When man exterminates mankind

The near universal assumption that war is mankind's foremost killing machine is wrong. Genocide is a greater exterminator, says K. ASHOK VARDHAN SHETTY. Ironically, he adds, the world seems apathetic to ensuring its inhabitants the right to freedom of life.When man exterminates mankind

History: "An account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools".

- Ambrose Bierce

IN April 1975, Maoist revolutionaries called the "Khmer Rouge", led by the shadowy Pol Pot, took over Cambodia (Kampuchea). Declaring "Year Zero" or the commencement of a revolutionary new era, Pol Pot forcibly emptied cities and towns and drove everyone, young and old, into the countryside to work on collective farms. He abolished private property, markets, banks, currency, newspapers, schools, hospitals and religion. He hated intellectuals and systematically executed most of them. Anyone not cooperating in his enterprise of creating an ideal peasant state was summarily executed. About 1.7 million people or over 25 per cent of the population died in "the killing fields of Cambodia", as they came to be known, before the Khmer Rouge was driven out by a Vietnamese invasion in January 1979. Pol Pot died in a jungle camp in 1998, deposed by his own movement but untouched by law.

Throughout human history, tyrants of various hues have gotten away with mass murder. According to Professor R.J. Rummel of the University of Hawaii, a leading expert on this subject: "the near universal assumption that war is mankind's foremost killing machine is wrong". While war in its various forms (international, civil, guerrilla, revolutions and the like) does kill in millions, genocide is a much more bloody human meat-grinder. In fact, genocides have caused four times more deaths than all the wars in history, and yet they do not get the attention they deserve.

Most people think that genocides are committed only by psychopaths like Pol Pot, but history is replete with instances where even ordinary people have become genocidal killers when placed in unusual situations. We tend to gloss over the fact that numerous minority groups have been wholly or partly exterminated in the course of our murderous past. We are not alert to where genocides may occur next and we do not know how to prevent them.

Scientists believe that along with language, art, tool making and agriculture, genocide is a hallmark of the human species. While most animals carry in their genes some code that instinctively restrains them from slaying their kind, such a code is absent in the Homo sapiens; and our intelligence and ethics have failed to restrain our urge to kill. In fact, our genocidal tendencies coupled with weapons of mass destruction now threaten our continuance as a species.

Never say "Never Again": The term "genocide" (from the Greek genos meaning "race", "nation" or "tribe" and the Latin cide meaning "killing") was first coined in 1944 by the Polish- American scholar, Raphael Lemkin in response to the extermination of six million Jews, 1.5 million gypsies and millions of other "undesirables" by the Nazis under Adolph Hitler (1933-45). Hitler lost World War II but he almost succeeded in his "final solution to the Jewish problem" by annihilating over 75 per cent of European Jews. The barbarity of his "death camps" at Auschwitz and Treblinka, where Jews were killed in gas chambers disguised as showers, shocked the conscience of the world. The United Nations boldly proclaimed "Never Again" where genocides were concerned. The U.N. General Assembly passed The Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide in 1948, making genocide a crime under international law. Yet, the second half of the 20th Century witnessed at least 25 instances of genocide that the U.N. has been unable to control, leave alone prevent. When a complaint was lodged before the U.N. against the ongoing genocide in Uganda in the 1970s, in which an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 persons were killed, it responded by asking Idi Amin himself to investigate.

The Genocide Convention: The convention defines "genocide" as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, such as: (a) killing members of the group; (b) causing serious mental or bodily harm to members of the group; (c) deliberately inflicting on the group, conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) imposing measures to prevent births within the group, and (e) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

Perpetrators of genocide may be punished whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals. More than two-thirds of the countries in the world (including India) have ratified the convention.

Genocide is always a crime against a group, not individuals; the individual is a victim because he belongs to the group. It is determined not by the number of people killed but solely by its intention, viz; the total or partial destruction of a group. It may be noted that the definition of genocide does not confine itself to direct killings only. Thus Stalin's action of creating an artificial famine in Ukraine in 1932-33 by forcefully confiscating all the food crops due to which an estimated three to five million Ukrainians died of starvation amounted to genocide. Hitler's action of coercive sterilisations of gypsies to prevent births in the group was also genocide. Australia's experiment in social engineering (till the 1960s) of forcibly separating aboriginal children from their parents and relocating "full-blooded" aboriginals in State or Church-run homes, and light skinned "half-breeds" in the homes of White foster parents, amounted to genocide.

However, the convention allowed a major loophole by not including "political groups" in its definition of genocide. This was done under pressure from the erstwhile Soviet Union. While in a strictly legal sense, killing of political opponents does not count as genocide (unless a political group happens to correspond to one or more of the included groups), the common meaning of genocide includes such killings and they are included in the figures of genocide by most social scientists.

Genocides in the past: In an essay criticising the United States for its genocide in Vietnam, Jean Paul Sartre observed: "Genocide may be a new name but the thing itself is as old as humanity and there has never been a society whose structure has preserved it from committing this crime". The numerous slaughter stories of conquered people in the Old Testament testify to the fact that even the Jews did the same thing when they had the power. Prof. Rummel has estimated that about 40 million people were killed in all the wars and 133 million killed in genocides upto the beginning of the 20th Century; and around 37 million were killed in wars and 170 million killed in genocides (including the killing of political opponents) during the 20th Century.

The Mongols: It was said of the Mongols' cold savagery that "the few survivors envied the dead". During their siege of the ancient city of Nishapur in Persia in 1221, an arrow from Nishapur's walls killed Chenghiz Khan's son-in-law. According to the historian Will Durant, as many as 1.75 million people were slaughtered in revenge when Nishapur fell - a figure considered to be a possible world record for an individual massacre. Among Chenghiz Khan's other infamous massacres were the killings of 1.6 million people of Herat, 1.3 million of Merv, one million of Meru Chahjan, and the complete extermination of the Tanguts of China. He and his Mongol successors (down to Timur Lane) slaughtered around 30 million Chinese, Indians, Persians, Arabs, Russians, Europeans and others over a period of about 200 years.

Australia: One of the forgotten chapters of history is the complete extermination of Tasmanian aborigines (who were Stone Age hunter-gatherers) by White Australians. The number of Tasmanian aborigines dropped from about 5,000 in 1803 (when the colonists first arrived) to a couple of hundreds by 1830. In 1830, the Government resorted to "ethnic cleansing" by rounding up the remaining Tasmanians and deporting them to Flinders Island, 30 miles away, where many of them died due to malnutrition and illness. The last Tasmanian, a woman called Truganini, died in 1876. The Australian mainland aborigines were relatively more numerous and too scattered to be exterminated completely, despite English settlers setting up a "Native Police", which used search-and-destroy tactics to kill or drive out the aborigines. The aboriginal population, which was about 300,000 when the English arrived in 1788, had declined to just 60,000 by 1921.

The Americas: The killing of the Caribbean Arawak Indians by Columbus, of the Aztecs of Mexico by Cortez, of the Incas of Peru by Pizzaro and of other Indian tribes have been well documented in contemporary Spanish and Portuguese accounts. According to historian Bertelome de Las Cascas, an eyewitness to the Columbian era, nearly three million Arawak Indians died between 1494-1506. He tells us how the Indians were deceived, poisoned, hanged en masse, roasted on spits, hunted with dogs, hacked into pieces to be used as dog food and so on. Fifty years later, a Spanish census recorded only 200 Arawak Indians living. By 1600, due to genocide, war, inhuman treatment especially under forced labour, and the introduction of "Old World diseases" such as smallpox, measles and the flu, the Indian population in all the Americas had fallen to just 10 million from about 55 million in 1492.

What about the United States? Beginning with the Powhatan and Pequot tribes in the New England area, where the English colonists first settled, numerous other Indian tribes were massacred by the Army as well as by land-hungry White settlers and speculators, as the frontier moved south and west. Payment of "scalp bounties" to hired killers of Indians, deliberately spreading diseases by giving Indians "gifts" of smallpox-infested blankets, and ruining their crops were some of the other measures employed. The U.S. Government violated its own past treaties with Indian chiefs and, under the authority of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, resorted to "ethnic cleansing" by forcing Indian tribesmen to migrate at gun-point to unfamiliar territories where many of them died of starvation and cold. The statement of a 19th Century U.S. General William Sherman: "The more Indians we kill this year, the less we will have to kill next year." sums up the prevailing attitude toward Indians.

The 20th Century: The first significant genocide was directed against the ethnic Armenians of Asia Minor by the Ottoman Turk Empire between 1915-18. About 1.5 to 2 million Armenians were deported to the Syrian deserts where most of them died due to massacre, rape and starvation. The fact that it did not attract much international opprobrium apparently emboldened Adolf Hitler. Contrary to what is popularly believed, the Nazi genocide was not the largest genocide of even the 20th Century. If we include the killings of political groups, the erstwhile Soviet Union (1917- 91) heads the list with 62 million civilians killed, followed by Communist China (1949-) with 35 million, Nazi Germany (1933-45) with 21 million, Chiang Kai Shek's Kuomintang China (1928-49) with 10 million, and militarist Japan (1936-45) with six million. (Source: R.J. Rummel).

In 1975, Indonesia under General Suharto invaded East Timor, an ex-Portuguese colony, and killed about 200,000 out of a total population of 600,000 East Timorese. In terms of the percentage of the population killed, this (33 per cent) was the worst genocide of the century. In contrast, the Nazis killed 6.5 per cent of the people under their control in Europe. Thousands of East Timorese were killed in another mini-genocide unleashed by Indonesian militias in 1999 after the islanders overwhelmingly voted for independence.

For nearly four decades, the Genocide Convention was forgotten and impunity was the order of the day. But it got a new lease of life with two horrifying genocides in the 1990s in the Balkans and in Rwanda in Central Africa. In 1991-92, as Yugoslavia broke up, ex-Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milosevic - pursuing his plan of establishing a "Greater Serbia" - unleashed mass killings and "ethnic cleansing" of Croats and Bosnian Muslims in the Serb- dominated areas in Crotia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. More than 200,000 people were killed and millions were uprooted at gun- point. Trouble erupted again in 1998-99 in the province of Kosovo where the minority Serbs - with the backing of Milosevic - indulged in mass killing and expulsion of ethnic Albanians who formed 90 per cent of the population.

In Rwanda, the simmering hostilities between the two major communities - the Hutus and the Tutsis - came to a head when Rwanda's (Hutu) dictator General Juvenal Habyarimana was killed on April 6, 1994. The Hutus sought revenge and massacred an estimated 800,000 Tutsis in just 100 days, and expelled another two million to neighbouring countries.

For the first time since the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes tribunals at the end of World War II, the U.N. set up an ad hoc criminal tribunal in 1993 at The Hague in Netherlands to try the perpetrators of war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity in the Balkans, and another tribunal for Rwanda in 1994 at Arusha in Tanzania. About 500 persons are facing trial at The Hague and as many as 125,000 at Arusha. Some jurists feel that the tribunals are setting a dangerous precedent by attempting to assert international legal jurisdiction over national legal systems.

Why do genocides occur? The societies that are prone to genocide have at least one significant, easily identifiable minority group. This minority group may be disadvantaged when compared to the majority (e.g. the natives of Australia and the Americas) or blamed for the country's problems (e.g. Jews in Hitler's Germany) or envied by the majority for achieving economic clout (e.g. South Asians in Uganda) or actively backed by a neighbouring nation (e.g. ethnic Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Kosovo) or simply hated for its past historical wrongs (e.g. Tutsis in Rwanda).

Deep-rooted racial and religious prejudices; secessionist struggles; attempts to equate the nation-state with the identity of the dominant group and to exclude minorities from the mainstream; attempts to establish "the ideal state"; and the desire to grab lebensraum are other important causes of genocide.

Readers will recognise that some of these factors are present in India and its neighbourhood. The killing of about 500,000 Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs during Partition was technically a genocide; it also witnessed the largest ever "ethnic cleansing" in history (over 12 million people). In 1971, General Yahya Khan, military dictator of Pakistan, unleashed a genocide of nearly 1.5 million people of the former East Pakistan in the months leading to the birth of Bangladesh; it ended only due to Pakistan's defeat at the hands of India in the 1971 war. The recent policy decision of the Taliban government in Afghanistan requiring Hindu Afghans to wear identity labels on their clothing and the talk of moving non-Muslims from mixed communities to separate areas has sounded the warning bells of a potential genocide and ethnic cleansing in that country.

Psychology of genocide: How can apparently ordinary people (including public officials) commit the unthinkable, namely, slaughter innocent men, women and children, and indulge in various despicable acts of cruelty? During the genocide in Bosnia and Herzegovina (1991-95), thousands of Bosnian Muslim women were raped by Serbs as a matter of policy and men were forced to kill each other by biting off each other's genitals. The 125,000 suspects facing trial for the 1994 genocide in Rwanda are drawn from almost all walks of life, including a former mayor and at least 20 priests (among them a bishop). On June 8, 2001, a Belgian court convicted two Hutu nuns, who had fled to that country, on charges of driving out Tutsi refugees from the convent and supplying cans of petrol to Hutu attackers, thereby causing the death of about 5,000 Tutsis.

Research into the psychology of genocide done by social scientists such as Stanley Milgram, Hannah Arendt, Neil Kressel, Peter Du Preez and others has thrown up certain interesting findings:

* "Obedience to authority" as opposed to "personal aggression" lies at the heart of most organised human destructiveness. Adolf Eichman who played a major role in the Nazi genocide of Jews stated that he was motivated "by a sense of duty, a willingness to obey authority and a bureaucrat's drive for advancement".

* Perpetrators find it easier to commit atrocities when "they are carrying out the orders of a legitimate authority" because then they feel that they are not personally responsible for their actions either legally or morally.

* Even ordinary people can and will kill if they are led to believe that they face a choice of "kill or be killed". In such situations, the perpetrators can delude themselves into thinking that the victims are the ones to blame and they were acting only in self-defence.

* The perpetrators of genocide think that their normal moral code is not applicable to the victims and justify their cruelty on the ground that the victims are sub-human or dangerous or incurably wicked.

* Genocide is an extreme solution to a social problem. If the danger to prosperity or survival is less extreme or the leader less paranoid, other solutions like sporadic acts of violence, apartheid or just minor discrimination may be employed.

An end to the culture of impunity?

The recent extradition (on June 28), of Slobodan Milosevic to face trial at The Hague has underscored the point that the Genocide Convention excludes any defence based on sovereign immunity; rulers and heads of state are also liable for prosecution. The dubious distinction of being the first head of government to be convicted of genocide belongs to the former Rwandan Prime Minister, Jean Kambanda (in 1998). More recently (in August 2001), Cambodia has taken steps to set up a special tribunal at Phnom Penh, supported by the U.N. but presided over by both Cambodian and U.N.-appointed judges, to try members of the Khmer Rouge figures involved in the 1975-79 genocide. A similar tribunal is taking shape to deal with crimes against humanity in East Timor.

All these are positive developments that will hopefully serve as a warning to other despots that genocide does not pay. But cynics would say that this is possible only in respect of the vanquished; in the case of victors (the U.S. in Nicaragua and Guatemala, Russia in Chechnya), impunity would still seem to be the order of the day. Justice is therefore selective and driven by politics.

In July 1998, a U.N. meeting in Rome adopted a statute for the creation of a permanent International Criminal Court (ICC) for trying the perpetrators of war crimes, genocides and other crimes against humanity. The setting up of the ad hoc criminal tribunals for the genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda did mark a major step forward, but only a permanent court with a genuinely global, impartial remit would have a deterrent effect on the perpetrators of such crimes, besides avoiding allegations that the tribunals were administering "victors' justice".

The court will be established if 60 countries ratify the statute; 36 countries had ratified it as on June 30 (India is yet to do so). Isn't it surprising how much importance and media attention is paid to the activities of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and how little to the establishment of a permanent ICC? The world seems to be placing a higher premium on freedom of trade than on freedom of life.

Today, genocide is recognised universally as the greatest and the gravest of all crimes against humanity. Inclusion of "political groups" in the definition of genocide, getting the remaining one- third of the countries to ratify the Genocide Convention, setting up a Genocide Alert and Early Warning System, the creation of a rapid reaction mechanism, and effective enforcement of the Convention through the establishment of a permanent court are some of the important pending issues. Making them happen is the responsibility not of the U.N. alone but of all who value a peaceful coexistence. Otherwise, prevention of genocide will be a "mission impossible" and the 21st Century may well go the way of the past century.

(The writer, an IAS officer, is Commissioner for Disciplinary Proceedings, Tirunelveli.)

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