in a clear case of genocide against a religious group. However, such UN efforts were not reflected in the events in Rwanda earlier in the decade. In 1994, while armed groups from the Hutu ethnic group slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda, with full U.S. and UN awareness of what was happening. The Bill Clinton administration (1992-2000) found reasons not to use the word genocide to describe what was clearly a planned extermination campaign. This hesitation arose from the U.S. concern that recognition of the Rwandan killings as genocide would impose a moral and legal obligation on the United States, under the UN Genocide Convention, to intervene.
That policy thinking had changed when the George W. Bush administration (2000-2008) took over from the Clinton administration. The Bush administration demonstrated that the U.S. government can use the word genocide to describe atrocities occurring in a given place, with or without investigation, and still not be morally or legally bound to intervene to stop it. Thus, on September 9, 2004, after nearly two months of a U.S. State Department-sponsored field investigation of what Scheffer would call atrocity crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, in a statement to the U.S. Congress, that a “genocide” had taken place in Darfur. Powell based his conclusions on “consistent and widespread pattern of atrocities (killings, rapes, burning of villages)” carried out by Sudanese government forces and government-backed armed militia groups known as the Janjawid, against “non-Arab villagers” in Darfur.
The United Nations held a different view. From its separate field investigation of the crimes committed in Darfur (launched in 2004), the UN reported in January 2005 that the government of Sudan and its armed militia had committed crimes against humanity and not necessarily genocide. The UN’s “Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur” concluded that “serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law” in the form of “killings of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, rape and other forms of sexual violence” had taken place in Darfur. The different terminologies that the UN and the United States used to describe the killing in Darfur highlight the problem that David Scheffer seeks to resolve in his call for a uniform terminology unimpeded by any form of wrangling over the legal determination of genocide. Scheffer’s idea has yet to reshape the discourse on genocide or influence genocide-prevention policy.
In the aftermath of the Rwanda genocide, international criminal tribunals have become the most popular genocide-prevention policy, more often used than humanitarian military interventions. The UN-sponsored International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), established in April 1993 and based in The Hague, has indicted key Bosnian Serb politicians such as Radovan Karadzic (who was arrested on July 21, 2008, living under the assumed name Dragan Dabic in a Belgrade suburb after fifteen years of eluding capture) and Ratko Mladić for genocide against Bosnian Muslims. The ICTY also considers rape and other dehumanizing sexual offenses against women in wartime as crimes of genocide. This designation is a new and important development in the international policy on genocide prevention and one of the primary innovations of the tribunal. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, established by the United Nations in November 1994 and based in Arusha, Tanzania, has likewise set impressive precedents in the prosecution of genocide. As of October 2001, the tribunal had convicted six former Rwandan state officials of genocide, the first international tribunal since Nuremberg to do so. The convicted include former Rwandan prime minister Jean Kambanda, Jean Paul Akayesu, and Colonel Theoneste Bagosora, all former prominent government officials. There are also other military and political figures in custody awaiting trial. The Rwanda tribunal has been a testimony to the efficacy of international criminal tribunals as tools in punishing genocide and, therefore, reducing the possibility of future genocidal acts.
Progress in the institutionalization of international criminal tribunals occurred in June 1998. More than 160 countries met in Rome to discuss and adopt a treaty establishing the first permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecuting perpetrators of genocide, as well as war crimes and other crimes against humanity. On July 17, 1998, 120 countries approved the treaty and 26 countries signed it the following day. But the authority of the resulting ICC is compromised by legal limitations. The court can try only cases of genocide that the UN Security Council refers to it, which means that Security Council members can use their veto to protect the perpetrators of genocide in their own states or in states to which they are bound with a vital strategic interest. Furthermore, the court cannot try any perpetrator of genocide who is a citizen of a country that has not signed the treaty establishing the court. This is a serious flaw that allows some nations to put their citizens who perpetrate genocide beyond the jurisdiction of the court by their refusal to sign the treaty. Despite these limitations, the idea of a permanent ICC is important because it institutionalizes the principle of accountability. The ICC was used by the United Nations Security Council in reference to genocide when it referred the crimes in Darfur to the court on March 31, 2005. On July 14, 2008, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the ICC, issued an official indictment against Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir for culpability in genocide in Darfur.
Not everyone, however, believes that international tribunals have a positive effect on genocide prevention. The previous indictments and trials of Bosnian Serb and Rwandan politicians at the international tribunals did not deter Sudanese leaders from murderous behavior. So, while some analysts hailed the indictment of the Sudanese leader as a significant act in the history of international justice, others have dismissed it as a form of moral posturing and a meaningless indictment from an illegitimate court. To the extent that indictments lead to successful prosecutions or put pressure on leaders of states and militias committing or condoning genocide to change their behavior, these indictments serve a useful purpose. They can be seen as new and innovative tools in genocide prevention and prosecution policy.
Regional Summaries
J. Rummell has argued that almost 170 million people were shot, beaten, tortured, murdered, burned, buried alive, bombed, starved, or worked to death by states, governments, and armed political movements during the first eighty-eight years of the twentieth century. He adds that struggles for power, the absolute exercise of power, and ethnic conflicts led to the deaths of more than 203 million people in the twentieth century. Every region of the world has had its share of these incidents of genocide.
The Americas
It is difficult to know the exact number of the indigenous population that has been systematically wiped out by governments in North, Central, and South America. However, with the settlement of Europeans in the Americas in the nineteenth century and with the expansion of national borders and the pursuit of development by governments in the United States, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Chile in the twentieth century, indigenous people (the American Indians or Native Americans) have paid dearly with their lives. The process of the destruction of the native population varied in time and place. The intentional state-organized extermination of Native Americans did not occur on any significant scale. A large number died from European infectious diseases after their encounter with European settlers. In Mexico, for instance, epidemic diseases, more than direct massacres, wiped out large numbers of the native people. But local and federal state authorities in the United States and Canada, for instance, also adopted policies that undermined what Lemkin calls the foundations of the livelihood of the native people. For example, according to some scholars, including Clinton F. Fink, during the California gold rush in the 1850s, entire groups of Native Americans were exterminated to gain control of their territory. This is an example of what Chalk and Jonassohn call genocide committed for the purpose of acquiring economic wealth. Also, by destroying the buffalo (a key source of food and survival for native people) and by putting Native Americans on marginal agricultural lands (reserves or reservations), the governments of Canada, the United States, and Brazil exposed these groups to famine, starvation, and disease. According to Chalk and Jonassohn, the failure to mitigate the adverse conditions on the reserves that killed native people and lowered their birthrates constituted deliberate neglect of the welfare of a group, betraying an intent to destroy them. The indigenous people of Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, according to Ted Robert Gurr, Monty G. Marshall, and Deepa Khosla, are seriously at risk of becoming victims of state-sponsored genocide in the twenty-first century.
Europe
The major genocides of the twentieth century took place in Europe. Between 1915 and 1922, according to Richard G. Hovannisian’s essay “The Historical Dimensions of the Armenian Question, 1878-1930,” about 1.5 million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire were killed by the Young Turks revolutionary government. Conflict exists in present-day Turkey over the applicability of the use of the term genocide to the killings and persecutions of Turkish Armenians; nevertheless, many observers do consider the word to be an accurate description of the actions taken against the Armenian minority. In fact, according to many, this genocide by the Turkish regime supports Melson’s view that war and revolution sometimes provide the conditions for genocide. From 1918 to 1921, about 100,000-250,000 Jews living in the Ukraine were killed by the Ukrainian government. In 1932-1933, Josef Stalin used famine and starvation as weapons to kill about 38,000,000 Ukrainians. In 1939-1945, about 18 million people were killed by the Nazi government of Germany in Europe alone; of these 5-6 million were Jews, 3.3 million were Soviet prisoners of war, 2 million were Gypsies, 1 million were Serbs, and hundreds of thousands were Jehovah’s Witnesses and handicapped people. In 1992, according to Thomas Cushman in his article “Critical Theory and the War in Croatia and Bosnia,” Croat and Serbian nationalists annihilated about 200,000 Muslims in Bosnia. In 2001, according to Ted Robert Gurr, Monty G. Marshall, and Deepa Khosla in “Peace and Conflict 2001,” the groups in Europe most seriously at risk of becoming the victims of state-organized genocide and politicide include the Kurds and Islamists in Turkey, Chechens in Russia, Serbs and Croats in Bosnia, Serbs in Croatia, Catholics in Northern Ireland, and Basques in Spain.
North Africa and the Middle East
According to “Peace and Conflict 2001,” the groups most seriously at risk of becoming victims of genocide in North Africa and the Middle East include the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, Saharawis in Morocco, and Kurds in Iran and Iraq. Since 1967, Israel’s military has often targeted Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who seek the creation of a Palestinian state through militant politics and acts of terror against Israel. As Ted Gurr, Monty Marshall, and Deepa Khosla note, until all agreements between the Palestinian Authority and Israel have been implemented, conflict will progress and the Palestinians will be the more vulnerable group in any hostility. Since 1975, the Kingdom of Morocco has continued to stifle the determination of the Saharawi people to create their own independent state of Western Sahara. Their leaders have been the targets of systematic Moroccan state-organized killing, and many Saharawis have been displaced and annihilated. The Kurds have been the targets of state repression, discrimination, and killing in Iran and Iraq since 1979. Their persecution results from their quest for more rights and privileges as a minority group in both countries.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Africa south of the Sahara Desert is home to many countries and thousands of ethnic groups, and this part of Africa has experienced some of the most serious genocides of the twentieth century. From April to July 1994, 800,000 Tutsis (10 percent of the total population) were slaughtered by extremist Hutu militia in Rwanda (see Case Study—Comparing Sudan and Rwanda).
In the twenty-first century, the groups most seriously at risk of becoming victims of genocide in sub-Saharan Africa are the political opponents of the Robert Mugabe government in Zimbabwe; supporters of the Oromo and Somali secessionists in Ethiopia; Isaaq ethnic groups in Somalia; Nuba, Fur, Maasalit, and Zaghawa ethnic groups in Sudan; supporters of the Lord’s Resistance Army, an armed political group opposed to the Museveni government in Uganda; Hutus in Burundi and supporters of exiled Hutu militants in Rwanda and Hutu; and Tutsis in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Asia and the Pacific Rim
There are deep historical memories of genocide in Asia, and the continent’s numerous minority groups are at greater risk of becoming victims of genocide in the twenty-first century. The groups most seriously at risk of becoming the victims of state-organized genocide are mainly in East, central, and South Asia. In China, the groups at risk include the Uighers and Tibetan ethnic groups, and the Christian and Falun Gung religious groups. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, the groups at risk are the Hazaris, Tajiks, Uzbecks, Sindhis, Hindus, Shi’a, and Christians. In India, Muslims and Assamese are greatly at risk of becoming victims of genocide. Australia’s native people (the Aborigines) are the victims of a continuing genocide in the Pacific Rim; they have been forcibly removed from their settlements, assimilated into the dominant white Australian population, and subjected to birth-control injections to prevent births within the group.
Case Study—Comparing Sudan and Rwanda
The continuing debate over the nature of the crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region since February 2003 is the best example of the collision of the popular-moral and academic-legal discourses on genocide. In early 2003, resentment over the Sudanese government’s continued neglect of the economic and development needs of Darfur (in the western region of Sudan) led to the outbreak of an armed insurgency in the region. Since then, the government of Sudan and the insurgents in Darfur have fought a war of attrition that has killed thousands of people in the region.
Much public interest in Darfur, especially in the United States and most Western countries, has centered on one key question: Is genocide taking place in Darfur? However, as is often the case, the facts present a complex situation. In fact, anthropologist Gerard Prunier has described the Darfur situation (in his 2007 book) as an “ambiguous genocide.” Prunier does not make the same judgment about what took place in Rwanda between April 6 and July 15, 1994, when about 800,000 Tutsis, and those Hutus who sympathized with them, were systematically sought out and killed by Hutu extremists wielding machetes and other deadly instruments. On Rwanda, Prunier shares the view of most scholars who study genocide—that what happened in that central African country in 1994 is a classic example of genocide.
What is unambiguous about organized violence in Sudan and Rwanda since the late 1990s is that it has resulted from domestic and regional wars waged by governments and insurgents. These wars on the African continent, fueled also by ecological disasters that threaten the existence of peoples who rely on the land for their livelihoods, are becoming common, deadly, and difficult to resolve. In these circumstances, clear lines among genocide, state terrorism, insurgent violence, and counterinsurgency have become very difficult to draw. Distinguishing between victims and perpetrators is equally difficult. Over the last thirty years, there has been a massive influx of small arms into many regions of Africa due to regional wars. One inescapable political reality has resulted—states no longer have a monopoly over violence. And violence has taken many extreme forms on the continent.
The 1994 genocide in Rwanda was triggered in part by a war in neighboring Uganda. Yoweri Museveni’s National Resistance Army insurgency in Uganda against the Obote regime had served as a recruiting and training ground for aggrieved Tutsi refugees who had been driven out of Rwanda since the 1960s and had made Uganda and Tanzania their home. The end of the antigovernment insurgency in Uganda in the 1980s should have been followed by the confiscation of the arms that Tutsi recruits possessed, but that did not happen.
Some demobilized Tutsi fighters formed the Rwandan Patriotic Force (RPF) and sought to reproduce in Rwanda the successful Ugandan insurgency. The initial successes of the RPF over the Rwandan national army were astonishing for a guerrilla force operating from foreign bases. The consequent anger in Rwanda, especially among peasants who had been displaced by RPF war tactics, was frightening. Hutu extremists were outraged over the failure of the Rwandan army to repel the incursions of the guerrilla force. Hutus, who saw their power and dominance slipping away as a result of concessions made by the Juvénal Habyarimana government, which was under international pressure to form a government of national unity with the RPF, no longer saw the state as a guarantor of Hutu power. Nor did the RPF see the state as an impartial protector of Tutsi life and political interests. The majority of Rwanda’s Hutu population saw the complete extermination of their Tutsi political competitors as the key to the permanent retention of power. Thus, armed Hutu paramilitary groups in Rwanda saw their fate and the state’s as intertwined. War in that country indeed took a turn toward genocide—it became a conflict for ethnic self-preservation. After April 6, 1994, and following the death of Rwanda’s president Juvénal Habyarimana, a Hutu (in a plane crash whose causes remain unknown), Hutu paramilitary groups such as the Akazu and Interahamwe, wielding machetes, sought out Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus and killed them in a murderous process aimed at destroying the Tutsi population of Rwanda as a group.
In Sudan, regional wars and domestic insurgency are also connected. What Gerard Prunier calls an “ambiguous genocide” and David Scheffer might characterize as atrocity crimes in Sudan have been fueled by neighboring wars in Chad and Ethiopia. In the 1980s, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi tried to create a belt of Islamic states across North and East Africa. Libya saw Chad—a religiously pluralistic state that was ideologically pro-Western and had a Christian leader, Hissien Habre—as a threat to Gaddafi’s vision of a northeastern African region of Islamic states. Prior to February 2003, Gaddafi’s solution to the Chad dilemma had been to arm rebels opposed to the Habre regime, who operated from Darfur, along the Sudan-Chad border. Libya flooded Darfur with weapons. Other non-African geopolitical actors such as France and the United States helped the Habre government with weapons as the Chadian government responded to Libya’s geopolitical ambitions in the region. With that help, Habre’s government armed pro-Chad and discontented Fur, Maasalit, and Zaghawa rebels in Darfur to fight the pro-Gaddafi and anti-Habre insurgents in the Darfur region.
The Sudan government was initially too weak to intervene in these proxy conflicts in Darfur because of its own preoccupation with a protracted war with the Sudan Peoples Liberation Army (SPLA) in southern Sudan. The SPLA had sanctuary and logistical support from Ethiopia because the Sudanese government was giving similar aid and comfort to the Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front (EPLF), an armed insurgent group that was locked in a war of secession with the Mengistu regime in Ethiopia. As in Rwanda, the regional wars along Sudan’s borders had deadly consequences. Large quantities of weapons were now available to ethnic groups in Darfur with long histories of low-intensity conflicts with one another over land, water, and grazing rights. Equally important, the availability of arms in the Darfur region strengthened the ability of the Fur, Maasalit, and Zaghawa groups in the region to contest the authority of the Sudanese state. These groups, who shared a distaste for Khartoum’s unequal development policies, formed armed movements to reshape the relationship between Khartoum and Darfur.
As events in Rwanda and Sudan demonstrate, under the reality of insurgency, beleaguered states show a greater willingness to subcontract violence to militia or paramilitary groups. When the army of fighters in domestic insurgencies change, from poorly paid and less-motivated professional soldiers to destitute and angry youth, the wars that ensue are often waged without rules. In Darfur, the lure of loot and rape has become the appealing motives of combat in insurgent and counterinsurgency warfare.
While regional wars and the availability of weapons have bred insurgency, ecological distress has worsened the livelihoods of people and weakened confidence in the state as guarantor of group survival. Over the past two decades, irregular rainfall patterns, due to regional climate change; desertification; and the drying up of wells have affected the livelihoods of the pastoral communities in Darfur, driving many, if not most, residents of the region into destitution. Such entrenched poverty and the intensified anger in pastoral communities that goes along with it have also made it easier for the state to recruit aggrieved nomads, who have their own local scores to settle with their peasant neighbors, to conduct the state’s counterinsurgency violence.
Indeed, competition over water resources and pasturelands have allowed the Janjawid, an armed militia group to which the Sudanese state has delegated its counterinsurgency warfare in Darfur, to kill thousands, rape women, and destroy property in the name of race, ethnicity, and religion. The Janjawid and the insurgents in Darfur have presented their conflict to the world as one between “White Sudanese” or “Arabs,” who are “Muslim” and live closer to the Sahara and speak the language of the Koran (Arabic), and “Black Sudanese” or “Africans,” who are “Christian” and live closer to the Sahel. Many Western analysts of Darfur have uncritically accepted this racial, ethnic, and religious explanation and have, mistakenly, described the atrocity crimes in Sudan as the product of a racial and religious conflict. What is unmistakable is that what has taken place in Darfur has generated a moral narrative. In that narrative, determining whether or not a particular mass killing is a genocide becomes a moral judgment that individuals make and not a scholarly verdict that experts render on the weight of the available evidence. Thus, in situations of genocide, social activism or the popular-moral discourse on genocide often supersedes the legal-academic discourse. Academic debates over whether the crimes committed in Darfur fit the legal definition of genocide, while human lives are being destroyed in daily atrocities, come across as a heartless academic exercise.
The debate over Darfur makes David Scheffer’s case concerning atrocity zones more solidly; clearly, it is difficult to determine what actually happens in a civil war. Thus, an all-embracing terminology is needed that can be used when one is uncertain that an actual genocide is occurring in a domestic war. As the Sudan case demonstrates, as long as regional wars and access to weapons continue to breed insurgency, dredge up historical grievances, and trigger state counterinsurgency warfare, and as long as nature fuels or complicates these processes, understanding the link between ecology and warfare may be an essential step toward understanding or preventing many genocides.