Category Archives: war

by | 20 August 2006 · 1:32 pm

Back to the Balkans: No Victory, No Justice?

This Sunday’s lesson in international humility comes via The Rhine River, who quotes a sobering excerpt from an article entitled “Milošević in Retrospect” by David Rieff in the Summer 2006 issue of Virginia Quarterly Review:

Milošević’s death accomplished what all his delaying tactics and coutroom antics could never do–cement perception of the International Criminal Tribunal of Yugolsavia’s failure….

But this is not to say that victors’ justice can never succeed; what it cannot do is succeed in a political vacuum or when the outcome on the battlefield has been indecisive….

And in Serbia, this is emphatically not the case. Even in Bosnia, nationalism burns almost as fiercely in the Serb areas as it ever did, and certainly few ordinary Serbs, let alone the former leadership, feel any remorse for Srebrenica or the siege of Sarajevo. In Serbia proper, the current government, while not extreme itself, depends on the support of Milošević’s Socialist Party in order to remain in power. Under those circumstances, it is almost impossible to imagine that had Milošević lived and been convicted, the Tribunal’s judgement would have seemed legitimate to many Serbs. With his death, one more name has been added to the martyrology of extreme Serb nationalism–a victim, in this accound, of a kangaroo court whose pretensions of delivering justice ring hollow.

On Thursday, the BBC also included some retrospection in its report on forensic experts exhuming bodies from the largest mass grave yet from the war in Bosnia.

The team unearthed 144 complete and 1,009 partial skeletons at the site in Kamenica, a village in eastern Bosnia near the border with Serbia.

The grave contained victims of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which about 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed by Bosnian Serb troops.

The bodies had been brought to Kamenica from elsewhere to conceal the evidence.

“Kamenica is the biggest mass grave” found since the 1992-1995 war, said Murat Hurtic, a member of the forensic team.

The massacre is the only event from the Bosnian war classified as genocide by the UN war crimes tribunal in The Hague.

The two men accused of masterminding the massacre, former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic and his military commander Ratko Mladic, remain at large.

The forensic team found documents in the mass grave indicating that the victims died in the massacre, the Associated Press reports.

Bullets and bindings around the victims’ arms were also found there.

In July 1995 Bosnian Serb forces overran the UN-protected enclave of Srebrenica, where tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians had taken refuge from earlier Serb offensives.

The Serb forces later separated thousands of men and boys from the women and killed them, dumping the bodies in mass graves.

Is anyone intimidated by international war crimes tribunals? Two alleged “masterminds” of mass slaughter in Bosnia have been at large for over a decade, most probably in the mountains of Serbia. If they are indeed guilty, better they should die in battles decisively lost than to be hauled before an unconvincing international court. And the same goes for other alleged war-criminal “masterminds” who may still be at large in the mountains of Pakistan.

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Filed under Eastern Europe, nationalism, war

by | 4 August 2006 · 8:17 pm

Oil Barons of Baku, 1901-1905

By 1901, Baku was supplying half the world’s oil. It became an international city overnight, and the local Azeris were soon outnumbered by Russians, Georgians, Ossetians, and others from the four corners of the earth. Between 1856 and 1910, Baku’s population grew at a faster rate than that of London, Paris, or New York. The Nobel brothers, who dominated the industry in the first decades, invented the concept of the tanker to handle the demand for Baku oil in the Far East, appropriately naming their first tanker Zoroaster. They made the bulk of the family’s fortune in Azeri oil, though brother Alfred’s invention of dynamite is more famous.

The oilmen came in all stripes—Swedes and Jews and Poles and Armenians—but the dominance of big foreign groups like the Nobels and Rothschilds didn’t last long. By the turn of the century, half of the tanker business and much of the production was in local hands. So-called oil barons arose from both the peasantry and the feudal aristocracy—anyone who dug a hole in the ground and got lucky. (The Nobels tried whenever possible to buy out these new oil barons, along with smaller producers. According to documents in the Baku archives, Abraham Nussimbaum sold the Nobels most of his wells in 1913, on the eve of the Great War, a highly opportune business decision.)

The new oil millionaires became great philanthropists, determined to turn their city from a provincial backwater into the finest Islamic city in the world—a showcase of the possibilities of the positive merger of East and West. As the representative local group, the Muslim oil barons felt the most obliged to make showy public statements with their new wealth. They took grand tours of Europe and hired architects to build copies of the mansions, museums, and opera houses they had seen, all in an attempt to anchor their city in the Occidental future rather than its Oriental past. While some Azeri Muslims were outraged by the education of women or their appearance onstage or in an office building, Baku benefited from having been so long at the crossroads of East and West that people were used to new fashions and change.

Equal parts Dodge City, medieval Baghdad, industrial Pittsburgh, and nineteenth-century Paris, fin de siècle Baku was the last great city built before the First World War spoiled the dream that the West could keep expanding forever in a grand civilizing pageant. It was a place of fantastic extremes of wealth and poverty, where gas lights and telephones made a stark contrast to camel caravans and emaciated Zoroastrian monks. The city’s wild and clashing history came to ahead at the turn of the century, when it was the “Wild East” frontier of Europe, the world’s greatest oil-boom town: A British visitor at the time wrote, “One might almost fancy oneself in an American city out west. There is the same air of newness about everything, the same sanguine atmosphere. Everyone is hopeful.”

Yet by 1905, the entire Russian frontier was bathed in blood, as the empire entered the first of its revolutions. The unrest reached from the coast of Korea to St. Petersburg’s Nevsky Prospekt, and Baku was not spared. The revolution came, as many do, on the heels of a disastrous war, one of the bloodiest in history. The czar’s advisers had dreamed up the 1904–5 Russo-Japanese War in part as a means of diffusing revolutionary tension, by acquiring, via quick victory, an injection of patriotism as well as some much-needed timber concessions on the Korean coast. Instead, the Russians experienced total defeat. The catastrophe in the Far East—against a people the czar called “little, short-tailed monkeys”—made the Russian Empire look fragile and moribund. As the war’s losses sank in—in addition to the hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, practically the entire Russian Navy was sunk by the Japanese fleet—years of left-wing terrorism and czarist oppression collided in a year of uprisings, ethnic cleansing, and generalized breakdown.

The semi-destroyed Russian military was in no position to quash the unrest. The only part of the vast czarist navy that had not been sunk by the Japanese was the famous Black Sea Fleet, and on its main battleship, the state-of-the-art Potemkin, the sailors rioted in the spring of 1905 and shot their officers. All around the Black Sea and the Caspian, public order broke down. While the staggering numbers of Russian dead, machine-gunned on the icy hills of Manchuria and the Korean peninsula, showed the new lethality of war, the revolutionary terrorism and pogroms that arrived inside Russia that year showed the new brutality of politics—and both foreshadowed what horror might be born through the mediums of modern mass violence.

SOURCE: The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, by Tom Reiss (Random House, 2005), pp. 11-13

One of the most intriguing photographs reproduced in the book is labelled “Muslim-Jewish Christmas party, Baku, 1913.” Days long, long gone.

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Filed under Caucasus, Central Asia, energy, industry, Japan, military, nationalism, religion, Russia, Turkey, war

by | 10 July 2006 · 11:29 am

British Capture of Manila in 1762

I’ve heard the Seven Years War (aka the Pomeranian War or Third Silesian War in Europe, the French and Indian War in North America, and the Second Carnatic War in India) described as the first “world war”—in the sense that its battles took place all over the globe—but I hadn’t heard about the British assault on Manila until reading a review of Nicholas Tracy’s Manila Ransomed (U. Exeter Press, 1995) on dannyreviews.com.

The British had conceived a bold plan to attack Manila even before Spain’s entry into the Seven Years war in January 1762. Their execution of that demonstrated their naval ascendancy and military prowess, but the aftermath highlighted the problems inherent in government through the East India Company.

The inspiration for the attack was as much dreams of loot as plans for commercial advantage or geopolitical advantage, and the expedition received limited support from the East India Company. But General William Draper and Vice Admiral Samuel Cornish managed to assemble in Madras a force of around 1750 soldiers (the 79th regiment, sepoys, and French deserters and other assorted troops), eight ships of the line, three frigates, and four store ships. Despite problems with elderly ships and the dangers of largely uncharted waters, all but two store ships arrived in Manila Bay on 23rd September 1762.

An immediate attack was a success. A landing south of Manila was followed by a bombardment and an assault, leading to a capitulation by October 7th. Acting governor Archbishop Antonio Rojo provided uninspiring leadership and surrendered the citadel and the port of Cavite as soon as the city fell.

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Filed under Philippines, U.K., war

by | 28 June 2006 · 1:33 pm

Darfur and Loss Compensation

Although territorial loss in war with its seemingly irreversible quality tends to be decisive, the expectation of such loss, if uncompensated, can also have horrific consequences. In the Darfur region of western Sudan we may have an illustration of just such a consequence as a form of loss compensation by means of self-help, in contrast to compensation that could be offered by the international community.

As a result of protocols signed on May 26, 2004, between southern Sudanese leaders of the black, predominantly Christian Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Arabized Muslim leaders of the north, a six-year interim period would be specified, after which a referendum would take place allowing for the possibility of independence for the oil-rich south. This outcome would lead to the loss of approximately one-third of Sudanese territory including its oil. The possible presence of oil in the Darfur region as well makes this territory potentially as valuable economically as the oil-rich south. If Darfur were to be Arabized through the massacre and ethnic cleansing of its black population, then it could serve as compensation for losses in the south, especially in the face of an incipient rebellion by the black Africans in Darfur.

Encouraged by the success of the black southern rebels both on the battlefield and at the conference table, two groups of black Muslims from Darfur rebelled, apparently representing black populations persecuted through raids and other violence by nomadic Arabized tribes. Confronted by another separatist rebellion like that of the SPLA, ethnic cleansing of another black population was unleashed, with a possible genocidal component of tens of thousands dead. One purpose of this effort has been to compensate for the potential losses in the south by ensuring that another potentially valuable territory, Darfur, remains within an Arab-dominated Sudan.

As in the Rwandan case, the international community was intensely concerned that a settlement between the Khartoum government and the SPLA be reached. Colin Powell, then the US secretary or state, visited the negotiations between the SPLA and Khartoum leaders in October 2003 and Darfur itself in June 2004. The United Nations has also taken an active role. And like Arusha in the Rwandan case, an international agreement implying heavy losses in the future, whether in political power (Rwanda, territory already having been lost to the RPF) or valuable territory (Sudan), may have spurred this effort at loss compensation. Also like the Interahamwe in Rwanda, much of the killing and ethnic cleansing has been carried out by a government-supported militia, the Janjaweed, an Arabized military group.

These considerations suggest that even more active intervention is required to stem these massacres and ethnic cleansing. A pairing of the two regions of Sudan, Darfur and the south, should be the focus of international diplomacy, without forsaking one region for the other. Unfortunately, just the opposite appears to have occurred. According to John Prendergast, a former African affairs director at the National Security Council under President Clinton, “When the secretary [Colin Powell] was in Naivasha [location of the negotiations between the Khartoum government and the SPLA], and a major problem was getting worse in Darfur, everyone agreed to deal with the southern problem first and with Darfur later. That was a monumental diplomatic error.”

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 386-387

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by | 10 June 2006 · 3:07 am

Genocide as Compensation for Loss

The invasion of Rwanda by the Tutsi-led Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF; initially based in Uganda) in October 1990 threatened to reverse these Hutu gains. Early RPF military successes led to the convening of the Arusha peace talks beginning in July 1992.

Four factors then led to an extraordinary evocation of the domain of losses. First, very early in the talks, it became clear that the presidential system that had favored Hutu power would be replaced by a parliamentary system combined with a council of ministers. Later in the talks, the strongest advocate of Hutu power, the Coalition pour la Défense de la République (CDR) was to be excluded from any transitional political institutions. At about the same time, it was decided that the number of seats in the new assembly and government ministries would favor the opposition to the Hutu-led government party, the Mouvement Révolutionnaire National pour la Démocratie et le Développement (MRNDD, formerly MRND).

Second, after the massacre of several hundred Tutsi, the RPF renewed its offensive in February 1993, and within two weeks had doubled the amount of territory under its control. Only French intervention prevented the RPF from taking Kigali, the Rwandan capital. A consequence of this success was the agreement to allow 50 percent of the armed command of the RPF to be composed of Tutsi, despite the 10 percent representation of Tutsi in the population at large. Refugees abroad, including of course many Tutsi in Uganda and elsewhere in Africa, were to be allowed back in the country as envisioned by the earlier Dar-es-Salaam declaration on the Rwandan refugee problem.

Third, the assassination on October 30, 1993, of Melchior Ndadaye, the first Hutu president of Burundi by the Tutsi-dominated army began a series of killings of thousands of Hutu in that country. According to Bruce Jones, “The assassination and killings were rich material for the extremists in Rwanda, who used the events to lend credence to their claims that the Tutsi of the RPF were returning to Rwanda to reestablish their historic dominance over the Hutu.”

Finally, as in our other two cases [the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide], the presence of refugees grievously accentuated the dimension of loss. The refugees were of two types, both Hutu, but from different locations. First were the Hutu from Burundi who fled the Tutsi-led massacres of 1972 and again in 1993. In 1988, poor harvests led to near starvation in Burundi, leading to an additional refugee influx. The latest of these, however, was to be the most consequential. After the assassination of President Ndadaye of Burundi in 1993, waves of violence spread that led to some 400,000 refugees from Burundi, mostly Hutu, crowding into Rwanda. Many of the génocidaires would be drawn from this group. According to Gérard Prunier, “The psychological impact of the Hutu President’s murder and the arrival in Rwanda of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees spreading tales of terror and massacre at the hands of the Tutsi army of Burundi had enormous negative consequences on the already overcast Rwandese political weather.”

The assassination and refugee arrivals solidified the position of the extremist “Hutu-power” advocates. Supporters of a hardline approach suggesting virtually a “final solution” of the Tutsi now secured additional public support. Many of these Burundi Hutu participated in the genocide, even to the point of committing extraordinary torture and atrocity.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 163-164

Selah. This concludes Genocide Week here at Far Outliers. On to cheerier thoughts but less frequent postings next week.

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Filed under nationalism, war

by | 8 June 2006 · 10:56 pm

Holocaust a Contingent Event?

Thus the Holocaust was a contingent event, one not predestined by the intensity of Nazi anti-Semitism, virulent as it was, but facilitated by the exigencies of a world war that threatened to destroy the Nazi state, with the Jews perceived by Hitler as leading a vanguard of that destruction. Each step in the decision-making process concerning the Jewish Question was dependent on critical war-related events. After the defeat of France in 1940, Madagascar, a French colony, was chosen as the future “homeland” of the Jews. When the undefeated British navy made such mass shipping impossible, an area at the fringe of the German empire near Lublin was chosen, to be later changed to an unnamed destination in the soon-to-be-conquered Soviet Union. This harsher decision was made in March 1941 at the same time as the Lend-Lease Agreement between the United States and Great Britain. Difficulties in the invasion of the USSR led to the killing of Jewish women and children after August 15. As these difficulties became increasingly apparent to the Germans, harsher measures including deportations of Jews from Western to Eastern Europe were carried out, to be followed by the ultimate decision to commit genocide after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the first Russian land victory defending Moscow….

The dynamic approach adopted here helps explain an apparent anomaly. While there is clear evidence of virulent German anti-Semitism during the war even among “ordinary” Germans who behaved abominably toward Jews in the death marches from the concentration camps into Germany proper in 1944–45, the evidence of earlier German anti-Semitism is variable. German anti-Semitic political parties had declined precipitously in their share of the Reichstag vote prior to World War I, achieving only 0.86 percent in 1912 compared with 3.70 percent in 1898. Even after World War I and the rapid rise of anti-Semitism, reasons for joining the Nazi Party given by early members generally did not include anti-Semitism among the primary factors. The economic boycott of Jewish businesses called by the Nazi leadership for April 1, 1933, shortly after its accession to power, was generally regarded as a public relations failure, even by the Nazis themselves. Only after the events of World War II and the growing threat to the Nazi – by now identified as German – state did the German population behave in a deeply anti-Semitic manner. Thus one resolution of the apparent inconsistencies between Goldhagen‘s account and the many critics of his emphasis on “eliminationist anti-Semitism” can be found in the dynamics of the confrontation between Nazi Germany and its systemic environment.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 151-153

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by | 7 June 2006 · 1:12 pm

External Threats to Serbian Security, 1990s

Serbia, despite its domination of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA), had legitimate security concerns as the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia loomed on the horizon. The July 1991 accord at Brioni stipulated the withdrawal of all JNA units from Slovenia, thereby implying international recognition of that new state. As a consequence, Prime Minister József Antall of Hungary warned Serbia that it could not assume that its province of Vojvodina with its large Hungarian minority would continue to be part of Serbia. “We gave Vojvodina to Yugoslavia. If there is no more Yugoslavia, then we should get it back,” declared Antall, referring to the 1920 Treaty of Trianon. This verbal threat was supported by the earlier sale of at least 36,000 Kalashnikov rifles to the Republic of Croatia in 1990. Serbia, therefore, could legimately feel threatened not only by the newly emerging states of the former Yugoslavia, but by neighboring existing states as well.

German domination of the EC political decision making at this time raised perhaps even deeper security concerns for Serbia. The taking on of Croatian fascist symbols by Franjo Tuđman, the Croatian leader, as the Croatian state emerged, of course, was hardly reassuring to the Serbs. Memories of the mass murder of at least 500,000 Serbs by the fascist Croatian state in alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II were rekindled by Tuđman’s behavior.

The recent German unification and German emergence as the clear economic, even political leader of the EC made matters worse. After considerable lobbying by the Croatian and Slovenian leadership as well as by the Vatican, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the German foreign minister, emerged as an unequivocal supporter of Croatian and Slovenian independence. When the actual recognition, by Germany, of both new countries came on December 23, 1991 – with agreement of the remaining EC members, apparently bullied by the newly augmented Germany – the Western threat became palpable. With growing economic ties to Germany, the Slovenian and Croatian economies, already burgeoning relative to the remainder of Yugoslavia, and the presence of NATO nearby, the JNA and mainly its Serbian leadership would feel an imminent threat to the Yugoslav state….

Bosnia was also pivotal to the JNA. During the 1980s, 40–55 percent of the Bosnian economy was tied to military industries. “Sixty to 80 percent of the army’s physical assets (armaments factories, supply routes, airfields, mines and basic raw materials, stockpiles, training schools, oil depots) were located in Bosnia-Herzegovina. On the eve of the war, 68 percent of the federal army’s 140,000 troops were stationed in the republic. To the extent that the Yugoslav army was fighting a war for its own integrity and state, it could not easily be a neutral party in Bosnia-Herzegovina or abandon its own economic foundations.

A two-tiered threat to the Serbs emerged from Serbian numerical weakness within Bosnia coupled with the looming presence of the newly united Germany at the head of the EC. The end result of the military clashes and ethnic cleansing was a near-equal division of Bosnia between the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina (the Bosnian Muslim–Croat Federation) holding 51 percent of the territory and the Republika Srpska (the Bosnian Serb Republic) occupying 49 percent with corresponding ethnic majorities within each. The two halves together formed the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, but with rights of each half to affiliate with other political entities, if they so wished.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 131-132

One of Midlarsky’s major themes is that genocides evolve in response to many contingencies: feelings of prior national or ethnoreligious loss or betrayal, threats to communal security, ongoing defeat in war, validation of past massacres, and so on.

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by | 6 June 2006 · 10:25 pm

Threat of Numbers, Democracy, and Ethnic Cleansing

Threat of numbers also weighed heavily in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia-Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. Ethnic cleansing was committed by all major actors in Bosnia – Serbs, Croats, and Muslims – but the greater part of the ethnically cleansed population was victimized by the Serbs. As a consequence, the Bosnian Serbs will be emphasized in the following account. In contrast to the preceding cases [British encouragement of the Irish famine and emigration during the 1840s and 1850s, and newly independent Poland’s attempt to drive out Germans and Jews during the 1920s and 1930s], the Srebrenica massacre incorporates a clear genocidal element within the overall ethnic cleansing.

The demography of Bosnia-Herzegovina underwent a dramatic change in the decades preceding the Yugoslav wars. In 1961, Muslims constituted only 26 percent of the population of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the Serbs comprising 43 percent. By 1991, virtually a complete reversal had occurred with the Muslims rising to 44 percent and the Serbs dropping to 31 percent. Many Serbs had migrated from Bosnia to Belgrade or other locations inside Serbia proper. A differential birth rate between Muslims and Serbs also favored the former. Thus, from a near majority in 1961 or at least a large plurality, the Serbs now were a distinct minority. One group’s former dominance was exchanged for a secondary status. And all of this was in addition to the genocidal elimination of a large portion of the Bosnian Serb population by the fascist Croatian Ustaše (with some Bosnian Muslim collaboration) in alliance with Nazi Germany.

In Tito’s Yugoslavia under single-party Communist rule, such a reversal of fortune, however dramatic, would not necessarily yield a commensurate diminution of influence. However, by the early 1990s, more than a decade after Tito’s death, democratic reforms ensured that ballots would count very heavily in the power distribution. The desire for electoral victories and the resulting power gain stoked the nationalist fires…. Indeed, ethnic cleansing, and its genocidal corollary, had its roots in a democratization process associated with the emergence of sovereignty in the new post-Cold War period. According to the Badinter Arbitration Commission and the European Community (EC) support of its ruling, international recognition of national sovereignty required a referendum of the residents of a given territory on their choice of a state.

Military control was not sufficient; a vote was required. Thus, the only guarantee of eventual incorporation of a stategically or economically desired territory within the borders of a state was the conformity of the (ethnoreligious) identity of most of the residents of that territory with that of the incorporating state. Ethnic cleansing, therefore, became a preferred modus operandi to maximize the security of the emerging state.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 129-130

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Filed under democracy, nationalism, war

by | 29 May 2006 · 2:29 pm

Validating the Road to Genocide

Finally, the role of validation must be considered. We saw that failures to adequately punish the perpetrators of earlier massacres either of Armenians in 1894–96, Jews in Ukraine in 1918–20, or Tutsi in Rwanda beginning in 1959 likely contributed to the perceived vulnerability of these groups.

With the rise of contemporary mass communications, perhaps even resulting in a global village in the half-century since the Holocaust, validation does not have to be confined to the earlier unpunished murder of the potential victims themselves. If the ongoing process of massacre is not addressed, then victimizers anywhere in the world may conclude that mass killing will not be interrupted or punished, even if in a different location and with different victims. A process of this type likely occurred prior to the Rwandan genocide, and specifically in the early stages of the Bosnian conflict two years earlier. At this time, it had all the appearances of genocide, at least to many observers. The fact that the apparent mass murder of tens if not hundreds of thousands in Bosnia went unopposed, at least militarily in the opening, most influential stages of the conflict, made it appear that genocidal activities could be accomplished without serious external constraint in the post-Cold War climate of the 1990s. In other words, “if they can get away with it, so can we.”

Regarding another African conflict, “I call it the copycat syndrome,” said Dame Margaret Anstee, who was the UN secretary general’s special envoy in Angola in the early 1990s. She said that, in 1992, when the rebel leader Jonas Savimbi “chose bullets over ballots,” he had been watching the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic [still at large!] “getting away with murder.” This interpretation accords with the finding of Stuart Hill and Donald Rothschild that receptivity to outside political violence is conditional upon a recent history of domestic strife, amply found in both Angola and Rwanda. The fighting between Hutu and Tutsi in 1959–64, the sporadic persecutions after independence (especially in 1973), and the ongoing strife after the RPF [Rwandan Patriotic Front] invasion of 1990 amply satisfy this condition.

Widespread massacres anywhere in the world, particularly in regions with powerful states such as Europe, have the potential to be extremely influential, especially if these states do nothing to stop the massacres. If power disparities between potential interveners and victimizers are substantial, again as in Europe in the early 1990s, and no intervention occurs, then validation of massacre, if not genocide itself, can be even more pronounced. Thus, prevention of genocide in one location is dependent on prior occurrences not only in that location, but in almost any place in the world in which successful intervention to prevent mass murder could have occurred, but did not. As in understanding the etiology of genocide, prevention is a complex matter requiring vigilance and awareness of the appropriate antecedent variables.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 394-395

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by | 29 May 2006 · 2:27 pm

Genocide Prevention by Democracies: OIMBY?

And now we arrive at a paradox of genocide prevention. Although one of the best preventives of the genocide of a state’s minority population is the existence of a liberal democratic regime within that state, quite the opposite is true of democracy in bystander states. Here, the desire to be reelected, as in the case of the Allied governments at Versailles, or simply to avoid negative public reaction, may preclude any governmental action on behalf of endangered citizens of another state. Recall … President Roosevelt’s refusal to authorize the bombing of Auschwitz because of the fear of embarrassment, not to mention his earlier narrowing of immigration possibilities for Jews seeking refuge in the United States. Opinion polls had revealed the high level of anti-Semitism in the United States that might make his governing more difficult and, of course, his reelection as well. The British followed a similar path, as did President Clinton more recently in the Rwandan genocide.

At the Evian immigration conference in 1938 …, the only state to open its borders to Jewish immigration was the Dominican Republic under Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who was among the least responsive to public opinion. The Western democracies were extremely uncooperative in opening their borders. To be sure, public outcry on behalf of a threatened population potentially may reach a larger audience in a democracy than in an autocracy, if allowed, but on the whole the presumption in democracies, almost universally accepted, is that the electorate will be far more responsive to issues directly concerning its own perceived well-being than to the concerns of “alien” people….

Democracy, therefore, is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, its spread will make the lives of minorities more secure within states that democratize successfully. This conclusion is suggested by the findings of Rudolph Rummel and Barbara Harff. On the other hand, populations threatened with genocide may find fewer islands of refuge within democratic states. Recent restrictions on the granting of political asylum in European countries, not to mention greater difficulties generally in immigrating to Europe, and all of this even after the European Holocaust experience, suggest the importance of this distinction.

SOURCE: The Killing Trap: Genocide in the Twentieth Century, by Manus I. Midlarsky (Cambridge U. Press, 2005), pp. 392-394

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