HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN
Adam LeBor

The Nation, NY
March 1 2007

In the winter of 1992, at the height of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, I
interviewed a group of Bosnian Muslim refugees who had found sanctuary
in the Croatian city of Karlovac. Their accounts were confused
and confusing, but they shared a common thread. One after another,
the refugees reported that when the Serbs arrived in their towns and
villages they immediately rounded up community and religious leaders,
teachers and intellectuals. They were the first to be executed. I was
not sure whether to believe these traumatized, shattered survivors. I
should have.

It is one of history’s darker ironies that the Serb paramilitaries
of the 1990s who wiped out Bosnia’s Ottoman heritage used ethnic
cleansing methods honed by the Ottoman army eight decades earlier.

The Turks deployed the Bashi-Bazouks, former criminals released from
prison, during the Armenian genocide in 1915. The Bashi-Bazouks lived
off plunder and were granted a free hand to murder and rape. When the
campaign against the Armenians began, Turkish soldiers sealed off each
community and rounded up its leaders and other notables. They then
executed them in the public square. Many of the Serb paramilitaries
who committed the worst atrocities in Bosnia were also criminals,
released by Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic to do the regime’s
dirtiest work. Like their Turkish predecessors, the Serbs too had
lists, we now know, of those slated for execution when the ethnic
cleansing began. The men of Karlovac were telling the truth.

Genocide, or what we now define as genocide–the intentional
destruction of a national or ethnic group–is not a modern crime. The
Bible records repeated incidents of the warring peoples of the Near
East annihilating each other, but genocide is a modern term. It was
invented by a Polish-Jewish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin. During the
1930s Lemkin lobbied the League of Nations, the predecessor of the
United Nations, for laws against the destruction of a people. In 1944
he published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis
of Government, Proposals for Redress, the first work to contain the
word genocide, from genos, Greek for people or race, and caedere,
Latin for to cut or kill. Paradoxically, while genocide continues to
take place, the word has become so powerful that, to paraphrase Oscar
Wilde, it has almost become "the crime that dare not speak its name."

Consider the strange, if not perverse, reluctance of one of the
primary bodies charged with prosecuting war criminals to deliver a
guilty verdict for genocide. Gen. Radislav Krstic was the commander
of the Drina Corps of the Bosnian Serb army, which carried out much
of the killing at Srebrenica, where in July 1995 8,000 Bosnian men
and boys were murdered. Krstic was indicted by the UN International
Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in 1998 on six
counts of genocide and crimes against humanity. In August 2001 he was
found guilty of genocide and sentenced to forty-six years in prison.

But the sentence was later reduced on appeal, to thirty-five years,
when the ICTY found Krstic guilty of the lesser charge of aiding and
abetting genocide.

The former speaker of the Bosnian Serb "parliament" Momcilo Krajisnik
was sentenced in September to twenty-seven years in prison for his
role in organizing the ethnic cleansing campaigns in 1992. Krajisnik
was the most senior Serbian indictee to be held at The Hague since the
death of Milosevic. He was found guilty of five counts of war crimes,
including persecution, extermination and forced transfer.

Judge Alphons Orie said that Krajisnik had played a crucial role
in conducting war crimes, and that the actus reus (guilty act) of
genocide had occurred. Nevertheless, the judges acquitted Krajisnik
of genocide, arguing that they had not received sufficient evidence of
genocidal intent to destroy the Bosnian Muslim and Bosnian Croat ethnic
groups. What this means is that the ICTY has ruled that genocide did
take place at Srebrenica in July 1995 and in eastern Bosnia in 1992,
but as of February 2007 no one has been found guilty of actually
committing these acts of genocide. On February 26 the International
Court of Justice, which deals with disputes between states, ruled that
Serbia was not guilty of genocide but had failed in its obligations
to prevent it at Srebrenica, further confusing matters.

Asimilarly arid debate shapes the discourse over Darfur. The Bush
Administration claims that a genocide is occurring there but refuses
to act under its obligations as a signatory to the Convention on
the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide to stop
the killing. The UN refuses to use the G-word at all. In January
2005 it released a 176-page report on Darfur. It recorded that
government forces and their proxy militia, known as the Janjaweed,
engaged in widespread and systematic murder, rape and other forms
of sexual violence, torture, pillaging and forced displacement. The
report noted that despite the fact that two elements of genocide
"might be deduced"–the act of killing and the targeting of a
particular group–"the crucial element of genocidal intent appears
to be missing." As if that weren’t opaque enough, it added that some
individuals may have committed acts with "genocidal intent."

This endless hair-splitting greatly aids states that perpetrate
genocide. If nobody knows what genocide is, then how can anyone be
guilty of committing it? It detracts from the more important debate
of how to stop the ongoing killing in Darfur. Wrongly viewing Darfur
through the prism of the Iraq War, much of the left, both in the United
States and Europe, seems paralyzed by the fear of being seen to support
another overseas adventure. For all its complications–pre-existing
conflicts over water and agricultural land, desertification and
arbitrary international borders–the crisis in Darfur is also
simple. The Sudanese government is waging a sustained campaign of
murder, ethnic cleansing and displacement against the people of Darfur,
a campaign extensively documented by the UN, Human Rights Watch and
Amnesty International, among others.

The slaughter could be curtailed or even brought to a close without
Western military intervention. Such steps might include: deploying
UN troops inside Sudan; deploying peacekeepers in Chad to prevent
cross-border raids; targeted sanctions on Sudan’s oil industry;
targeted sanctions on Sudanese government ministers, army and
intelligence officers; using US trade as a weapon to pressure China,
Sudan’s main sponsor, to stop the carnage; and even threats to boycott
the Beijing Olympics.

The obfuscation of the facts also buttresses the determination of
nations that have committed genocide to punish those few citizens who
dare to speak out. Consider, for example, the case of Turkey, which
still refuses to acknowledge its responsibility for the twentieth
century’s first genocide. A major difference between the destruction
of the Bosnians and that of the Armenians is that the former has
been thoroughly documented–most thoroughly in the United Nations’
own reports. (Though unable to prevent or stop genocide, the UN is
extremely proficient at documenting it, as evinced by its dossiers
on Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur.) Yet even now in Turkey, a country
that seeks admission to the European Union, it remains hazardous to
discuss the actual fate of the Armenians. In 1915, about 1 million
Armenians were killed by deliberate murder, enforced starvation
and forced marches into barren plains with no food or water. Turkey
admits that between 300,000 and 600,000 Armenians died but blames
the general chaos of war. Those who contradict the official version
are dealt with harshly. The novelists Orhan Pamuk, who won the 2006
Nobel Prize in Literature, and Elif Shafak have both faced charges
for the thought-crime of "insulting Turkishness," which can bring
three years in prison–Pamuk for telling a Swiss newspaper that
"30,000 Kurds and 1 million Armenians were killed in these lands,
and nobody but me dares talk about it," Shafak because of a few
lines about the genocide spoken by an Armenian character in her novel
The Bastard of Istanbul [reviewed in this issue]. The charges were
dropped in both cases, but more recently another writer accused of
"insulting Turkishness"–Hrant Dink, editor of the Armenian-Turkish
newspaper Agos–was shot dead outside his Istanbul office.

Perhaps it is best that the Turkish historian Taner Akcam remain,
at least for a while, at the University of Minnesota, where he
teaches history. Pamuk referred to the genocide of the Armenians,
but Akcam has documented it. A Shameful Act is an important work of
record, comprehensively chronicling the destruction of the Armenians,
its causes, unfolding and consequences. Richly sourced, Akcam’s book
utilizes Ottoman materials and archives as well as American and German
documents. He writes: "What remains in the Ottoman archives and in
court records is sufficient to show that the CUP [Committee of Union
and Progress, a k a Young Turks] Central Committee, and the Special
Organization it set up to carry out its plan, did deliberately attempt
to destroy the Armenian population."

Here, at least, there seems no doubt about the question of genocidal
"intent." Akcam swiftly demolishes the argument that Armenians
were slaughtered because they had organized an uprising against
the authorities. What resistance there was came about because of
the deportations, not the other way around. The uprising in Urfa in
October 1915, for example, was launched by Armenians deported from
Van and Diyarbakir, since Urfa was a stop on the deportation route.

Yet the genocide of the Armenians, as horrific as it was, was
not an end in itself, Akcam argues. It was part of a process of
"homogenizing" the new Turkish state-to-be. Kurds and Arabs, Greeks
and Assyrians, were also ethnically cleansed at this time, although
not exterminated. This process was completed in 1923 when Greece
and Turkey compulsorily swapped their minorities, thus uprooting
perhaps 2 million people from the homelands where they had lived for
centuries. Just as Milosevic’s Greater Serbia could be built only on
the ashes of multiethnic Yugoslavia, so the new state envisioned by
the Young Turks demanded the destruction of the multinational Ottoman
Empire–an empire that, for all its faults, had allowed different
communities and minorities to live alongside one another for centuries.

In Terrible Fate, Benjamin Lieberman also traces the rise of ethnic
cleansing and mass murder to the collapse of empire: "As empires
broke apart into nation-states, processes of ethnic cleansing and
even genocide moved or eliminated many of the people who had once
lived under imperial rule." The great merit of the Ottoman and
Austro-Hungarian empires was that they were not nation-states but a
diversity of nations with a common citizenship. But what was once their
strength also doomed them, for Vienna and Constantinople had no means
of accommodating the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism, whether
Hungarian, Serbian, Greek or Arab. Lieberman, a professor of history
at Fitchburg State College in Massachusetts, has written a lively,
panoramic work with a fine eye for the human story. Using contemporary
accounts, eyewitness statements and diplomatic records, he examines
the Balkan wars of the late nineteenth century, the two world wars,
the Holocaust, the mass deportation of the Germans from Eastern Europe,
the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the continuing fallout
of the Ottoman Empire in Israel-Palestine, Cyprus and Iraq.

Lieberman argues persuasively that an intellectual focus on ethnic
cleansing, rather than nation-building, generates a dramatic shift
in our understanding of contemporary history. Ethnic cleansing
has repeatedly proved a necessary component of twentieth-century
nation-building: "The story of the rise of the nation-state, a triumph
of self-determination, becomes a story of tragedy for those who were
driven out." Among his examples is the Palestinian exodus of 1948,
and the creation of the State of Israel. Historians still argue
vociferously over how many Palestinians were expelled, evacuated
or simply fled in panic. Lieberman sidesteps this, arguing that
their exodus was not unique. Quite the opposite, in fact: "The Arab
departures from Israel seem mysterious only if viewed in isolation from
all comparable examples. Ethnic war in other former Ottoman regions
had displaced entire peoples, and ethnic war in Israel and Palestine
had much the same effect, though this war left some Arabs in Israel."

Lieberman writes movingly about one of the least reported instances
of ethnic cleansing in modern history: the expulsion of the ethnic
Germans of Eastern Europe after the defeat of the Third Reich.

Perhaps 12 million people fled or were ethnically cleansed, the single
largest population movement in modern European history.

For years this remained a taboo subject inside Germany, the preserve
of right-wing expellees’ groups, and even now it remains delicate.

Gunter Grass’s 2002 novel Crabwalk, which recounts the sinking of the
German refugee ship Wilhelm Gustloff in January 1945, finally forced
the Volksdeutsch exodus into the public arena. But in neighboring
countries there is a sense that the ethnic Germans got what they
deserved. The Germans of the Sudetenland had ushered Hitler’s army
into Czechoslovakia. The Swabians of Hungary helped keep the country’s
wartime ruler, Adm. Miklos Horthy, in the Axis when he began to waver
and consider joining the Allies.

Yet how many of the Volksdeutsch were guilty of war crimes? The
exodus brought to an end historic European communities: The Saxons of
Romania, the Danube Swabians and the Prussians of the Baltic coast
have now all but vanished. The victors were sometimes murderous:
Czech soldiers seized a train filled with German refugees, ordered
them off and shot 265 of them. In Komotau, in northwest Bohemia,
Czech forces ordered the entire male population aged between 13 and
65 to the town square and made 100 men remove their clothes, sing the
German national anthem and proclaim, "We thank our Fuhrer." A dozen
or so were then beaten to death.

Almost fifty years later, in 1992, similar atrocities were taking
place in the Serb concentration camps of northern Bosnia, such as
Omarska and Trnopolje. The same sentiments were used to justify them.

"They had committed war crimes, and now it is the other way around,"
proclaimed Milan Kovacevic, who ran Omarska. "They" were Croats and
Bosnians, and the "war crimes" had been committed during World War
II. As a baby Kovacevic had lived in Jasenovac, the main Croatian
concentration camp; as an adult he was running one, Michael Mann
observes. Like Lieberman, Mann, a professor of sociology at UCLA, has
written a broad study of genocide and ethnic cleansing, including the
Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Yugoslav wars and Rwanda. But
The Dark Side of Democracy is drier and more theoretical. Mann begins
his work with eight theses. Some merely state the obvious in academic
language: "stably institutionalized democracies are less likely than
either democratizing or authoritarian regimes to commit murderous
cleansing," which is hardly news, and "Regimes that are actually
perpetrating murderous cleansing are never democratic, since that
would be a contradiction in terms." His core argument is that murderous
ethnic cleansing results from a confusion of democracy with the demands
of the dominant ethnic group in extreme conditions. Thus "ordinary
people are brought by normal social structures into committing
murderous ethnic cleansing," assuming that "ordinary" does not mean
having an innate lust for killing. But this seems less an argument
about the dark side of "democracy" than about mob rule. At times
Mann’s book reads like a thesis in search of a reality.

Democracy means more than a simple parliamentary majority. It demands
stable, independent institutions, the rule of law and an independent
judiciary, all of which help prevent mass murder.

Mann writes perceptively of what he calls "genocidal democracies
in the New World," including Spanish Mexico, Australia and German
South West Africa, where genocide occurred in the midst of struggles
between colonists and natives over resources. He is strong on the
United States’s own genocidal history. This country, after all, was
founded on the deliberate destruction of its indigenous inhabitants
and their communities. Thomas Jefferson, its third President, drove
his compatriots on to slaughter the American Indians. "In war,"
Jefferson declared, "they will kill some of us; we shall destroy all
of them." And so they did, quite quickly. Between 1848 and 1860 the
Indian population of California fell from 150,000 to 31,000, with
most casualties caused by disease, starvation or deliberate killing.

One of Mann’s most interesting chapters looks at Stalin, Mao and Pol
Pot and what he calls "classicide," the elimination of the bourgeoisie
as these dictators struggled to impose a "revolutionary vision of a
future industrial society" on an agrarian one. Mann argues that both
"radical ethnonationalism" and "revolutionary Communism" fostered
organic ideas about "we, the people," whether as a nation or a
class. And both legitimized mass slaughter as part of that group’s
mission. This is an important point, and Mann makes it well: A powerful
sense of collective identity, no matter how inorganic or manufactured,
seems a vital precondition for the group to undertake its genocidal
"mission" and to view it as legitimate.

Mann is wrong, however, to argue that ethnic cleansing is "essentially
modern." It is true that cheap and effective weaponry–none more so
than the AK-47 assault rifle–has increased the number of victims
and the frequency of conflict. But ethnic cleansing and genocide
are arguably merely modern terms for one of humanity’s oldest–and
cruelest–pastimes. As long as humans have sought control over
resources such as land, water and food supplies, they have been
prepared to kill and lay waste to defend their assets.

As Mark Levene writes: "The path to genocide is in part, deeply
embedded in the human record and…facets of it are actually very
evident in ancient, classical, as well as more recent, pre-modern
times." Consider God’s instruction to the twelve tribes when they
arrived in what would become the land of Israel, as recorded in
Deuteronomy 7:1 and 7:2:

When the Lord thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou
goest to possess it, and hath cast out many nations before thee, the
Hittites, and the Girgashites, and the Amorites, and the Canaanites,
and the Perizzites, and the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations
greater and mightier than thou;  And when the Lord thy God shall
deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy
them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.

Not only should the indigenous people be "utterly destroyed"; it was
also forbidden to marry either their sons or their daughters. King
Saul was commanded to wipe out the Amalekites, "man and woman, infant
and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." The Israelites–if these
accounts are accurate–were hardly unique in their enthusiasm for
smiting their enemies. As Levene notes: "This was clearly an ancient
Near Eastern norm." Levene, who teaches history at the University
of Southampton in Britain, has published the first two volumes of an
ambitious four-volume study, Genocide in the Age of the Nation State.

This is a discursive rather than a chronological or episodic work.

Levene argues that the centrality of the Holocaust has warped scholarly
priorities by obscuring the linkage between the extermination of
the Jews and earlier genocides. The Holocaust was unique in its
industrialization of mass murder but was also part of a grim historical
continuum. Hitler himself was well aware of the extermination of the
Armenians. In his secret speech to Wehrmacht commanders in August
1939, Hitler lauded Genghis Khan’s killing machine before asking,
"Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?"

Levene suggests that the terror of the Jacobin era in Revolutionary
France may be a prototype of later genocides. The thud of the
guillotine was a necessary precursor of a sense of "nation-state
one-ness," in which all citizens enjoyed equal rights in a "new
secular order" where disobedience, or exclusion, would be answered
with death. This echoes Mann’s arguments about the importance of
communal identity, whether class or nation-based. But whatever the
criteria for membership of the modern body politic, the wretched
inhabitants of European colonies were not included. The contrast,
Levene writes, between the absence of genocide in Europe before
1914 and "the crescendo of genocidal assaults in response to native
resistance in Africa, Asia and the Pacific at the fin-de-siècle high
point of the Western imperialist surge, is very noteworthy." These
themes are examined in greater depth in Volume II, The Rise of
the West and the Coming of Genocide. Here Levene ranges widely and
insightfully, examining mass delusions, conspiracy theories, the
rise and collapse of empires, and the cost of nationhood. Levene’s
predilection for academic base-touching and extended definitions of
terms and arguments may prove tiresome for the nonspecialist reader.

Nonetheless, if the following two volumes maintain the standards
set here, his series will be a major contribution to the field of
genocide studies.

Does it matter, then, whether General Krstic or Momcilo Krajisnik is
found guilty of genocide rather than ethnic cleansing? Perhaps not.

For despite Lemkin’s codification and subsequent international
jurisprudence, genocide, arguably, is not a distinctive phenomenon
but merely the ultimate conclusion of ethnic cleansing, itself
an age-old custom of human history. We may now be socialized not
to kill, but many of us can also be reprogrammed without too much
effort. In Warsaw in 1941, or Vukovar in 1991, the veneer of modern
civilization was thin and easy to shatter. A manufactured sense of
threat, a spreading sense of fear, the use of the broadcast media to
spread hate and issue instructions, the identification of those with
different surnames or religious faiths as a dehumanized "other," the
provision of weapons–these are often sufficient to turn a proportion
of everyday people into killers and torturers. Milan Kovacevic, the
commander of Omarska, was no uneducated brute. He was an anesthetist
and the director of Prijedor hospital. He later said: "What we did
was not the same as Auschwitz or Dachau, but it was a mistake. It
was planned to have a camp for people, but not a concentration
camp…. I cannot explain the loss of control…. You could call it
collective madness." Kovacevic was eventually indicted for genocide
and arrested. He died peacefully in his cell at the UN detention center
in 1998. But even now, in Darfur, the collective madness continues.

As Taner Akcam argues: "Every group is inherently capable of
violence; when the right conditions arise this potential may easily
become reality, and on the slightest of pretexts. There are no
exceptions." History, and today’s headlines, prove both Kovacevic
and Akcam right.

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