Genocide: Causes, Characteristics, Prevention

Read the reprints, case studies, primary documents and other materials provided on genocide and answer the following questions:

Genocide: 1. What is a minority? 2. What is prejudice and how does it develop? 3. How does labeling/stereotyping effect the person it applies to? 4. What is discrimination? 5. What do the accounts have in common? 6. What were the motives behind these acts of genocide? 7. What is the relationship of genocide to war? 8. Are there important differences in the groups who are the victims of genocide and those who are not victims? 9. How have theories on race, nationalism and technology contributed to genocide? 10. How can groups protect against genocide? Consider roles played by the rule of law, independent courts, free elections, and free press. 11. What factors determine the behavior of bystanders? 12. Why is dehumanization of the victims a necessary prelude to genocide? 13. Fill out the genocide chart (on the back) using the case studies.

International Organizations: 1. What international organizations exist to protect human rights? 2. What specific situations lead to violations of human rights? 3. Is it the duty of others to intervene on behalf of those whose human rights are being violated? Why or why not? 4. What are some current examples of human rights violations? 5. How has the definition of human rights expanded in the 21st century?

GENOCIDE CHART
Armenia Nanking Holocaust Cambodia Bosnia Rwanda Darfur

Targeted Group(s)

Perpetrators Leaders Dates

Number of death s by ethnic group

Synopsis

"In Germany, They came first for the communist, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unions, And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, And I didn't speak up because I was Protestant. Then they came for me, And by that time no one was left to speak up." -Martin Neimoeller, German pastor
Definitions: "Genocide as a coordinated annihilation of a national, religious, or racial group by a variety of actions aimed at undermining the foundations essential to the survival of the group as a group. " -Raphael Lemkin, Polish Jewish jurist, 1944 "a structural and systematic destruction of innocent people by a state bureaucratic apparatus. " sociologist, 1980 -Irving Louis Horowitz,

"Genocide is a series of purposeful actions by a perpetrator to destroy a collectivity through mass or selective murders of group members and suppressing the biological and social reproduction of the collectivity. -Helen Fein, sociologist, 1988 "Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group: a. killing member of the group b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction part d. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group e. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group -United Nations Genocide Convention, 1948 "Genocide is a form of one sided mass killing in which a state or other authority intends to destroy a group as that group and membership in it are defined by the perpetrator. " -Chalk and Jonassohn, 1990 The Psychology of Collective Behavior The third modern approach, largely the work of Neil Smel ser, has been termed the value-added approach. It maintains that there are many determinants or necessary conditions-some so cial, some psychological, and some cultural-that must be present for any kind of collective action to occur. The value-added approach insists, however, that these determinants must combine in a definite pattern. As they combine, theoretically possible out comes are gradually eliminated, and the actual outcome becomes increasingly determined. Smelser identifies the following determinants in order of increasing specificity. First, "structural conduciveness" refers to the kinds of structural elements present in a society and their implications for the occurrence of various types of collective behavior. For exam ple, the existence of a stock market, in contrast to other types of exchange mechanisms, provides a setting that makes possible the occurrence of financial speculation, of "booms" and "busts." Second, "structural strain" refers to some deprivation, con flict, ambiguity, or discrepancy in the social environment that disposes to collective attempts at relieving the strain. Perhaps the most prolific cause of such strain is the discrepancy, within a social structure, between legitimate expectations and actual per formance relative to those expectations. In order to be a determi nant of an incident of collective behavior, however, strain must combine with the condition of conduciveness, the two sets of variables acting together and thus increasing the probability of a particular outcome.

The third variable identified by Smelser is the growth and spread of a "generalized belief." In order that the social situation may be diagnosed and people may undertake action in a purposive way, some system of meaning must be created. A generalized belief identifies the source of strain, attributes certain char acteristics to that source, and specifies certain responses to the strain as possible and appropriate. It functions much like an ideology and, in fact, the study of generalized beliefs necessarily merges with the study of rumors, ideologies, and systems of religious belief. A further condition that of "precipitating factors," refers to dramatic, often fortuitous events that occur in the context of the other variables and that may trigger collective action. Next, the participants must be mobilized for action. Given the existence of the previous conditions, collective behavior must still await the mobilization of potential actors. At this stage the behavior of leaders' is often decisive. Finally, the operation of "mechanisms of social control" refers to those counter determinants that prevent, interrupt, de flect, inhibit, or suppress the accumulating force of all the other determinants. Social control refers to the way in which the envi roning society reacts to an actual or impending episode of collec tive behavior. The agencies involved include the police, the courts, the press, legislative and community leaders, and organized public opinion. Whether attempts at social control succeed in preventing or suppressing the behavior in question depends partly on the degree to which those who act as the agents of control represent in their actions the sentiments of the larger community and partly on their willingness and ability to use force to maintain the existing order. -

M inorities as Social Categories Minorities are social categories because of the attitudes of the dominant members of the society. If some individuals were not considered as different, and reacted to as different, minorities would not exist in the social structure. No one is born with attitudes that brand certain individuals as minority members. All such attitudes are learned. As the song in South Pacific states: "You've got to be taught to hate." Through the socialization process the children in a society are taught to react to different persons in different ways. They tend to adopt the attitudes of their parents toward members of minority categories. These attitudes generally take the form of prejudice. stereotyping and discrimination. Prejudice. A PREJUDICE is an attitude, a rigid emotional predisposition to respond negatively toward all members of a particular group or social category. To be prejudiced is to have a pre-conceived opinion about others. For example, if a child is told many times that all members of a certain minority are lazy, ignorant and dirty; he may come to believe this as fact -even though he may never have met a member of this minority category and has no basis for this belief. Stereotyping. Very closely related to prejudice is stereotyping. STEREOTYPING is a process by which we tend to treat all members of a particular category as being alike. It is usually the result of over-generalization. We may have an experience with one person who belongs to a particular social category and then over-generalize by thinking that all others in the category are just like him. We see several sailors drunk while on leave and we over-generalize that all sailors drink to excess-we develop the stereotype of the drunken sailor. Some other common stereotypes that have developed in our society are the hot-tempered Irish, the tight-fisted Scotsman, the formal, aloof Englishman and the emotional Mexican. Many jokes are based upon the stereotypes that exist in a society. When we have had experiences with a number of persons of any social category, we know that we cannot, in reality, stereotype individuals, for each individual is a unique person. These stereotypes do, however, have some influence on the persons who are stereotyped. If told enough times that they have a particular quality, people tend to develop that quality because they believe it is normal for them to have it. This is known as the self-ulfilling prophecy. The expectation brings about the prophesied result: the f individual behaves in the way he is expected to behave. Discrimination: DISCRIMINATION is overt behavior toward another person that is different from the individual's usual behavior toward others. It is, in other words, differential treatment toward others. Generally the difference in treatment occurs because the other person is a member of a particular social category. The individual is not reacting to the person himself but to the social category that he represents. In our society discrimination takes place in such areas as education, voting, employment, group membership and housing. In some cases it leads to open conflict in which individuals attempt to harm the person or destroy his property because of his membership in a minority category. Usually prejudice and discrimination go together; the person who is prejudiced also discriminates. They may, however, operate separately. A person who is prejudiced may not discriminate. A person may be prejudiced toward Negroes but still rent his apartment to a black person because he does not want to be fined for violating the civil rights laws. Conversely, a person who discriminates may not be prejudiced. An individual may have no prejudice toward Negroes but may not rent his apartment to black people for economic reasons-for example, he may know that his present tenants are prejudiced and would move out if he rented to a Negro.

ETHNIC CONFLICT Ethnic conflict seems to have supplanted nuclear war as the most pressing issue on the minds of policymakers. But if yesterday's high priests of mutually assured destruction were guilty of hyper-ration ality, today's prophets of anarchy suffer from a collective hysteria trig gered by simplistic notions of ethnicity. Debates about intervention in Rwanda or stability in Bosnia demand a more sober perspective. -By Yahya Sadowski The Number of Ethnic Conflicts Rose Dramatically at the End of the Cold War The idea that the number of ethnic conflicts has recently exploded, ushering us into a violent new era of ethnic "pandemonium," is one of those optical illusions that round-the-clock and round-the-world television coverage has helped to create. Eth nic conflicts have consistently formed the vast majority of wars ever since the epoch of de colonization began to sweep the developing countries after 1945. Although the number of ethnic conflicts has continued to grow since the Cold War ended, it has done so at a slow and steady rate, remaining consistent with the overall trend of the last 50 years. In 1990 and 1991, however, several new and highly visible ethnic conflicts erupted as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The clashes between the ar mies of Croatia, Serbia, and Slovenia, and the agonizing battle that pitted Bosnia's Croats, Muslims, and Serbs against each other, oc curred on Europe's fringes, within easy reach of television cameras. The wars in Azerbaijan, Chechnya, Georgia, and Tajikistan, while more distant, were still impressive in the way that they humbled the remnants of the former Soviet colossus. Many observers mistook these wars for the start of a new trend. Some were so impressed that they began to reclassify conflicts in Angola, Nicaragua, Peru, and Somalia-once seen as ideological or power struggles-as primarily ethnic conflicts. The state-formation wars that accompanied the "Leninist extinction" now appear to have been a one-time event-a flash flood rather than a global deluge. Many of these battles have already been brought under control. In deed, the most striking trend in warfare dur ing the 19905 has been its decline: The Stockholm International Peace Research Insti tute documented just 27 major armed conflicts (only one of which, India and Pakistan's slow-motion struggle over Kashmir, was an inter state war) in 1996, down from 33 such struggles in 1989. Once the Cold War ended, a long list of seemingly perennial struggles came to a halt: the Lebanese civil war, the Moro insurrection in the Philippines, regional clashes in Chad, the Eritrean secession and re lated battles in Ethiopia, the Sahrawi inde pendence struggle, fratricide in South Africa, and the guerrilla wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua. The majority of the wars that survive today are ethnic conflicts-but they are mostly per sistent battles that have been simmering for decades. They include the (now possibly de funct) IRA insurgency in the United Kingdom; the struggle for Kurdish autonomy in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey; the Israeli-Palestinian trag edy; the Sri Lankan civil war; and long-stand ing regional insurrections in Burma, India, and Indonesia. Most Ethnic Conflicts Are Rooted in Ancient Tribal or Religious Rivalries The claim that ethnic con flicts have deep roots has long been a standard argument for not getting in volved. According to political journalist Elizabeth Drew's famous account, Presi dent Bill Clinton in 1993 had intended to intervene in Bosnia until he read Robert Kaplan's book Balkan Ghosts, which, as Drew said, conveyed the no tion that "these people had been killing each other in tribal and religious wars for centuries." But the reality is that most ethnic conflicts are expressions of modern hate" and largely products of the twentieth century. The case of Rwanda is typical. When Europeans first stumbled across it, most of the country was already united under a central monarchy whose inhabitants spoke the same language, shared the same cuisine and culture, and practiced the same religion. They were, however, divided into several castes. The largest group, the Hutus, were farmers. The rul ing aristocracy, who collected tribute from all other groups, was recruited from the Tutsis, the caste of cattle herders. All groups supplied troops for their common king, and intermar riage was not unusual. Social mobility among castes was quite possible: A rich Hutu who purchased enough cattle could climb into the ranks of the Tutsi; an impoverished Tutsi could fall into the ranks of the Hutu. Anthropologists considered all castes to be members of a single "tribe," the Banyarwanda. Then came the Belgians. Upon occupying the country after World War I they trans formed the system. Like many colonial powers, the Belgians chose to rule through local elite-the Tutsis were eager to collaborate in exchange for Belgian guarantees of their local power and for privileged access to modem education. Districts that had been under Hutu leadership were brought under Tutsi rule. Un til 1929, about one-third of the chiefs in Rwanda had been Hutu, but then the Belgians decided to "streamline" the provincial administration by eliminating all non-Tutsi chiefs. In 1933, the Belgians issued mandatory identity cards to all Rwandans, eliminating fluid movement between castes and permanently fixing the identity of each individual, and his or her children, as either Hutu or Tutsi. As the colonial administration penetrated and grew more powerful, Belgian back ing allowed the Tutsis to increase their exploi tation of the Hutus to levels that would have been impossible in earlier times. In the 1950s, the Belgians came under pres sure from the United Nations to grant Rwanda independence. In preparation, Brussels began to accord the majority Hutus-the Tutsis con stituted only 14 percent of the population-a share of political power and greater access to education. Although this policy alarmed the Tutsis, it did not come close to satisfying the Hutus: Both groups began to organize to de fend their interests, and their confrontations became increasingly militant. Centrist groups that

included both Hutus and Tutsis were gradually squeezed out by extremists on both sides. The era of modem communal violence began with the 1959 attack on a Hutu leader by Tutsi extremists; Hutus retaliated, and sev eral hundred people were killed. This set in motion a cycle of violence that culminated in December 1963, when Hutus massacred 10,000 Tutsis and drove another 130,000 -150,000 from the country. These tragedies laid the seeds for the genocide of 1994. The late emergence of ethnic violence, such as in Rwanda, is the norm, not an exception. In Ceylon, riots that pitted Tamils against Sin halese did not erupt until 1956. In Bosnia, Serbs and Croats coexisted with one another, and both claimed Muslims as members of their communities, until World War II-and peaceful relations resumed even after the bloodshed of that conflict. Turks and Kurds shared a common identity as Ottomans and wore the same uniforms during World War I; in fact, the first Kurdish revolt against Turkish rule was not recorded until 1925. Muslims and Jews in Palestine had no special history of inter-communal hatred (certainly nothing resembling European anti-Semitism) until the riots of 1921, when nascent Arab nationalism began to conflict with the burgeoning Zionist movement. Although Hindu-Muslim clashes had a long history in India, they were highly localized; it was only after 1880 that the contention between these two groups began to gel into large-scale, organized movements. Of course, the agitators in all these conflicts tend to dream up fancy historic pedigrees for their disputes. Bosnian Serbs imagine that they are fighting to avenge their defeat by the Ottoman Turks in 1389; Hutus declare that Tutsis have "always" treated them as sub-humans; and IRA bombers attack their victims in the name of a nationalist tradition they claim has burned since the Dark Ages. But these mythologies of hatred are themselves largely recent inventions.

W would have the ho authority to redraw national borders?

Ethnic Africa

Ethnic Conflict Was Powerful Enough to Rip Apart the USSR The idea that the Soviet Union was destroyed by an explosion of ethnic atavism has been put forth by a number of influential thinkers, most notably Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. But this theory is not only historically inaccurate, it has misleading policy implications. The collapse of states is more often the cause of ethnic conflicts rather than the result. Prior to 1991, ethnic consciousness within the Soviet Union had only developed into mass nationalism in three regions: the Baltic States, Transcaucasia, and Russia itself. Russian nationalism posed no threat to Soviet rule: It had been so successfully grafted onto communism during World War II that even today Leninists and Russian ultranationalists tend to flock to the same parties. In Transcaucasia, the Armenians and Georgians had developed potent national identities but were much more interested in pursuing local feuds (especially with Muslims) than in dismantling the Soviet Union. Only in the Baltic States, which had remained sovereign and independent until 1940, was powerful nationalist sentiment channeled directly against Moscow. When the August 1991 coup paralyzed the Communist Party, the last threads holding the Soviet state together dissolved. Only then did rapid efforts to spread nationalism to other regions appear. In Belarus, Ukraine, and across Central Asia, the nomenclature, searching for new instruments to legitimate their rule, began to embrace--and sometimes invent-nationalist mythologies. It was amidst this wave of post-Soviet nationalism that new or rekindled ethnic conflicts broke out in Chechnya, Moldova, Ukraine, and elsewhere. Yet even amid the chaos of state collapse, ethno-nation alist movements remained weaker and less violent than many had expected. Despite the predictions of numerous pundits, revivalist Is lamic movements only took root in a couple of places (Chechnya and Tajikistan). Relations between indigenous Turkic peoples and Rus sian immigrants across most of Central Asia remained civil.

Ethnic Conflicts Are More Savage and G enocidal Than Conventional Wars Although this assumption is inac curate, the truth is not much more comforting. There appears to be no consistent difference between ethnic and non-ethnic wars in terms of their lethality. In fact, the percentage of ci vilians in the share of total casualties is rising for all types of warfare. During World War I, civilian casualties constituted about 15 percent of all deaths. That number skyrocketed to 65 percent during World War II, which, by popularizing the use of stra tegic bombing, blockade-in duced famine, and guerrilla warfare, constituted a real, al underappreciated, water shed in the history of human slaughter. Ever since, the num beit ber of civilian dead has consti -

tuted two-thirds or more of the total fatalities in most wars. Indeed, according to UNICEF, the share of civilian casualties has continued to grow since 1945- rising to almost 90 percent by the end of the 1980s and to more than 90 percent during this decade. Furthermore, ethnic wars are less likely to be associ genocides of modem times have not been tar ated with genocide than conventional" wars. The worst geted along primarily ethnic lines. Rather, the genocides within

Afghanistan, Cambo dia, China, the Soviet Un ion, and even, to a great extent, Indonesia and Uganda, have focused on liquidating political dissidents: To employ the emerging vocabulary, they were politicides rather than ethnicides. Indeed, the largest genocides of this century were clearly ideologically driven politicides: the mass killings committed by the Maoist regime in China from 1949 to 1976, by the Leninist/Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union between 1917 and 1959, and by the Pol Pot regime in Cam bodia between 1975 and 1979. Finally, some pundits have claimed that ethnic conflicts are more likely to be savage because they are often fought by irregular, or guerrilla, troops. In fact, (a) ethnic wars are usually fought by regular armies, and (b) regular armies are quite capable of vicious massacres. Contrary to the stereotypes played out on television, the worst killing in Bosnia did not occur where combatants were members of irregular militias, reeling drunk on slivovitz.The core of the Serb separatist forces consisted of highly disciplined troops that were seconded from the Yugoslav army and led by a spit -and-polish officer corps. It was precisely these units that made the massacres at-Srebrenica possible: It required real organizational skill to take between 6,000 and 10,000 Bosnian troops prisoner, disarm and transport them to central locations, and systemati cally murder them and distribute their bodies among a network of carefully con cealed mass graves. Similarly, the wave of ethnic cleansing that followed the seizure of northern and eastern Bosnia by the Serbs in 1991 was not the spontaneous work of crazed irregulars. Transporting the male Bosnian population to concentra tion camps at Omarska and elsewhere re quired the talents of men who knew how to coordinate military attacks, read rail road schedules, guard and (under-) supply large prison populations, and organize bus transport for expelling women and children. Globalization Makes Ethnic Conflict More Likely The claim that globalization- the spread of consumer values, democratic in -aggravates ethnic and cultural violence is at the core of Sa stitutions, and capitalist enterprise pothesis, muel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" hy

Robert Kaplan's vision of "the coming anarchy," and Benjamin Barber's warning that we face a future of "Jihad vs. McWorld." Al though these suggestions deserve further study, the early indications are that globalization plays no real role in spreading ethnic conflict and may actually inhibit it.

Despite the fears of cultural critics that the broad appeal of "Baywatch" heralds a collapse or worldwide values, there is not much concrete evidence linking the outbreak of eth has not erupted into ethnic carnage or even mass im violence in this decade. The spread of democratic values seems a slightly more plausible candidate as a trigger for ethnic violence: The recent progress of de mocracy in Albania, Armenia, Croatia, Geor internal conflicts of the post-Cold War period have occurred in so many of the worst recent ethnic conflicts occurred in coun gia, Moldova, Russia, Serbia, and South Africa cieties that were growing less free, such as Egypt, has been attended by ethnic feuding in each country. But this is an inconsistent trend. Some of the most savage India (which faced major secessionist challenges by Kashmiris, Sikhs, Tamils, etc.), Iran, and Peru. For that matter, tries where the regime type was unstable and vacillated non, Liberia, Nigeria, and tually reduced most forms of back and forth between more and less free forms, as in Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Leba America and East Asia during the 1980s, political liberalization seems to have ac political violence. Investigating the impact of economic glo balization leads to three surprises. First, the countries affected most by globalization-that is, those that have shown the greatest increase in international trade and benefited most sig nificantly from foreign direct investment-are not the newly industrializing economies of East Asia and Latin America but the old in dustrial societies of Europe and North Amer ica. Second, ethnic conflicts are found, in some form or another, in every type of society: They are not concentrated among poor states, nor are they unusually common among countries experiencing economic globalization. Thus, the bad news is that ethnic conflicts do not disappear when societies "modernize." The good news, however, lies in the third surprise: Ethnic conflicts are likely to be much less lethal in societies that are developed, eco nomically open, and receptive to globalization. Ethnic battles in industrial and industrializing societies tend either to be argued civilly or at least limited to the political violence of marginal groups, such as the provisional IRA in the United Kingdom, Mohawk secessionists in Can ada, or the Ku Klux Klan in the United States. The most gruesome ethnic wars are found in poorer societie1r-Afghanistan and Sudan, for example-where economic frustration rein forces political rage. It seems, therefore, that if economic globalization contributes to a coun try's prosperity, then it also dampens the level of ethnic violence there. Fanaticism Makes Ethnic Conflicts Harder to Terminate Vojislav Seselj, the commander of one of the most murderous Serb para-mili tary groups in Bosnia, once warned that if U.S. forces were used there, "the war [would] be total. ... We would have tens of thousands of volunteers, and we would score a glorious victory. The Americans would have to send thousands of body bags. It would be a new Vietnam." Of course, several years later, after Serb forces had been handily defeated by a combination of Croat ground forces and NATO airpower, the president of the Serb separatists, Radovan Karadzic, admitted their nic wars to the global spread of crude mate rialism sion sets as the former Yugoslavia but via film, television, radio, and boombox. Denmark has just as many televi

migrant bashing. Meanwhile, Burundi, sitting on the distant

outskirts of the global village with only one television set for every 4,860 people, has witnessed some of the worst

Tajikistan. Con versely, in numerous cases, such as the so-called third wave of democratization that swept Latin

leadership had thought all along that "if the West put in 10,000 men to cut off our supply corridors, we Serbs would be finished." Militarily, ethnic conflicts are not intrinsically dif ferent from any other type of combat. They can take on the form of guerrilla wars or con ventional battles; they can be fought by deter mined and disciplined cadres or by poorly motivated slobs. How much military force will be required to end the fighting varies widely from one ethnic conflict to the next. However, achieving a military victory and building a durable peace are two very differ ent matters. Sealing the peace in ethnic con flicts may prove harder for political-not military-reasons. Ethnic conflicts are fought among neighbors, among people who live in termingled with one other, forced to share the same resources and institutions. When two states end a war, they may need only to agree to stop shooting and respect a mutual border. But in ethnic conflicts there are often no es tablished borders to retreat behind. Some times, ethnic disputes can be resolved '. by drawing new borders-creating new states (such as Bangladesh and "rump" Pakistan) that allow the quarreling groups to live apart. Other times, they can be terminated by con vincing the combatants that they must share power tion of peaceably and learn to coexist. This is the objective of the Dayton accord on Bosnia. In either case, ending ethnic warfare often requires the expensive and delicate construc take much longer. Building truly effective states takes time. For this reason, ethnic wars whose participants are already organized into states or proto-states (which was true of the combatants in Croatia and Bosnia) are probably easier to bring to a conclusion than battles in regions-Afghanistan, for example, not to speak of Somalia where real states have yet to congeal.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

new political institutions. Not only may this be more difficult than terminating a "normal" interstate war, it may also

Genocide Case Studies

ARMENIAN GENOCIDE 1915-16 KNIGHTS OF VARTAN ARMENIAN RESEARCH CENTER The University of Michigan-Dearborn The Armenian Genocide was carried out by the "Young Turk" government of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-1916. One and a half million Armenian Christians were killed, out of a total of two and a half million Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The Turks believed that the Armenians were supporting the Russians during World War I. Most Armenians in America are children or grandchildren of the survivors, although there are still many survivors amongst us. Armenians all over the world commemorate this great tragedy on April 24, because it was on that day in 1915 when 300 Armenian leaders, writers, thinkers and professionals in Constantinople (present day Istanbul) were rounded up, deported and killed. Also on that day in Constantinople, 5,000 of the poorest Armenians were butchered in the streets and in their homes. The Armenian Genocide was masterminded by the Central Committee of the Young Turk Party (Committee for Union and Progress [Ittihad ve Terakki Cemiyet, in Turkish]) which was dominated by Mehmed Talt [Pasha], Ismail Enver [Pasha], and Ahmed Djemal [Pasha]. They were a racist group whose ideology was articulated by Zia Gkalp, Dr. Mehmed Nazim, and Dr. Behaeddin Shakir. The Armenian Genocide was directed by a Special Organization (Teshkilati Mahsusa) set up by the Committee of Union and Progress, which created special "butcher battalions," made up of violent criminals released from prison. Some righteous Ottoman officials such as Celal, governor of Aleppo; Mazhar, governor of Ankara; and Reshid, governor of Kastamonu, were dismissed for not complying with the extermination campaign. Any common Turks who protected Armenians were killed. The Armenian Genocide occurred in a systematic fashion, which proves that it was directed by the Young Turk government. First the Armenians in the army were disarmed, placed into labor battalions, and then killed. Then the Armenian political and intellectual leaders were rounded up on April 24, 1915, and then killed. Finally, the remaining Armenians were called from their homes, told they would be relocated, and then marched off to concentration camps in the desert between Jerablus and Deir ez-Zor where they would starve and thirst to death in the burning sun. On the march, often they would be denied food and water, and many were brutalized and killed by their "guards" or by "marauders." The authorities in Trebizond, on the Black Sea coast, did vary this routine: they loaded Armenians on barges and sank them out at sea. The Turkish government today denies that there was an Armenian genocide and claims that Armenians were only removed from the eastern "war zone." The Armenian Genocide, however, occurred all over Anatolia [present-day Turkey], and not just in the so-called "war zone." Deportations and killings occurred in the west, in and around Ismid (Izmit) and Broussa (Bursa); in the center, in and around Angora (Ankara); in the south-west, in and around Konia (Konya) and Adana (which is near the Mediterranean Sea); in the central portion of Anatolia, in and around Diyarbekir (Diyarbakir), Harpout (Harput), Marash, Sivas (Sepastia), Shabin Kara-Hissar (ebin Karahisar), and Ourfa (Urfa); and on the Black Sea coast, in and around Trebizond (Trabzon), all of which are not part of a war zone. Only Erzeroum, Bitlis, and Van in the east were in the war zone. The Armenian Genocide was condemned at the time by representatives of the British, French, Russian, German, and Austrian governmentsnamely all the major Powers. The first three were foes of the Ottoman Empire, the latter two, allies of the Ottoman Empire. The United States, neutral towards the Ottoman Empire, also condemned the Armenian Genocide and was the chief spokesman in behalf of the Armenians.

The American people, via local Protestant missionaries, did the most to save the wretched remnants of the death marches, the orphaned children. Despite Turkish denial, there is no doubt about the Armenian Genocide. For example, German ambassador Count von WolffMetternich, Turkey's ally in World War I, wrote his government in 1916 saying: "The Committee [of Union and Progress] demands the annihilation of the last remnants of the Armenians and the [Ottoman] government must bow to its demands." German consuls stationed in Turkey, including Vice Consul Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richner of Erzerum [Erzurum] who was Adolf Hitler's chief political advisor in the 1920s, were eyewitnesses. Hitler said to his generals on the eve of sending his Death's Heads units into Poland, "Go, kill without mercy . . . who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians." Henry Morgenthau Sr., the neutral American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent a cable to the U.S. State Department in 1915: "Deportation of and excesses against peaceful Armenians is increasing and from harrowing reports of eye witnesses [sic] it appears that a campaign of race extermination is in progress under a pretext of reprisal against rebellion." Morgenthau's successor as Ambassador to Turkey, Abram Elkus, cabled the U.S. State Department in 1916 that the Young Turks were continuing an ". . . unchecked policy of extermination through starvation, exhaustion, and brutality of treatment hardly surpassed even in Turkish history." Only one Turkish government, that of Damad Ferit Pasha, has ever recognized the Armenian genocide. In fact, that Turkish government held war crimes trials and condemned to death the major leaders responsible. The Turkish court concluded that the leaders of the Young Turk government were guilty of murder. "This fact has been proven and verified." It maintained that the genocidal scheme was carried out with as much secrecy as possible. That a public facade was maintained of "relocating" the Armenians. That they carried out the killing by a secret network. That the decision to eradicate the Armenians was not a hasty decision, but "the result of extensive and profound deliberations." Ismail Enver Pasha, Ahmed Cemal Pasha, Mehmed Talt Bey, and a host of others were convicted by the Turkish court and condemned to death for "the extermination and destruction of the Armenians." The Permanent People's Tribunal recognized the Armenian Genocide on April 16, 1984. The European Parliament voted to recognize the Armenian Genocide on June 18, 1987. President Bush issued a news release in 1990 calling on all Americans to join with Armenians on April 24 in commemorating "the more than a million Armenian people who were victims." President Clinton issued a news release on April 24, 1994, to commemorate the "tragedy" that befell the Armenians in 1915. The Russian Duma (the lower house of the bicameral Russian legislature) voted on April 20, 1994, to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Israel officially condemned the Armenian Genocide as Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Yossi Beilin proclaimed on the floor of the Knesset (the Israeli legislature), on April 27, 1994, in answer to the claims of the Turkish Ambassador, that "It was not war. It was most certainly massacre and genocide, something the world must remember." The Armenian genocide is similar to the Jewish holocaust in many respects. Both people adhere to an ancient religion. Both were religious minorities of their respective states. Both have a history of persecution. Both have new democracies. Both are surrounded by enemies. Both are talented and creative minorities who have been persecuted out of envy and obscurantism. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Nanking Massacre 1937 The following selection was one of the first reports about the ghastly carnage during the Japanese occupation of Nanking. This eyewitness report was filed by a New York Times reporter. Aboard the U.S.S. Oahu at Shanghai, Dec. 17 1937. Through wholesale atrocities and vandalism at Nanking the Japanese Army has thrown away a rare opportunity to gain the respect and confidence of the Chinese inhabitants and of foreign opinion there. . . . The killing of civilians was widespread. Foreigners who traveled widely through the city Wednesday found civilian dead on every street. Some of the victims were aged men, women and children. Policemen and firemen were special objects of attack. Many victims were bayoneted and some of the wounds were barbarously cruel Any person who ran because of fear or excitement was killed on the spot as was anyone caught by roving patrols in streets or alleys after dark. Many slayings were witnessed by foreigners. The Japanese looting amounted almost to plundering of the entire city. Nearly every building was entered by Japanese soldiers, often under the eyes of their officers and the men took whatever they wanted. The Japanese soldiers often impressed Chinese to carry their loot The mass executions of war prisoners added to the horrors the Japanese brought to Nanking. After killing the Chinese soldiers who threw down there arms and surrendered, the Japanese combed the city for men in civilian garb who were suspected of being former soldiers. In one building in the refugee zone 400 men were seized. They were marched off, tied in batches or fifty, between lines of riflemen and machine gunners to the execution ground. Just before boarding the ship for Shanghai the writer watched, the execution of 200 men on the Bund [dike]. The killings took ten minutes. The men were lined against a wall and shot. Then a number of Japanese, armed with pistols, trod nonchalantly, around the crumpled bodies, pumping bullets into any that were still kicking. The army men performing the gruesome job had invited navy men from the warships anchored off the Bund to view the scene. A large group of military spectators apparently greatly enjoyed the spectacle. When the first column of Japanese troops marched from the South Gate up Chungshan Road toward the city's Big Circle, small knots of Chinese civilians broke into scattering cheers, so great was their relief that the siege was over and so high were their hopes that the Japanese would restore peace and order. There are no cheers in Nanking now for the Japanese. By despoiling the city and population the Japanese have driven deeper into the Chinese a repressed hatred that will smolder through tears as forms of the anti-Japanism that Tokyo professes to be fighting to eradicate from China. The capture of Nanking was the most overwhelming defeat suffered by the Chinese and one of the most tragic military debacles in the history of modern warfare. In attempting to defend Nanking the Chinese allowed themselves to be surrounded and then systematically slaughtered The flight of the many Chinese soldiers was possible by only a few exits. Instead of sticking by their men to hold the invaders at bay with a few strategically placed units while the others withdrew, many army leaders deserted, causing panic among the rank and file. Those who failed to escape through the gate leading to Hsiakwan and from there across the Yangtze were caught and executed... When the Japanese captured Hsiakwan gate they cut off all exit from the city while at least a third of the Chinese Army still was within the walls. Because of the disorganization of the Chinese, a number of units continued fighting Tuesday noon, many of these not realizing the Japanese had surrounded them and that their cause was hopeless. Japanese land patrols systematically eliminated these. Tuesday morning, while attempting to motor to Hsiakwan, I encountered a desperate group of about twenty-five Chinese soldiers who were still holding the Ningpo Guild Building on Chungahan Road. They later surrendered. Thousands of prisoners were executed by the Japanese. Most of the Chinese soldiers who had been interned in the safety zone were shot in masses. The city was combed in a systematic house-to-house search for men having knapsack marks on their shoulders or other signs of having been soldiers. They were herded together and executed. Many were killed where they were found, including men innocent of any army connection and many wounded soldiers and civilians. I witnessed three mass executions of prisoners within a few hours Wednesday. In one slaughter a tank gun was turned on a group of more than 100 soldiers at a bomb shelter near the Ministry of Communications. A favorite method of execution was to herd groups of a dozen men at entrances of dugouts, and to shoot them so the bodies toppled inside. Dirt then was shoveled in and the men buried. Since the beginning of the Japanese assault on Nanking the city presented a frightful appearance. The Chinese facilities for the care of army wounded were tragically inadequate, so as early as a week ago injured men were seen often on the streets, some hobbling, others crawling along seeking treatment. Civilian casualties also were heavy, amounting to thousands. The only hospital open was the American managed University Hospital and its facilities were inadequate for even a fraction of those hurt. Nanking's streets were littered with dead. Sometimes bodies had to be moved before automobiles could pass. The capture of Hsiakwan Gate by the Japanese was accompanied by the mass killing of the defenders, who were piled up among the sandbags, forming a mound six feet high. Late Wednesday the Japanese had not removed the dead, and two days of heavy military traffic had been passing through, grinding over the remains of men, dogs and horses. The Japanese appear to want the horrors to remain as long as possible, to impress on the Chinese the terrible results of resisting Japan.

Chungahan Road was a long avenue of filth and discarded uniforms, rifles, pistols, machine guns, fieldpieces, knives and knapsacks. In some places the Japanese had to hitch tanks to debris to clear the road. Rudolf Hoess, Eyewitness to Hitler's Genocide 1934-1945 Although the Nazis did experiment with mass shootings to kill Untermenschen (sub-humans), they eventually adopted a form of killing that used Cyclon-B gas in their extermination camps. The following account, given at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal (19451946), is the testimony of Rudolf Hoess, a member of the Nazi Party (NSDAP), who commanded the extermination camp at Auschwitz. I, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Hoess, being first duly sworn, depose and say as follows: 1. I am forty-six years old, and have been a member of the NSDAP since 1922; a member of the SS since 1934; a member of the Waffen-SS since 1939. I was a member from 1 December 1934 of the SS Guard Unit, the so-called Deathshead Formation [TotenkopfVerband]. 2. I have been constantly associated with the administration of concentration camps since 1934, serving at Dachau until 1938; then as Adjutant in Sachenhausen from 1938 to May 1, 1940, when I was appointed Commandant of Auschwitz. I commanded Auschwitz until 1 December 1943, and estimate that at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease making a total dead of about 3,000,000. This figure represents about 70% to 80% of all persons sent to Auschwitz as prisoners, the remainder having been selected and used for slave labor in the concentration camp industries. Included among the executed and burnt were approximately 20,000 Russian prisoners of war (previously screened out of Prisoner of War cages by the Gestapo) who were delivered at Auschwitz in Wehrmacht transports operated by regular Wehrmacht officers, 100,000 German Jews, and great numbers of citizens, mostly Jewish from Holland, France, Belgium, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Greece, or other countries. We executed about 400,000 Hungarian Jews alone at Auschwitz in the summer of 1944 4. Mass executions by gassing commenced during the summer of 1941 and continued until fall 1944. I personally supervised executions at Auschwitz until the first of December 1943 and know by reason of my continued duties... that these mass executions continued as stated above. All mass executions by gassing took place under the direct orders, supervisions and responsibilities of RSHA [Reich Security Main Office]. I received all orders for carrying out these mass executions directly from RSHA. ... 6. The "final solution" of the Jewish question meant the complete extermination of all Jews in Europe. I was ordered to establish extermination facilities at Auschwitz in June 1941. At that time there were already, in the general government, three other extermination camps; Belzek, Treblinka, and Wolzek. These camps were under the Einsatzkommando of the Security Police and SD. I visited Treblinka to find out how they carried out their extermination. The Camp Commandant at Treblinka told me that he had liquidated 80,000 in the course of one-half year. He was principally concerned with liquidating all the Jews from the Warsaw ghetto. He used monoxide gas and I did not think that his methods were very efficient. So when I set up the extermination building at Auschwitz, I used Cyclon B, which was a crystallized prussic acid which we dropped into the death chamber from a small opening. It took from 3 to 15 minutes to kill the people in the death chamber depending upon climatic conditions. We knew when the people were dead because their screaming stopped. We usually waited about one-half hour before we opened the doors and removed the bodies. After the bodies were removed our special commandos took off the rings and extracted the gold from the teeth of the corpses. 7. Another improvement we made over Treblinka was that we built our gas chambers to accommodate 2,000 people at one time, whereas at Treblinka their 10 gas chambers only accommodated 200 people each. The way we selected our victims was as follows: we had two SS doctors on duty at Auschwitz to examine the incoming transports of prisoners. The prisoners would be marched by one of the doctors who would make spot decisions as they walked by. Those who were fit for work were sent into the Camp. Others were sent immediately to the extermination plants. Children of tender years were invariably exterminated since by reason of their youth they were unable to work. Still another improvement we made over Treblinka was that at Treblinka the victims almost always knew that they were to be exterminated and at Auschwitz we endeavored to fool the victims into thinking that they were to go through a delousing process. Of course, frequently they realized our true intentions and we sometimes had riots and difficulties due to that fact. Very frequently women would hide their children under their clothes but of course when we found them we would send the children in to be exterminated. We were required to carry out these exterminations in secrecy but of course the foul and nauseating stench from the continuous burning of bodies permeated the entire area and all of the people living in the surrounding communities knew that exterminations were going on at Auschwitz. 8. We received from time to time special prisoners from the local Gestapo office. The SS doctors killed such prisoners by injections of benzene. Doctors had orders to write ordinary death certificates and could put down any reason at all for the cause of death. 9. From time to time we conducted medical experiments on women inmates, including sterilization and experiments relating to cancer. Most of the people who died under these experiments had been already condemned to death by the Gestapo... I understand English as it is written above. The above statements are true; this declaration is made by me voluntarily and without compulsion; after reading over the statements, I have signed and executed the same at Nuremberg, Germany, on the fifth day of April 1946. Subscribed and sworn to before me this 5th day of April 1946, at Nuremberg, Germany Smith W. Brookhart Jr., Lt. Colonel, IGD ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cambodia: Year Zero (1975-79) Pol Pot the leader of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge communist Party create another genocidal terror when he implemented one of the most theoretical and brutal communist revolutions of the twentieth century. Convinced that the Khmer Rouge Communists could achieve a Cambodian workers paradise immediately; one of its officers told the Cambodian head of state, prince Norodom Sihanouk: "We want to have our name In history as the ones who can achieve total communism with one leap forwardWe want to be know as the only communist party to communize a country without a step-by-step policy, without going through socialism." To achieve this goal, between 1975 and 1979 the Khmer Rouge liquidated more than a million Cambodians. Once the Khmer Rouge took the Cambodian capital city of Phnom Penh in April 1975, they started to move people out of the cities into the countryside for a massive reeducation program. At the same time, the Angkar (the "Higher Committee") began the systematic killing of those Cambodians associated with the governments of Lon Nol and Norodom Sihanouk. But, in addition to these political killings, the Khmer Rouge started to annihilate any Cambodian man, woman, or child who threatened the revolution or refused to obey orders. Between 1975 and 1979, more than a million Cambodians, out of a population of 7 million, fell in the Khmer Rouge killing fields. Francois Ponchaud, a French Roman Catholic priest, lived and worked in Cambodia for many years but was forced to leave Phnom Penh with the last convoy of foreigners on May 8, 1975. Although living in Paris, he continued to work with Cambodian refugees, interviewing them and recording their stories while the Khmer Rouge's genocide was under way. The following excerpts describe the experiences of a schoolteacher, a court clerk, and a physician during this period. A Schoolteachers Story At the beginning of January 1976... twenty of us were sentenced to death for traveling without permission. We were taken away in a truck with our hands tied behind our backs. One Khmer Rouge sat behind with a gun and two more sat in front with the driver. One of us managed to free himself and secretly untied eleven others. Then one of us tried to kill the Khmer Rouge sitting in the back of the truck, but the guards in front saw him and turned around and started shooting. The twelve who had their hands free jumped down from the truck and dived into the Mongkol Borei River by the side of the road, then disappeared into the forest. The other eight were killed on the spot. A Court Clerks Account of an Execution In October 1975, the Angkar chose us to cut bamboo at 0 Ta Tam, near Phnom Rodaong, for eighteen days. One afternoon we were in a group of thirty wagons carting bamboo to the national highway. We had loaded and were about to turn around when we saw a military truck enter the forest carrying about ten young men and girls. A moment later we heard shots, then the truck came back empty. We were very frightened, and harnessed up to go home. Then we heard moaning and somebody calling for help. One of our group, named Sambath, went over and saw a young man with bullet wounds in both arms and one thigh, and his arms still tied behind his back. Sambath untied him, gave him a little rice, and told him how to get to the road to the west. On the way home Sambath told us, That young man told me that the people who had been shot hadn't done anything wrong, they had simply gone to look for food in the forest, so they weren't working with their group. That's why they were killed." A Physicians Description of His Prison Camp When we got out of the train at the station in Sisophon a reception committee was waiting for us. Loudspeakers welcomed us and asked all "specialists" to step forward: doctors, architects, schoolteachers, students, technicians, and skilled workers of all kinds. The Angkar was going to need them. I didn't move, but a man who had been a nurse under me and was now a Khmer Rouge cadre recognized me and strongly advised me to tell them my true identity or risk punishment. Then all the "specialists" were taken to Preah Neth Preah, where we had to work the land as before. One day we were taken to Chup, a village on the road between Siem Reap and Sisophon. There the Khmer Rouge received us with open arms and gave us three meals a day! That was a real treat! At one big meeting, attended by 397 "specialists," a Khmer Rouge asked us to write our biographies and set down our desiderata. He even invited us to come up to the platform and offer our suggestions as to how the country could be better run. Teachers and students went up and began criticizing the Angkar for not giving people anything to eat, and for treating the sick with medicine that was more like rabbit dung than real pills; they asked for the bonzes to be reinstated and the pagodas reopened, and the high schools and universities, and for everyone to be allowed to visit his family, et cetera. The Khmer Rouge said nothing, but we could see plainly enough that they didn't like it. After we had written our autobiographies they called out the names of twenty young people who had been most outspoken in their criticism, tied their hands behind their backs the way you tie a parrot's wings, and took them to Sisophon, where they were put in prison. The rest of us went back to the village of Preah Neth Preah. A month later, on January 6, the Khmer Rouge carne to get some of us and took us to the Battambang prison. There were forty-five of us, and we were the first "guests" of the prison since the new regime began. We had to write out our autobiographies several more times. Each time the cadres became more insistent: "You've made good progress since the last time but we know that some of you are still not telling the whole truth! We know what that truth is, why hide it? The Angkar doesn't want to kill you, don't be afraid! By acting the way you are, you show that you have not been converted." After three sessions, one of my friends revealed that he had been an army doctor. A week later he disappeared. We had been there two weeks when the group of twenty young people interned at Sisophon were brought in; their arms were still tied at all times, even during meals, and the ropes had cut deep furrows. We also saw a former lieutenant colonel of the government army brought in, and about twenty [republican] MPs. After a few days they were taken away one at a time and we didn't see them again. Now and then one of us was summoned for a "meeting," and sometimes the person did not come back. At the end of two and

one-half months in prison fifteen of us were taken to the Van Kandal pagoda, which had also been made into a prison. There were three buildings in the pagoda: The doors and windows of one were kept permanently shut-that was where the prisoners were beaten, and some people had been in it for seven months. The windows of the second building were opened from time to time. The third building, where I was put, was for prisoners who stayed only a short time, usually two or three weeks. Its doors and windows were always open until 6:00 P.M. We had reeducation sessions, study meetings, we were subjected to constant interrogations. Those of us who were European trained doctors and engineers were questioned even more than the others, because we were suspected of having worked with the imperialists or been engaged in secret activities. In the evening, when we were taking our bath in the Stung Sangker, we saw other prisoners bathing, for although the houses on the other bank were always shut up, there were prisoners in them too. After ten days we were given a black garment and a gray and red krama [scarf] and put in a truck. Half the group was let out at Pay Saman and the other half at Kauk Khmwn, to go on working in the fields. That was April 6, 1976. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Ethnic Cleansing (New term for Genocide) Bosnia 1991-92: Three Witnesses The dissolution of Yugoslavia, which began in 1991, resulted in great physical destruction. The once resplendent cities of Dubrovnik and Sarajevo are now battered, shell shocked, and strewn with rubble. By 1996 between 200,000 and 500,000 people were killed in the fighting, more than 3 million were refugees, and between 20,000 and 50,000 Bosnian Muslim women were raped. Ethnic, religious, and national rivalries in the Balkans run very deep. Certainly the animosity between the Muslim and the Christian populations in the Balkans stretches back over six hundred years of bloodied history. These ethnic and religious tensions came to flash point in the years immediately following the death of Communist Party leader Marshal Tito, who had ruled Yugoslavia with considerable skill between 1945 and 1980. To assuage the ethnic rivalries after the death of Tito, the seat of government of Yugoslavia in the 1980s rotated among the six autonomous republics of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Montenegro. But this system of rotation soon proved unworkable and in 1991 Croatia and Slovenia declared their independence from Yugoslavia. Serbia, the largest of the republics, tried to forestall further dissolution, but the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina also declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Of the six former Yugoslav republics, Bosnia is the most ethnically and religiously diverse. It is the only republic not established on a purely ethnic or religious basis. It was not until 1971 that the Muslims in Bosnia gained official separate recognition in the Yugoslav census. Prior to 1971, Muslims were identified as "Yugoslav" or "other." This distinction underscores the difficulty of defining precisely who and what a Bosnian is, because Muslims, Serbs, and Croats all lay claim to this designation. At the time of the 1992 referendum on independence, the 4 million Bosnians were divided approximately into a population that was 44 percent Muslim, 31 percent Serbian, and 17 percent Croatian, with the remainder being Gypsies, Albanians, and other Balkan or Western European people. This religious and ethnic division was further complicated by the fact that large concentrations of Serbs live in western Bosnia close to the Croatian border and large concentrations of Muslims live in eastern Bosnia close to the Serbian Republic. Beginning in the spring of 1992, brutal, internecine fighting broke out among the Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian population. In Bosnia, the practice of "ethnic cleansing," or the forced removal (or annihilation) of a targeted population from its homes, villages, and cities, has been used by all groups against their enemies throughout this war. The following accounts are the statements of three Muslim survivors of Serbian ethnic cleansing in former Muslim-occupied areas of northwestern Bosnia-Herzegovina who were later interrogated in Zagreb, Croatia, and Wifferfuerth, Germany. A Witness from the Omarska and Trnopolje Camps (Near Prijedor); Muslim, Born 1931, Male After the occupation of Kozarac, on May 27, 1992, I was imprisoned for the first time in Ciglane (the Brickyards) near Prijedor. I spent two days and three nights there. Then I was transferred to the "Keraterm" camp and after three days, I spent another six days in the Omarska camp. The last camp I was taken to was Trnopolje. The total number of days spent in various camps is one month and twenty days. We heard that they took away children from their mothers and that the children were never returned. Women were separated from men. People slept on the concrete floor under the eaves of the brickyard. People would urinate at a spot ten meters away from the rest of the prisoners. The people imprisoned there were mostly from the village of Kozarac, the surrounding area of Prijedor and even from Bosanski Novi. They caught us in such a manner that they used the Red Cross emblem and shouted into a megaphone: "Surrender, the Red Cross is waiting for you, you will be protected." There were twenty-one buses on the road and in front of them they separated women and children. We had to keep our heads lowered in the bus. Some buses drove straight through the woods and into Trnopolje; the others went to Ciglane (the Brickyards). They would take people to Ciglane by night. Then machine-gun fire would be heard and that person never returned. I saw how they tortured a reserve policeman. First they broke his bones and then they put a piece of clothing into his mouth, drenched him in gas and set him on fire. In Omarska they battered and interrogated people. I think that I saved myself by my persistent claim that I have no brothers or children. I did not betray anyone for being in battle or having arms. The camp was on the Banja Luka-Bosanski Novi railroad. There was also a mine with screening towers 20 meters high. Inside the towers there were bins (10 X 6 square meters) each containing some 300 people. These bins were used for screening ore. Each bin had four floors and there were 8,000 people in six rooms. We could not sleep but maybe doze on somebody's shoulder. There was no light. At last, after three days, we got one loaf of bread to share among

six people. We urinated inside the same room we occupied. My two brothers were there and one of them died on the second floor. I did not dare look at him and I did not know that he died until I came to Trnopolje and was told so by some people. Approximately thirty-five or forty people died in six days. We got bread once every three days. Later we even got some beans. They would come to the door, and we would form a circle and take our food in a piece of cardboard or a milk pack that we found there. Every day they would give us as much water as we could catch in a piece of cardboard. On several occasions they put a hose through a steel mesh platform which separated each floor. The camp was divided into three sections: A, B and C. No one survived in the C section. I know that because later nobody from the C section came to Trnopolje. Three men from the village of Kozarac committed suicide. Two of them got out through the drain and the guards outside killed them. Besides the towers, there were also prisoners in the storage building. There were only thirty women in the camp. Interrogations were carried out every night. They put a gun barrel into my mouth and thus I lost seven teeth. Many did not return after the interrogation. Interrogators were educated Serbs. I know three of them. Two of them were Mladen Mitrovic, our neighbor, and Slobodan Kuruzovic, a local teacher. They were both some sort of commanders in the camp. They wore caps with the Chetnik insignia. They beat camp prisoners. They used to tell us that they would kill thirty Muslims for each Serb killed. I was the only one from the C section to mount a bus with forty-five men, mostly older in age. Young men would come to the camp, and the older ones would leave. Boys and young men did not stand a chance. We arrived in the Trnopolje camp at 5:00 P.M. It was as if we were free at last. We were happy for being able to lie on the concrete. Upon my arrival, there were some 4,500 people in the central fenced in area surrounded by guards. However, the entire village of Trnopolje was a camp, and seen from this angle it contained 10,000 prisoners. Some women were allowed to go home escorted by Chetniks and prepare meals. On the one side of the camp there was a highway, and on the other side there was a railroad where people were hurled into cattle wagons for the purpose of ethnic cleansing. From the cinema where I spent my first night, Bakir Mahic was taken out. They entered every night and took away people in succession, not according to any list or bill of indictment. They would take boys to a macadam road and tread on them. However, less people died here than in Omarska because there was some food. In the entire central camp area there was one school and one outdoor toilet. We got enough drinking water and A. V. would pass us a hose over the fence. Once the camp commander gave me permission to go home for a visit and after 2.5 kilometers the guards caught us, forced us into a van (seven people on top of another seven people, etc., like logs), and then they returned us to the camp. They filed us in the clinic and there I saw captured Muslim doctors. In front of the clinic I saw how Chetniks carved the Chetnik insignia (four cyrillic S) into S.K.'s chest. He was a big thirty-one year old man. After that they cut the sinews on his legs. They threw another man on the ground and cut his spine in half with a knife so that his legs were instantly paralyzed. The Chetniks who call themselves Rambos did such things. Those particular members of irregular units had various details to their uniform such as reticular masks on their faces, black gloves, and black ribbons on their foreheads. They were not Bosnian Serbs because they talked in Ekavian dialect (used in Serbia) and they often used the word "bre" (Serbian dialect). Through an open window I could hear women crying from twenty meters away. One girl was saying through tears: "People, leave me alone, I was operated only a month ago." "Do you have a mama?" they asked her, and then they brought her parents to her. They raped her mother in front of her and her father. Once they took five thirteen year old girls to Mirsad's house and returned them the following day in such a state that S.P., a medic, managed to sew up two of them, while the other three had to be transferred to the Prijedor hospital. At least they said that they took them there. Ten women were raped under a poplar tree. Some thirty Chetniks were standing guard in shifts. Doctor P. told me how Zeljko Sikora from Prijedor, Czech by nationality, was mutilated. He also worked in the hospital as a medic. They chopped off his testicles and gouged out his eyes. He was falsely accused that he had castrated 300 Serbian children before the war. After one month and twenty days spent in camps, I left Bosnia with a convoy of refugees. ******************************************************************************************************

A Witness Tells of the Interrogation Methods in the Omarska Concentration Camp (Near Prijedor); Muslim, Born 1966, Female

I finished electro technical school in 1985. Because of difficulties in finding employment, I was forced to work as a waitress for an entrepreneur in his restaurant. I worked there until September I, 1991, when the restaurant was sold. I had to wait four months, until January I, 1992, when I started working at a grill for the same owner. Our boss did not want to send us to the employment office to wait, because the restaurant was in the process of being built and he would need us at any time. I worked at the grill in shifts until April 30, 1992, when the government changed overnight. I was working the second shift and while walking through the city I saw armed persons in uniforms. I did not understand anything. At that point I was unaware of these events. At work I asked what was going on and they told me to be quiet and work. On the same day a curfew was proclaimed. Because of my grave financial situation I had to keep working. At work there were constant provocations, people would play around with weapons, but I put up with it thinking that it would pass. I heard them saying that all Croats and Muslims were going to be slaughtered and killed, but I never believed that would actually happen. They often asked me if I was a little "Ustasha," and gave me that nickname. All of this was more or less normal for me until they came to my place. First they told me that they would set all of my things on fire, that it all had to burn because it was Muslim, and after all of these provocations they took me to jail. At the Internal Affairs Office they hit me and yelled at me and looked for a Serbian flag to nail it on my head. They even said that they would carve it in my forehead. I spent the night in jail and in the morning I was taken to the Omarska camp. The drive to Omarska was horrible. They taunted me and hit me sometimes, and told me that I would never again return to Prijedor, and that they wanted an ethnically clean Greater Serbia. They drove me through Kozarac. At every one of their checkpoints they stopped and took me out with the intention of shooting me right on the spot. They told me to take a good look at Kozarac, which no longer existed and never again would. I could only see destroyed and burned houses. They told me that this was no longer Kozarac, that it was now Radmilovo. There were two militiamen with me in the car, Bato Kovacevic and a certain Jancevic. Both of them took some writing pads on this trip. When I arrived in Omarska, they said that I was an extreme case and that I had to be watched closely. First they took all my money and turned my pockets inside out. Several times they hit me over the back with automatic guns and they struck me with a cane twice. Then they took me to the interrogation room. While they were questioning me, they extinguished cigarettes on my legs because I could not answer their questions. I ended up with two open wounds. After the interrogation they locked me up with the other women. Here I was able to see the elite of Prijedor society. These people had had it all, and now they were poor and pathetic. Every day we watched what they did to our men. Prisoners had to lie out in the sun on their stomachs all day, while the guards danced on them. The worst was night time. They often came and took me out somewhere and raped me. In the morning Commander Zeljko Mejakic would call me and ask me how I had spent the night and if I had slept well. I could not say anything because they hit me a few more times with their fists or rifle-butts with the warning to shut up. This same commander knew what was happening because he was one of them. Every day I counted and looked to see where the men were taken after interrogation, either to another room or out in the field. When they took a man out we knew that there was one person less. Every morning and evening a truck came by and took all of those that were out in the field. They even came with a dredger to pick them up. In the course of the day they often took me to their office to clean up the blood. When I came in they would tell me whose blood it was and how they were beaten. One day I was cleaning Asaf Kapetanovic's blood and on the way back to my room I saw that they were taking Idriz Jakupovic in for questioning. They were hitting him and yelling at him, and they threw him against the wall so that he broke his arm. This whole scene and all of these images are always in my head. These two are no longer alive, but they are not the only ones. Muhamed Cehaie, Abdulah Puskar, Nediad Serie, Ziko and Osman Mahmuljin, Ado Begic and many others were killed in front of me. The way they killed men was to beat them to the point when they could no longer get up, so that they would lie there and rot. They would just throw them outside and let them die. This is very hard for me to write, because every moment that I spent in that camp is like an open wound. My writing about it only scratches the surface. I spent fifty-six days in this camp. Every night I listened to the people crying and moaning, begging and pleading for their torturers to stop, trying to convince them of their innocence. They were guilty on only one charge: for being Croatian or Muslim. Then the Serbs brought in the people from my hill. They beat and killed them. At the same time, members of the Serbian Red Cross arrived, and among them was a Miea from the medical center. He did not have a hand, but he was able to beat and kill people. Then they beat up and killed Ratih Kadirie, who worked as a driver at the medical center. There was a Zoran, called Zoka, who distributed the sour and moldy food, who was also one of the killers, and Kale, who carried an extension cord, Krle, Draten Kacavenda, Mite, Drago, Zivko who would not let us have our bread, Ckalja, who watched these scenes with pleasure, and many others whose names I do not know. After fifty-six days I was taken to Trnopolje with twenty-eight other women. I stayed there for three days and then I was released. I remained in the city, because I could not get to my house in the village. I knew nothing of my family. The people in my village were either forced out or killed. I stayed in the city for two weeks and then I left with a convoy for Travnik. Just as we departed, after a few kilometers, they began with the looting. Every few kilometers they stopped and looked for money, German Marks,

jewelry and other things. They also took various pendants, nail-clippers, pencils, lighters, etc. Sometimes they took someone's child and said that they would kill him/her if they did not get a set amount of German Marks. Subsequently they even stripped us of our clothes and shook us to make sure we hid nothing. In this way they stripped us of all we had, and in the end, on Vlasie Mountain, they took out 250 young and strong men and killed them. They took fifteen men out of the truck that I was in. In Travnik, after three months, I finally met up with my parents. They told me everything that had happened to them. I do not know anything about my brother ************************************************************************************************** A Victim of Rape in the Village of Rizvanovici (Prijedor County); Muslim, Born 1977, Female After the attack on my village, I witnessed the massacre of civilians as the worst tragedy. At that point I did not know that something much worse than death was yet to come. My sister gave birth to a child in the basement where we hid, during the mortar attacks on the village. After the village of Rizvanovici fell, and after the Chetniks came, I saw dead children, three to eight years of age near my house. I saw the destroyed mosque, and men who were taken away. Some more prominent men were singled out from the column and taken away. They shot them in the head. They fell down and remained lying there in grotesque positions. There was chaos, panic and death. My grandfather was accused of killing a Serb, and they executed him on the threshold of his house. A certain number of women and children remained in the village. We hid in the basements of the destroyed houses. Our house was intact. That day, several Chetniks arrived. They searched for valuable things and men who hid in the nearby forest. One of the Chetniks, thirty years of age, ordered me to accompany him into the house. I had to go. I was terrified, but I did not comprehend what was going to happen to me. I knew that I would endanger the lives of the members of my family if I resisted. When we entered the house, he searched for money, jewelry and other valuable objects. He could take everything he wanted. He ordered me to confess where the men were hidden. I did not answer. Then he ordered me to take off my clothes. I was horrified. I took off my clothes silently, and everything fell apart in me. Under my naked skin I felt I was dying. I closed my eyes. I could not bear look at him. He hit me with his fist and I fell down on the floor. Then he jumped on the top of me. He raped me. I cried, and squirmed, and bled a lot. I was a virgin. He ordered me to get up. I wanted to pick up my clothes and cover my naked and disfigured body, but he told me not to touch them. He ordered me to stand still and wait. He said I better be careful of what I did, because I am responsible for the fate of my family. He went out, turned around to make sure nobody saw him and then invited another two Chetniks to come in. I felt lost. I did not feel anything when they left. I do not know how long I was lying on the floor. My mother came in and found me lying there. And her seeing me in such a humiliating state was even worse than everything that had happened to me. I suddenly realized what had happened. I realized that I had been depraved, raped, deformed forever. My mother knew what was happening inside of me. That was the saddest moment in our lives. We both cried, screamed. She covered me. Together, we went back to the basement. I remember all that was happening to me later on through some sort of mist, some distorted dream. We were transported to Trnopolje, and then went on foot to Travnik over the Vlasic Mountain, some thirty kilometers away. It was in Travnik that I emerged from this dreamy, confused state. Now, I sometimes find myself wondering if all this ever happened to me. To me of all people. My mother helped me tremendously. I want to become a mother one day. Only how? For me, men represent a horrible picture of violence and pain. I know that not all of them are like that, but this feeling of horror is stronger than my sense of reason. I cannot help myself.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Rwanda Genocide 1994 In the spring of 1994, the Western media reported "tribal warfare" of unusual ferocity in Rwanda, a small central African country with Zaire on its west, Uganda on its north, and Kenya on its east. Together with its southern neighbor, Burundi, Rwanda had been a German colony from 1885 to World War I and a Belgian mandate from 1925 to 1962. In 1994, the majority Hutus seemed intent on killing as many of the minority Tutsis, who had formerly enjoyed something of an elite status, as they could. In the summer months of the same year, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a group composed largely of Tutsis in exile in Uganda, with some Hutus hostile to the regime, led an invasion that succeeded in toppling almost the entire Hutu government. The leadership of the fallen regime encouraged Hutus to flee the country, and hundreds of thousands did so, huge numbers ending up in a sprawling refugee camp in Goma, just across the Zairian border. Alain Destexhe is an experienced observer of African affairs and the former secretary general of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders), a worldwide relief and health organization very active in Africa. In his work excerpted here, he traces how the Tutsis, who raised cattle and acquired wealth and status separating them from the Hutus, who were mostly crop farmers and laborers, became the objects of murderous resentment. Hutu Racist Ideology It took exactly fifty years ... it or something very like it has indeed happened again. Just as Hitler's grand plan was founded on an ingrained European anti-Semitism which he played on by singling out the Jews as the source of all Germany's ills, the Hutu radicals are inheritors of the colonial lunacy of classifying and grading different ethnic groups in a racial hierarchy. While the Jews were described by Nazis as "vermin," the Tutsis were called invellzi ("the cockroaches that have to be crushed"). Anti-Tutsi propaganda presented them as a "minority, well-off and foreign"-so similar to the image developed to stigmatize the Jews-and thus an ideal scapegoat for all Rwanda's problems. In a country which receives virtually no information from the outside world, local media, particularly the radio, play an essential role. For a large part of the population, a transistor radio is the only source for information and therefore has the potential for exerting a powerful influence. Rwandan radio broadcasts are in two languages, French and the national language, Kinyarwanda, which is spoken by all Rwandans. Less than a year before the genocide began, two close associates of President Habyarimana set up the "private" radio station, known as Radio Mille Collines (Thousand Hills). Assured of a large audience thanks to regular programs of popular music, the programs in Kinyarwanda broadcast unceasing messages of hate, such as "The grave is only half full. Who will help us fill it?" Christened "the radio that kills" by its opponents, it was the basic instrument of propaganda for the Hutu extremists, and the militias rallied in support of its slogans. On 6 April 1994 the plane carrying President Habyarimana and President Cyprien Ntariyamira of Burundi was shot down by rocket fire. Although it is not yet known who was behind this assassination, it is clear that it acted as the fuse for the eruption of violence which led to the greatest tragedy in the history of the country. As the stereotypes of physical characteristics do not always provide sufficient identification-and can even be totally misleading-it was the identity cards demanded at the roadblocks set up by the militias that acted as the signature of a death warrant for the Tutsis. As control of the road could not alone ensure that no Tutsi escaped, the militia leaders divided up the territory under their control so that one man was allocated for every ten households in order to systematically search for Tutsis in their immediate localities. In this way every Tutsi family could be denounced by somebody who knew the members personally: pupils were killed by their teachers, shop owners by their customers, neighbor killed neighbor and husbands killed wives in order to save them from a more terrible death. Churches where Tutsis sought sanctuary were particular targets and the scene of some of the worst massacres: 2,800 people in Kibungo, 6,000 in Cyahinda, 4,000 in Kibeho, to give just a few examples. In Rwanda, the children of mixed marriages take the ethnic group of the father and, although many of the Hutu killers-including some militia leaders-had Tutsi mothers, so effective was the indoctrination program, that even this apparently counted for nothing. Radio Mille Collines encouraged the violence with statements such as that made at the end of April 1994, "By 5 May, the country must be completely cleansed of Tutsis." Even the children were targeted: "We will not repeat the mistake of 1959. The children must be killed too." The media directly influenced Hutu peasants, convincing them that they were under threat and encouraging them to "make the Tutsis smaller" by decapitating them. In the northern areas occupied by the RPF, the peasants were astonished that the Tutsi soldiers did not have horns, tails and eyes that shone in the dark as they had been described in radio programs. The genocide spread rapidly to cover the whole country under the control of the government army. By the end of April, it was estimated that 100,000 people had been killed. There are aspects of this genocide which are new and contemporary; others we have seen before. The use of propaganda, the way control was exercised over the administration: these are all reflections of the modem era. So too are the extreme racist ideology and the radical determination to exterminate all Tutsis in one all-encompassing blow. It would be a mistake to think that the killings were carried out in an archaic manner: the reality is that they were meticulously well organized. However, the means used to accomplish them

were primitive in the extreme: for example, the use of machetes and unfunis (wooden clubs studded with metal spikes). Unfortunately, the media eclipsed the first aspect of its preoccupation with the second. Nobody really knows the exact origin of the Hutu, Tutsi and Twa peoples (the Twa represent only one percent of the population and have never played a significant role in the region). The three groups speak the same language, share the same territory and follow the same traditions. By all definitions, this should qualify Rwanda as a nation in the true sense. The first Europeans to reach Rwandan territory described the people and their way of life in terms very much influenced by the scientific ideas of their time. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the origin of Africa's many peoples was regarded by Europeans as rooted in the biblical story of Ham, Noah's son. The book of Genesis tells how Ham and his descendants were cursed throughout all generations after he had seen his father naked. The "Blacks" were believed to be descendants of Ham, their color a result of that curse. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, linguistic studies, archaeological research and rational thinking led to a questioning of this theory, which was subsequently replaced with a system of classifying people according to their physical characteristics: skin color, type of hair, shape of the skull, etc. Those who were then classified as "blacks" were regarded as "another" kind of human being, not descended from Noah. Yet this classification did not cover the whole population of the African continent. Explorers in the region we now know as Niger and the areas of the Zambezi and the Upper Nile came across people that did not correspond to the caricature of the negro. So it was that German, and later Belgian, colonizers developed a system of categories for different "tribes" that was largely a function of aesthetic impressions. Individuals were categorized as Hutu or Tutsi according to their degree of beauty, their pride, intelligence and political organization. The colonizers established a distinction between those who did not correspond to the stereotype of a negro (the Tutsi) and those who did (the Hutu). The first group, superior Africans, was designated Hamites or "white coloreds" who represented a "missing link" between the "whites" and the "blacks." Also included in this group were the Galla peoples of Ethiopia and Somalia. "Any quality attributed to an African group must be read as a sign of interbreeding with 'non-negro' cultures": this "hamitic" ideology translates into the hypothesis, for which there is no serious proof, that a migration of the Galla took place in the seventeenth century, thus explaining the similarities between the Galla and the Tutsi. The Belgians also favored the Tutsi students and the main priority of Rwanda's schools was their education. As this was, inevitably, also the policy at the tertiary level, the educated elite at the country's university, Astrida, the future administrative and technical backbone of the country, were very largely Tutsi. The colonizers blamed the imbalance in the schools and resulting low social standing of the Hutu on Hutu passivity, making no acknowledgement of their own role in the situation. The legacy of this theory continues even today. The missionaries also supported the Tutsi power structure, using it to evangelize from the top down. The Tutsi chiefs, once they had become Christian, then felt a moral obligation to convert the Hutu masses. The seminaries were more open to the Hutu than the schools. Although, after 1959, the educated Tutsi sometimes backed the theory of the mono-ethnic origins of the population following the removal from power of the Tutsi aristocracy ... the myth of Egyptian origins and Hamitic superiority was supported by many among the Tutsi people. Some Hutu discovered the extent to which they, the "native" people of the region, had been "despoiled" and developed their own theory of the "Ethiopian invaders," categorizing the Tutsi as colonizers, the same as the Belgians. Rwandan Tutsis were from now on treated as immigrants and the 1959 "revolutionaries" called for "the return to Ethiopia of the Tutsi colonizers." The Hutu had begun to believe that they alone were the native people of Rwanda. Belgium, criticized at the UN for a colonial policy that ensured that only a handful of the local population in their colonies received sufficient training for them to eventually be promoted to the higher levels of their national administrations-a policy aimed at ensuring that they would not think they were capable of running their own countrygradually ceded power to the small Hutu .elite. The democratic principle of majority rule was cited as justification for the removal of the Tutsi from their previous positions of influence; a complete reversal of previouspolitical policy. The Hutu became the "good guys" who "have been dominated for so long by the Tutsi" and the Belgians now expressed "sympathy for the cause of the suppressed masses." In 1959, a series of riots directed against the authority of the Tutsi chiefs were allowed by the Belgians to escalate into a revolution accompanied by massacres which killed more than 20,000 Tutsi. What happened in Rwanda illustrates a situation where the coexistence of different social groups or castes metamorphosed into an ethnic problem with an overwhelmingly racist dimension. The caricature of physical stereotypes, although they did not always hold true and were probably due to the principle of endogamy practiced by each group despite the number of mixed marriages, was manipulated to provide proof of the racial superiority of one group over the other. Archaic political divisions were progressively transformed into racial ideologies and repeated outbreaks of violence resulting from the colonial heritage which was absorbed by local elites who then brought it into the political arena. The present generation has internalized this ethnological colonial model, with some groups deliberately choosing to play the tribal card. The regimes that have ruled Rwanda and Burundi since independence have shown that they actually need ethnic divisions in order both to

reinforce and justify their positions. Finally, however, it was the ethnic classification registered on identity cards introduced by the Belgians that served as the basic instrument for the genocide of the Tutsi people who were "guilty" on three counts: they were a minority, they were a remainder of a feudal system and they were regarded as colonizers in their own country. Day by day, as the death toll increased in the spring of 1994, the reality that a genocide was underway became clearer. By the end of April, it was estimated that 100,000 people had been killed, by mid-May 200,000, and by the end of May half a million. Although nobody really knew the actual death toll, the signs of massacres were everywhere and the River Nyaborongo carried thousands of corpses towards Lake Victoria along what Hutu propaganda described as "the shortest way back to Ethiopia." Taking humanitarian, rather than political, action is one of the best ways for a developed country to avoid facing up to its responsibilities in the wake of a disaster such as Rwanda. Another way is language. Employing a particular vocabulary can cast doubt on the actual causes of the massacre and foster confused images of the guilty and the victims. "Warring parties," "belligerents" and "civil war" on one hand, and "aggression," "massacre" and "genocide" on the other, are all strong words-but they are not synonyms in meaning. Under the cover of a supposed objectivity, to suggest that "both parties" have committed atrocities can often be seen as an underhand way of giving them the same status. To speak of tribal disputes when an armed majority perpetrates a genocide against an unarmed minority is patronizing and meaningless. The aggression against the Bosnians and the genocide of the Tutsis both exceed civil war. In the case of Rwanda, to compare the RPF with the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR) is at best a display of ignorance, at worst propaganda. The FAR have committed a genocide and the RPF have carried out exactions: the two things cannot be compared. If a distinction is not made, then genocide is reduced to the status of common murder-but murder is not the same as genocide. They differ both in nature and in degree, a fact that needs to be constantly emphasized if the crimes committed in Rwanda are not to be pushed to the back of international consciousness. The racist philosophy of the previous Hutu government and the dangers of trivializing, and even forgetting, the events are summed up perfectly in a remarkable interview with Francois Karera, the former mayor of Kigali, now living comfortably with his family in Zaire, just a few miles from the misery of the refugee camps (one of which he is responsible for). According to Karera "The Tutsis are originally bad. They are murderers. The Tutsis have given the white people their daughters. Physically they are weak-look at their arms and legs. No Tutsi can build: they are too weak ... they just command... the others work. If the reasons are just, the massacres are justified. In war you don't consider the consequences, you consider the causes. " The perpetrators of genocide should permanently lose any legitimacy as rulers of their people. They should be outlawed by the international community and brought to trial for their crimes. In the case of Rwanda, no attempt should be made to negotiate with those responsible for the genocide of the Tutsis: they are not only directly responsible for this worst possible crime against humanity, but also for the exodus from Rwanda and the catastrophic events in Goma which followed. When the new Allied forces won victory in 1945, there was never any question of providing a role for the Nazi party in the new Germany, nor of considering just how small a fraction of the population it really represented. The Nazis were banned outright and the authors of genocide then, as should happen in Rwanda today, lost any right to participate in public life.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

GENOCIDE IN SUDAN (DARFUR) Darfur is a region about the size of France located in Western Sudan. A little over half of the six million people who live there are black Africans while the rest are Arab. It is a region that has faced severe underdevelopment and neglect from the central government. In early 2003, two loosely allied rebel groups began a rebellion in Darfur, Sudan calling for the redress of social and economic grievances and demanding greater political power. Sudanese authorities saw the rebellion as a threat to the viability of the entire country, fearing other neglected regions would similarly rise up and demand larger degrees of autonomy. Thus, the government decided to respond by carrying out a deliberate policy of extermination against the African tribal peoples of Darfur, Sudan from which the rebels are drawn. A large Arab militia known as the Janjaweed has been the main group employed by the government to implement this policy of genocide in Sudan. They are armed by the government and sent into various African villages where they proceed to kill civilians of all ages, burn down houses, destroy crops and livestock, carry out mass executions, target vital infrastructure, and commit wide-scale rape. Reports coming out of the region speak regularly of such brutal acts as men being chained together and thrown into burning huts, women being raped in front of their loved ones, and children being kidnapped from their families. To date, over 400,000 people have died as a result of the Sudan genocide campaign and 2.5 million have been internally displaced. Despite the denial of involvement with such crimes by the Sudanese government, the facts show that high ranking officials are coordinating the Sudan genocide. Sudanese intelligence forces are known to be in close communication with the militias and air force planes regularly conduct bombing raids on villages and fleeing civilians prior to Janjaweed invasions. In July of 2004, Human Rights Watch released a report revealing internal government documents showing that the central government both armed and coordinated the Janjaweed to carry out the Sudan genocide. In addition, the government has gone to great lengths to make sure that no news reporters or humanitarian personnel are allowed into the villages being targeted in Darfur. The United States has already officially labeled the crisis in Darfur, Sudan genocide and the United Nations has called it the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tribal Wisdom "For centuries, [Yugoslavia] marked a tense and often violent fault line between empires and religions. The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of that country... surfaced all those ancient tensions again " -U.S. president Bill Clinton, addressing the U.S. Naval Acad emy in 1994 "We are confronted by contradictory phenomena in which both the factors of integration and cooperation and the tendencies of division and dispersal are both apparent. The technological and communications revolution is offset by the eruption of nationalist conflicts and ethnic hatreds." -Egyptian foreign minister Amr Moussa, before the UN Gen eral Assembly in 1996 "In this Europe of ours, where no one would have thought a struggle between ethnic groups possible, tragically this has come about. It may serve to open people's eyes to the unspeakable possibilities in the future, even in unexpected places. Today we are threatened by the danger. .. of racial, religious, and tribal hatred." -Italian president Oscar Luigi Scalfaro in 1997 "Yet even as the waves of globalization unfurl so powerfully across our planet, so does a deep and vigorous countertide .... What some have called a 'new tribalism' is shaping the world as profoundly on one level as the 'new globalism' is shaping it on another." -His Highness the Aga Khan, at the Commonwealth Press Union Conference in Cape Town in 1996

" ... all over the world, we see a kind of reversion to tribalism We see it in Russia, in Yugoslavia, in Canada, in the United States What is it about, all this globalization of communication that is making people return to more-to smaller units of identity?" -Neil Postman, chair of the department of culture and commu nication at New York University, in 1995

Amnesty International Amnesty International is a worldwide campaigning movement that works to promote internationally recognized human rights. Amnesty International's vision is of a world in which every person enjoys all of the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights standards. Our mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of our work to promote all human rights. Amnesty International has more than a million members and supporters in over 140 countries and territories. Amnesty International is impartial and independent of any government, political persuasion or religious creed. Our work is financed largely by subscriptions and donations from our worldwide membership. Fact and Figures: The work of Amnesty International Amnesty International's mission is to undertake research and action focused on preventing and ending grave abuses of the rights to physical and mental integrity, freedom of conscience and expression, and freedom from discrimination, within the context of its work to promote all human rights. The organization opposes abuses by opposition groups, including hostage-taking, torture and killings of prisoners and other deliberate and arbitrary killings; assists asylum-seekers who are at risk of being returned to a country where they will be at risk of violations of basic and fundamental human rights; cooperates with other non-governmental organization (NGO), with the United Nations (UN) and with regional intergovernmental organizations; ensures control of international military, security and police relations; organizes human rights education and awareness-raising programs. Campaigning for Human Rights During 2001, Amnesty International delegates visited dozens of countries and territories to meet victims of human rights violations, observe trials, and interview local human rights activists and officials. Amnesty International members, supporters and staff around the world mobilize public opinion to put pressure on governments and others with influence to stop human rights abuses. Activities range from public demonstrations to letter-writing, from human rights education to fundraising concerts, from approaches to local authorities to lobbying intergovernmental organizations, from targeted appeals on behalf of a single individual to global campaigns on a specific country or issue. Each year, Amnesty International members from around the world join forces to campaign on one country or on a particular human rights issue. These major campaigns involve reporting on human rights issues, lobbying governments, and working closely with local human rights activists and other community organizations to achieve change. Human Rights Watch WHO - We are lawyers, journalists, academics, and country experts of many nationalities and diverse backgrounds. We often join forces with human rights groups from other countries to further our common goals. WHAT - Human Rights Watch is the largest human rights organization based in the United States. Human Rights Watch researchers conduct fact-finding investigations into human rights abuses in all regions of the world. Human Rights Watch then publishes those findings in dozens of books and reports every year, generating extensive coverage in

local and international media. This publicity helps to embarrass abusive governments in the eyes of their citizens and the world. WHEN - Human Rights Watch started in 1978 as Helsinki Watch, to monitor the compliance of Soviet bloc countries with the human rights provisions of the landmark Helsinki Accords. WHERE - Human Rights Watch is based in New York. Human Rights Watch tracks developments in more than 70 countries around the world. We also follow issues in women's rights, children's rights, and the flow of arms to abusive forces. We have exposed abuses by governments and rebels; by Hutu and Tutsi; by Serb, Croat, Bosnia Muslims, and Kosovar Albanian; by Israelis and Palestinians. WHY - Human Rights Watch believes that international standards of human rights apply to all people equally, and that sharp vigilance and timely protest can prevent the tragedies of the twentieth century from recurring. Some examples: HOW - The hallmark and pride of Human Rights Watch is the even-handedness and accuracy of our reporting. To maintain our independence, we do not accept financial support from any government or government-funded agency. THE HELSINKI ACCORDS Representatives of thirty-five nations gathered in Helsinki, Finland, in 1975 for a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. The Final Act of the Conference, known as the Helsinki Accords, sets forth a number of basic human rights: "The participating States will respect human rights and fundamental freedoms, including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief, for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion. "They will promote and encourage the effective exercise of civil, political, economic, social, cultural, and other rights and freedoms all of which derive from the inherent dignity of the human person and are essential for his free and full development. "Within this framework the participating States will recognize and respect the freedom of the individual to profess and practice, alone or in community with others, religion or belief acting in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience. "The participating States on whose territory national minorities exist will respect the right of persons belonging to such minorities to equality before the law, will afford them the full opportunity for the actual enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms and will, in this manner, protect their legitimate interests in this sphere.

"The participating States recognize the universal significance of human rights and fundamental freedoms, respect for which is an essential factor for the peace, justice and well-being necessary to ensure the development of friendly relations and co-operation among themselves as among all States."

United Nation Commission on Human Rights www.un.org Introduction Human rights are recognized as fundamental by the United Nations and, as such, feature prominently in the Preamble of the Charter of the United Nations: "... to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small..." The Organization's role in this area is carried out by a number of human rights bodies some of which date back to the very foundation of the United Nations. In 1993 the General Assembly created the post of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR)(website: http://www.unhchr.ch/). Topics that have been addressed by this commission include:

Adequate housing Administration of justice Business and human rights Capital punishment Children' s rights Civil and political rights Crimes against humanity Death penalty Discrimination Education (Right to-) Executions (extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary-) Extreme poverty

Freedom of opinion Freedom of religion Genocide (see War crimes) Health (see Toxic wastes) HIV/AIDS Housing (Adequate-) Human rights defenders Human rights education Justice (Administration of-) Labor rights (Employment) Law enforcement

Mercenaries Migrants Minorities Nationality and statelessness (see Asylum) Poverty Refugees (see Asylum) Slavery Terrorism Torture War crimes Women