About the Genocide Forum
A Platform for post-Holocaust Commentary
- Torture as Genocide: More than Killing
- Ethnic Counter-Cleansing
- Looking for Early Warnings: A New Industry
- Life is Beautiful: A Third Perspective
- Democracy, Capitalism and Genocide
Sept-Oct 1999
Year 6, No. 1
Bonnie Falchuk: Managing Editor
Carol Rittner: Associate Editor
Henry R. Huttenbach: Founder- Editor
Sandrine Dikambi: Assistant Editor
Torture as Genocide: More than Killing
It is often repeated mantra-like that at its heart genocide involves mass killing, along with other secondary characteristics. On one level that is accurate, if not entirely true. Genocide is indeed marked by widespread and wholescale slaughter of a marked group. And yet, one must note – and not just in passing – that if killing is the ultimate goal, why is it performed in conjunction with the willful application of intense pain, both psychological and physical? How can one explain this almost universal use of sadistic practices aimed at tormenting and postponing death as if it were equi-important in the act of genocide? Speedy killing would seem to be the most expeditious manner of achieving the extinction of a group.
Instead, death seems to be subordinated to a wide spectrum of merciless torments applied prior to the act of group destruction: rape, starvation, medical experiments, exposure to the elements, prolonged corporal punishments, and so forth. The entire repertoire of cruelty precedes the killings. These have been recorded in conjunction with all the known cases of genocide of this century, from the decimation of the Hereros in German Southwest Africa (Namibia) to Serbia's assault on Kosovo's Albanians. Scholarly focus has been on such incidents during the Holocaust at the expense, however, of similar, indeed the same behavior in the context of other genocides. For example: the Armenians were force-marched into the Syrian desert, there to die of neglect; close to three million ethnic Russian prisoners of war categorized as Untermenschen were deliberately starved to death in 1941-2 inside what amounts to barbed-wire death-pens in open fields; Serbs mass-raped Muslim women and continually beat and mutilated Croat men in concentration camps prior to killing them; and Hutus performed grisly acts of mutilation on Tutsis before they killed them. What does this dimension of torture in the context of genocide mean?
By any definition of the word, this pre-killing infliction of suffering is torture. Though torture primarily exists outside the context of genocide, it acquires a distinct genocidal quality when practiced as a part of genocide. It no longer is the torture of the Spanish Inquisition or of political or secret police interrogations designed to extract information or confessions. For the victim, of course, the mental and bodily pain is the same. It is the context which alters the category of torture. What, then, is torture for the genocidist?
Is it purely an expression of sadism, an extension of hatred for a group? Is it an intended part of the killing process? And why does killing have to be preceded by the infliction of extreme pain? What ritual or murderous deed is this? What makes it so necessary as if it were a sine qua non of genocide? Is it to hammer in a basic truth to the victims before they expire? Is this perverse practice an act of enlightenment as encountered in Kafka's The Machine? Are the victims tormented as a means of clarifying to them why they had to be killed so that they would not die ignorant of the reason why they deserved a collective death? Is it perhaps to dehumanize them first, to rob them of the last vestige of dignity? Or is it a combination of some or all of these?
To answer some of these questions, one needs to examine the mind of the genocidist. Unfortunately, genocide psychology is still in its infancy if studied at all. An analysis of the genocidist as rational torturer and not just as coldhearted masochist is urgently called for if idle or amateur speculation is to be avoided. Does torture inside genocide have a special meaning? Or utility? Does torture in the Cambodian context differ markedly from that in the Holocaust? Is it significant beyond its utter meaninglessness? Is that not a contradiction? Clearly, it is time more interdisciplinary attention be given to torture as a part of genocide.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Ethnic Counter-Cleansing
Imagine if after Germany had capitulated in May 1945, the conquering allies had officially countenanced and encouraged not only the return and repatriation of all surviving German Jews – there were approximately 250,000 settled throughout the world – but also their unilateral right to reclaim their homes and other properties. Furthermore, imagine they would have unofficially allowed several hundred bands of armed German Jews to reenter war-torn Germany, the allies calling for their disarmament only after the Jewish militias had returned to various parts of Germany to wreack vengeance on local civilian populations. What would have been the probable result of this hypothetical post-Holocaust scenario? Since it did not happen, we shall never know. But it did happen and continues to happen in Kosovo after NATO evicted the Serbian army.
After Serbia's capitulation to NATO bombing, UN-NATO policy was to allow hundreds of thousands of Albanian refugees in neighboring Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro (and even those in the United States) to go back to their respective villages and towns, in most of which genocidal murder and destruction had been committed by "special" Serbian units supposedly not formally part of the Yugoslav army. At the same time, NATO policy did little to defang the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which also crossed international borders in force, heavily armed. Not surprisingly, many of these KLA units immediately headed for places in Kosovo heavily populated by Serbs (see map below) and promptly launched a cruel campaign of counter destruction and murder with the intent of forcing the expulsion of all Serbs. At the time of writing (September 1999) over 85percent of Kosovo's c.200,000 Serbian minority has fled or been forced to leave the republic into Serbia proper. Common sense suggests the remaining Serbs will also leave except for a handful.
The result is ethnic cleansing followed by ethnic counter-cleansing. In this contest of bitter ethnic conflict, genocidal behavior was replaced by genocidal behavior. If the Serbian assault on Kosovar Albanians came as a surprise in tandem with NATO bombing – pundits and media talking-heads reckoned it would subside – then the Albanian revenge required no prophetic gift. UN-NATO policy imprudence unleashed an untamed beast, and both organizations must now shoulder at least co-responsibility for this round of ethnic violence whose stated goal is to make Kosovo Serbian- rein (free of Serbs). The post facto disarmament of the KLA adds insult to injury.
As the map shows, there are (were) three categories of Serbian populations in Kosovo: 1) those that abut borders (Montenegro, Macedonia, and Serbia) which are basically extensions of Serbian settlements from these three areas; 2) those that are isolated but living in compact enclaves like the Muslim cities in Bosnia, (e.g Srebrenica before it was totally cleansed), small islands of Serbs surrounded by an ocean of less-than-friendly ethnic Albanians; and 3) those that are scattered thinly throughout Kosovo, living in predominantly Albanian-populated villages and small towns. All three are vulnerable in varying degrees in the absence of reliable protection by NATO troops and UN governance e.g. (a police force). So far (September1999), this theoretical protection has proved thoroughly ineffective. For the most part, Serbs in Albania have been left to fend for themselves. NATO forces do arrive but after the killings, and the wretched Serbian survivors must run the gauntlet of Albanians as they head fearfully for the nearest border to find a measure of refuge outside Kosovo.
This actual turn of events provides the answers to the questions raised by the hypothetical scenario in post-Holocaust Germany, where nothing of this sort happened if only because the occupying allied forces would not have allowed such dangerous developments to take place. (The arguments that Jewish survivors were in no physical condition to take revenge or were culturally, therefore psychologically, not disposed towards violence are neither persuasive nor are they relevant to the point being made.) The essential point is to focus on Kosovo and to be aware of what is happening there refracted through the prism of inter-ethnic conflict expressed in genocidal violence in the context of an insufficient governing authority. The immediate issue is how to quell or prevent such a cycle of genocidal violence elsewhere. Specifically, what will happen in Burundi, Rwanda, etc. where ethnic rivalries remain essentially untethered and waiting for the next round. Perhaps the German model – the hypothetical one – might, for purposes of serious discussion be of some use after all in preparation of avoiding or at least curbing ethnic cleansings down the road.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Looking for Early Warnings: A New Industry
Genocide Research is increasingly focusing on the study of early warning. This is due to the contemporary urgency of the outbreak of mass killings, largely interethnic, both in Europe and the Great Lake district in Africa, with legitimate fears that in the next century similar genocidal slaughter will erupt in the rest of Africa (signs are showing up in Nigeria), in Indonesia (other than East Timor, already long in the headlines), and in India (separate from the Kashmir crisis).
Now that a seriously belated NATO military intervention has demonstrated mixed results in Kosovo, the question arises whether a lesson was learned from the crisis that preceded it, namely, Rwanda in 1994. According to most assessments, there were numerous signals pointing towards a government-instigated assault on the Tutsis and Hutu opponents of the government (meaninglessly described as "moderates" by the press). What were these "signs"? Prior to the killings, the introduction of ethnic identity cards, on-going inflammatory radio broadcasts by high government officials and divisive political speeches using the rhetoric of violence. In retrospect all these "signs", taken together, do suggest a trend, a line pointing in the direction of a potentially genocidal crisis. But without the advantage of prior knowledge, do these "symptoms" really suggest an unambiguous future calling for an international intervention? "Do the facts," as one is tempted to ask, "speak for themselves?" Are they predictors of a certain future? And do they serve as a model of a pre-genocidal background for other incidents such as Kosovo?
Some would agree that Bosnia is a more likely source of predicting Kosovo. Contextually that is true. Both the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Kosovo are part of the dismemberment policies of rump Yugoslavia and its uncompromising President, Slobodan Milosevic. Throughout the war in Bosnia, the fighting among the three armed ethnic groups and their respective killings of unarmed civilians (let us refrain from calling them "innocent") intensified. The mass murder of ethnic groups, especially by Serbs finally forced a mixed UN-NATO intervention by bombing followed by a US imposed peace treaty in Dayton, Ohio.
By then, the Kosovo question already loomed large. Yet by tacit consensus it was neither mentioned nor addressed by anyone attending the Bosnia discussions. Milosevic saw this to mean that he had a free hand in Kosovo and acted accordingly, namely to bring the province and its Albanian majority under complete Serbian rule by removing any semblance of Albanian autonomy. This, predictably, led to escalation on the part of Albanians who resisted (both peacefully – initially – and violently), with the revival of the KLA (which predates this present crisis).
The international community, in particular the Clinton administration, falsely concluded that the enforced Dayton Agreement was lesson enough to restrain Milosevic. The fear of a second wave of bombing would make Milosevic act rationally. They were tragically wrong. Little wonder that once the second military intervention began, Milosevic accelerated his campaign to rid Kosovo of its Albanian population rather than diminish it in order to avert a second Dayton diktat.
Could one have predicted the actual course of events and prevented them as early as the Dayton conclave? Could one have anticipated them after Dayton and considerably earlier before the fiasco at Rambouillet? If so, should one have tempered intervention in order to lessen the tragic consequences – the speedy victimization of nearly a million Kosovar Albanians; thousands shot, tens of thousands injured and hundreds of thousands uprooted and forced into exile?
The answers to these unanswerable questions are basically academic, both as predictions and post facto interpretations. They are, basically, anyone's guess. We simply cannot foretell the future if only because there are too many variables and imponderables to serve as hard and fast guidelines for interventionist policy in cases of suspected or anticipated genocide. The fact is that the future remains the future, unknown and mostly unknowable until it enters into the present and becomes reality.
Despite this predicament, there is a growing sub-industry in genocide studies, genocide prediction, which, in turn, is allied with an equally popular campus (academic) and private (think tank) activity, conflict resolution. Both are public-policy oriented, means to influence government decision-making vis-à-vis genocide-related crises. Both are the products of social science types who subscribe to the notion that social problems (economic, political, etc.) can be empirically dealt with, including those devoted to "fore-seeing" the future. In a sense we are witnessing a collective act of intellectual arrogance. Of course we should give it a try but with a double measure of humility towards failures: the gods of the future hold their cards very close to their chests, so much so, that even they often dare not look at them. So if they do not know, how can we? Future genocides need to be addressed; we should be informed. But, if history teaches any lesson at all, it warns us of the unpredictability of what will be. Only when it has happened do we know it took place. Not before. At best we can say the following about future genocide: it is presently rearing its head; therefore we should be prepared to deal with it anywhere. That much is certain, though where and when is not.
Will it happen again in Rwanda/Burundi? Maybe. Should we have been forewarned about Kosovo because of Rwanda? In general, certainly; specifically, no. Could Bosnia have been helpful? No doubt. But we know that now. We could not have known that then. Let us go on searching for ways to identify "warnings", but let us keep in mind that they are not bona fide warnings unless genocide is already in progress. Symptoms are not the illness; symptoms point in many directions. They are only de facto symptoms after the diagnosis.
Henry R. Huttenbach
Life is Beautiful: A Third Perspective
Introduction: In The Genocide Forum (5/5) appeared two conflicting opinions of Benigni's Life is beautiful. Given the importance of mass media representations of past genocides, herewith a third interpretation. At issue is the propagation of images and preservation of public memory.
We laughed till we died*
Roberto Begnigni's Life is Beautiful grossed $38 million in Italy, becoming one of the most successful film in Italian cinema. It won three Oscars and broke box-office records in the United States, too. The film appeared when Italy was embarking upon an uncomfortable re-evaluation of its wartime past, including the fate of the 7,500 Jews deported to the Nazi death camps, and at a time wider fin-de-siècle anxiety over how the Holocaust will be remembered. However, Life is Beautiful hardly challenges the benign reading of Italian fascism and raises troubling questions about representations of the Holocaust.
It begins in 1939 with the arrival in Arezzo of two lads, Guido and Ferruccio. Guido, a Jew, is going to train as a waiter with his uncle. They arrive just as some thugs are roughing up the uncle, but the older man dismisses the assailants as merely "barbarians" and advises passivity: "silence is the loudest cry".
Later, uncle's horse is painted green and the words "Achtung cavallo ebreo" scrawled on its side. When uncle warns Guido that he will soon become a target Guido quips: "The worst they can do is strip me, paint me yellow and write, 'Attention Jewish waiter!'" Of course, there was a lot worse that "they" could do and it is not clear if Guido's nonchalance is intended as a parody of anti-Semitism or a sign of myopia. It should be noted, though, that the equine graffiti is in mixed German-Italian, as if to suggest that racism is foreign in nature.
By avoiding explicit scenes of violence in Italy and projecting anti-Semitism on the Germans, Benigni makes it easier for Italians to evade their own culpability for the persecution of the Italian Jews. True, Mussolini's Fascist creed was not dogmatically anti-Semitic. Italian occupation troops in France and the Balkans harboured Jewish refugees and no Jews were deported from Italy until the German take-over in autumn 1943.
However, the round-ups and massacres that marred Italy's record there-after cannot be attributed solely to the occupiers. From its inception racism was latent in Fascism. Mussolini brought in Nuremberg-style race laws against the Jews in 1938, to applause from leading Fascists like Roberto Farinacci, who were genuine racial anti-Semites. Over 20,000 Italians were enrolled in the fanatical Black Brigades that roamed the northern Italian puppet state over which Mussolini presided. Italians arrested up to 2,000 Jews, Italian citizens, for deportation to Auschwitz.
Yet Benigni consistently belittles Italian anti-Semitism. In one hilarious scene Guido sends up propaganda proclaiming the superiority of the Italian "race" by jokingly parading his physical virtues and exclaiming: "This is an Italian belly button. It's part of our race." Yes, racial science was absurd – but it was also lethal.
Democracy, Capitalism and Genocide
The 1949 UN Genocide Convention specifically lists demographic politics as an instrument with the potential of endangering the existence of a group. This is covered by Article II(c). At the time of drafting the convention the authors had the examples of World War II in mind, specifically forced mass expulsion, "resettlement" and deportation, three aspects of the same process of uprooting. If they had waited fifty years they might have included an inverse policy, namely, the act of mass transference of one ethnic group in order to transform an indigenous people into a struggling minority in its own ancestral territory, an imperial practice of the Soviet Union, in particular in Estonia and Latvia. In the former the rate of russification by ethno-demographic inundation threatened a people less than one million. In the latter, the titular population had shrunk to a bare 52 percent of the total. The tactic was a potent tool in the policy of Soviet ethno-homogenization. One more generation in a Soviet context and both ethnic groups would have been reduced to a non-viable status.
For over two decades Chinese governments have employed similar demographic strategies vis-à-vis the non-Han minorities in the far western regions of the People's Republic of China. In the mountainous west reside several million Muslims of various ethnic groupings and Buddhists in Tibet and west Qinghai. As a way of neutralizing separatist tendencies among Uighurs and Tibetans, the Chinese government has planned to upset the ethno-democratic balance in favor of the Han. Over the years it has encouraged soldiers stationed in these regions to stay and settle. This policy was backed by generous subsidies.
Now the Chinese authorities have intensified their campaign. The plan is to resettle nearly 60,000 Han farmers and their families (i.e. about 180,000-200,000 persons) to the Qinghai province. Not only is this territory claimed by Tibet, but Tibetans have for centuries tilled the soil there, always as a significant majority. Now they face literal demographic drowning by huge numbers of Han being encouraged to leave their ancestral lands and settle in distant Qinghai, thereby enlarging the Han grip on all of China.
What makes this ethnocidal (therefore genocidal) policy especially noteworthy is China's plan to fund the project. It has recently applied to the World Bank to underwrite this move to the tune of an initial loan of $40 million. Significantly, the World Bank is a US-dominated organization. So far, the money has been approved by the World Bank's board with US support, the latter eager to ingratiate itself with an economy that promises major US investments and profits. However, the loan still has to be reviewed by an independent board of the World Bank. Were the loan upheld, then the US would be directly associated with this genocidal threat (in the form of reducing Tibetans to a weak minority and, thereby, endangering the future of their ethnic/cultural survival), keeping in mind that systematic culturecide has already been committed by China in Tibet since the 1950 invasion. That indeed is a tragic and ironic position for the US to be in as the world's sole democratic mega-power, now reduced to a moral slave of its own economic needs.
Were the loan to go through, we would be witnessing a Faustian convergence of capitalism, democracy and genocide. Readers, watch your tax money at work.
Henry R. Huttenbach
About The Genocide Forum
The Forum is a publication of the Center for the Study of Ethnonationalism located on the campus of the City College of New York. The founder and editor of The Genocide Forum is Professor Henry R. Huttenbach.
The Genocide Forum, which appears bi-monthly, is intended to serve as a convenient vehicle of exchange to discuss critical issues of common interest to students of Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The Forum is designed to accommodate experts in the field to share their concerns via concise (1,500 words) analytic essays.
Contributors are invited to submit their essay on a 3.5" disk (Macintosh/MicroSoft Word) with one double-spaced print-out to Professor Henry R. Huttenbach, History Department, The City College of New York, Convent Avenue at 138th St., New York, NY 10031. Tel: (212) 650-7384; Fax (718) 624-0450.
Back Issues of The Genocide Forum are available on request as long as supplies last. Complete sets of back issues are available on 3.5" diskette (Macintosh/Microsoft) for $25.
Quotations may be made as long as proper credit is given. Duplication of long passages or entire articles require the written permission of the editor.
The Genocide Forum is made possible through the partial support of the Division of Humanities of the City College of New York.
Nota Bene: Views expressed by authors are not necessarily those of the editor.
Henry R. Huttenbach
c/o History Department
City College of New York
Convent Ave. at 138th Street
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A Publication of The Center for The Study of Ethnonationalism
The City College of The City University of New York